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Font shapes are defined using vectors, so they always look awesome when you make them bigger.
When you don't have enough pixels to draw the proper shapes, hinting is what makes sure that each stroke is visible, tells it where a bit of grey might make black-on-white more readable, or nudge a stroke out of position a little to align it to the pixel grid.
Emyr-
Eben Sorkin, the author of Merriweather, is a total nerd when it comes to font hinting.
http://ebensorkin.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/font-hinting-mysterydiscovery/
He's gone and used loopholes in the format and tooling to give the lower-case 'g' an additional set of hints at small sizes.
This is why Merriweather was #2 on our list. Elena has better j's, and I prefer the punctuation of Elena (less jarring, the Merriweather quotes are way too long)... but I was always concerned they weren't quite as nerdy on the hinting and hadn't the number of users to really put it to the test in the real world.
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And don't forget about sub-pixel rendering (which is what tools like Cleartype do) which adjusts the red,green and blue values individually using actual sorcery:
You could totally geek-out on this stuff: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-font-rendering/
Velocio
bq
So, hinting? Anyone give me a ... clue as to what that is?