If you're going to try to determine which is easier to read, it doesn't make any sense at all to base your reasoning on how the fonts look when they're huge - y

If you're going to try to determine which is easier to read, it doesn't make any sense at all to base your reasoning on how the fonts look when they're huge - you need to look at their appearance when they're rendered as they're intended to be used. As a side note: why is it so common with negative letter spacing? Do the fonts look bad "as designed" on some common OS/browser combo? On my OSX+Firefox it just makes the text harder to read and it looks too cramped.