I've become increasingly aware that much of the text on my MBP appears rather blurry. I don't fully understand Fond Smoothing, but I do have it selected to smooth fonts and have it at default to Turn off text smoothing for font sizes 4 and smaller. If I select "12", text in Mail becomes more blurry. I've changed to a higher resolution- 1280x1024 (highest I can go) which seems to help a bit but I don't get full screen viewing. I don't remember blurry text on my MacBook like I do on this MBP. Is there any workaround? Turning off Font Smoothing makes no difference.

I opened iTunes and all the text in there, the issue is very noticeable. In two letters side by side, one appears darker than the other.
In Mail, the text in the content is terrible. Almost hard to read. And I am using my reading glasses so it's not my aging eyes.

Problem settled. I was using only my Display Preference in my menubar which gave me limited resolutions. I went into the actual System Preferences and chose 1280x800 and all text sharpened up real well, although Mail content still is not up to par. How do I get all the available resolutions to show up in the menubar?

There is only one native resolution with LCD screens: the highest one you see in your system display preferences (assuming no other monitor is attached).

Also, if the Display pref pane was used to change to three or more different resolutions other than the default and the Display Preference in the menubar (Number of Recent Items) was set to 3, only the last three resolutions used would show. And not the proper one!!