I have never heard of this technique. But it is used to make pixes look a lot sharper without changing the monitor. This is how it works: Each pixel on a display is made out of 3 smaller sub pixels with the colours red, green and blue. Each colour is then adjusted to change the colour of the pixel overall. However this technique uses the sub pixels to make the edges of the letters look sharper.
On the above image the left side shows the normal letter and how it would look. The centre image uses anti-aliasing which is a technique that blurs the edges of letter into a greyer shade so that it looks better. However anti-aliasing can make small text look small and unreadable. The right image uses the sub-pixel font rendering to make the letter clearer and smoother.
By ‘borrowing’ sub-pixels from adjacent whole pixels, we can fine-tune the placement and width of typeface features with three times more horizontal accuracy then ever before! Our eyes cooperate by seeing only black and white, since the ‘borrowed’ sub-pixels are always adjacent to their complementary color pixels, which our eyes mix to form white!
It may say that you can’t see the colours, but on a few of the images they show it can be seen, though it is not very annoying. On another image the text looks extremely clear, a lot better than the non-sub-pixel one.
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