Large Text Goes Fuzzy
I've noticed that something makes large text go fuzzy on LCD computer screens, at least on several that I've looked at. This is illustrated here, where in the two text examples the first is not fuzzy but the second is so. Below the two examples, their respective letter 'e' is magnified. The left 'e' is fine but the right 'e' is fuzzy with less dark pixels than the correctly rendered one.
What causes this, I wonder. There's a clue in the fact that when I open my browser and view a web page with a large text heading the text is okay, then if I open Macromedia Flash or view a web page containing a Flash object the fuzziness appears in the original page I opened.
Antialiasing, and jaggedness vs fuzziness
Both the enlarged letters are magnified versions of the 'e' in the word 'Prize' and can be seen to have been antialiased by the browser, a process by which pixels at the edges of text over a certain size are given a degree of transparency (made into various shades of grey) to smooth the jaggedness that would otherwise occur if they were all jet black. If there's too much transparency, however, the effect is the unpleasant fuzziness that can make large headings look rather ugly.
As an example, on Tom Raftery's website (from where I've taken the '12 Responses' text), the heading text size is pretty similar to mine and the strange thing is that some of his headings look fuzzy and some don't. At least this is as I see it on my computer with a MAG Innovision 19 inch LCD screen and also on various laptops I have access to.
