I tried to share the screen from my 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina display to my iMac for the first time today, using the Screen Sharing feature built into the OS (10.8.5 Mountain Lion on both computers). The first thing I noticed was that it took much longer to connect than for my previous non-Retina MacBook – well beyond what the higher resolution could account for. The next, more important issue was that all I got was a black screen.
I found a bunch of hits on similar issues, but all referred to screen sharing with Skype, WebEx, or other services, not the built-in function. For those services the solution was generally either reducing the resolution on the MacBook to a non-HIDPI resolution (I haven’t tested this yet) or a software update.
The solution I found for the built-in Screen Sharing is to change the setting from “Adaptive Quality” to “Full Quality” under the View menu. Unfortunately, this only works if I display both screens – the built-in Retina display and the external 20″ standard resolution monitor I have attached to the MacBook. I can select just the 20″ display successfully, but if I select just the Retina display it fills the window with static.
