There was a time when people ditched their perfectly fine 8 bit LUT based graphic cards and computers for 24 bit true color ones. It made life much easier for developers. All the effort to manage a color palette within a program, and to try to do something reasonable to support more than one program on the screen at a time just went away, not to mention the choices around dithering algorithms. It was glorious.

Roughly speaking, we’ve had 25 years to get sub pixel vector glyph rendering right, and it still is consistently wrong in many places.

It is a clever hack whose time has come and gone, I will not miss:

- fails miserably if you rotate your screen.

- only works for horizontal text. Anything rendered at differently angles looks different.

- forces a different spatial resolution for brightness and color, in one axis but not the other.

- sensitive to the monitor’s physical subpixel layout. You really can’t rely on an end user to tell you the right answer after they plug in a monitor.

- color fringing is a thing, more so for people with better eyesight. Some people see it, some don’t.

- difficult to reconcile with high dpi printing to make sure what you see on the screen approximates what you are going to get.

- it’s hard to know if the person you send this too will see the same thing you do. Different platforms, renderer, and hardware means they may see something differently.

So, it was pretty good for horizontal text on a monitor where you knew the subpixel pixel order and you got everything right so it approximated the eventual printed output. But its time has passed.

Hand down that monitor to someone’s video game or media watching needs and if you deal with text, get a high dpi monitor.