As for cleartype, from the documentation, it should? only be neccessary as a fix for flat screens, it shouldn’t be needed for crts and therefore SHOULD? only effect the display and not the capture.

If you think it looks better on a crt with cleartype then smoothing has improved the font which lacks resolution but then the font may have lost definition, however smoothing can help keep the filesize of fonts down. I had to treble the size of one of my intricate images to cater for internet explorer and it still looked worse than safari did originally.

I guess theres a balance that all browsers should adhere to, but then maybe we need to wait for screen technology to level out first (in the end crts matched their colors to each other and to printers). I feel more smoothing could be a good thing as so many web images have to be small and smoothing beforehand requires more bandwidth(scarce) rather than cpu(abundant).

In fact you have to be careful testing fonts on flat screens as anyone who has watched the credits of a DVD on a HD tv would see, whereas a far higher resolution crt can display consistently at any resolution it supports (except lower resolution than the source imagery).

This is because a flat screen is digital and therefore lacks the levels of brightness (on or off only) per pixel of an analog crt, meaning only native resolutions (resolution the flat screen was designed for) look half decent, especially for text.

Comparisons should therefore be made on crts and also tested on flat screens, otherwise you would have to know the hardware.

If wish the flat crt had made it out of development, but then would it have limitations anyway?

Pay a visit to http://jeffcroft.com in both browsers, you will get it. =)

but still.. safari have a good text rendering.. but somtime i dont like it.. huhu.. blurry..