Ask HN: Dual monitors, or single 4k?

One advantage of dual monitors is that if you ever have to do screen sharing, you can quickly hide anything on the other monitor that you don't want your clients to see while still being able to refer to it. Same goes if you are recording your screen/screecasting.

Before you shell out more money, are you sure the problem cannot be solved by better keybinds and/or a better UI?

A TV has lower refresh rate and higher ms thereby increasing input lag. This is especially annoying during gaming.

I use a 15,4" MBP with 2880 x 1800 resolution. Without the keybinds I use it'd be a hell though.

On work we use 3x 27" monitors. But I could easily work with two (due to WYSIWYG) or one (if no WYSIWYG).

4k@40" offers about the same ppi as a 27" at 1440p if scaling 1:1. So about the ideal text size imo, and obviously plenty of space to spread your code out.

Its also easy to work off completely one side while doing something unrelated in the other - atm I have a twitch stream and a browser on one side and an IDE on the other where I'm casually coding. Splitting the screens like this give you a better aspect ratio to read off than having 2 smaller monitors.

http://imgur.com/a/kPRzq ^ eventually what i settled on, use 1920 as primary and if working on something would go on bigger.

23 Left Dell (emails, windows I'm not ready to close) 40 seiki ( excel, factset/bloomberg, chrome) 23 center hp (word, typing emails, reports) 23 right hp (xplorer2, network,file related)

I tried working with a single high res screen and went back, my mental model just fits 3 screens better.

Is your workflow severely impaired when on a laptop alone? I.e. in a coffee shop?

(It's wasted on me, though. I like looking straight ahead, so I keep everything visually centered, and I find that putting stuff in the margins is just distracting clutter. I've never understood the appeal of tiling window managers or of filling a screen with lots of noisy background activity. It's nice if you need to display something super wide, however, like a diff or some complex log output.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PXYRMPE

- The most productive I've been has been using 3 monitors, 1 for messaging/research, middle screen for working, and right screen for testing/launching, etc.

Consider if you have an eyeglass prescription the amount of strain you may experience with any monitor size, pixel size, etc. The higher the prescription, astigmatism, etc, the more factors you may have to consider.

- Currently use 27" Asus at 1440p for the past few years. It was a big jump at the time but now I'm used to it and want more space. Tilts, pivots, so I got two to put them side by side. Not ideal, or bad either. The issue is the screen area, and how low and high you are able to look comfortably and productively.

- Have a friend who got a Philips 40" 4K and said it was too big in terms of the area you can look at without having to pivot your head a lot. Users with a 40'+ 4K monitor report a border of the screen around the outside that is not actively usable without for work but may be useful for other things like IM, etc.

- Asus has come out with a 31.5" monitor at 1440p that might be interesting to you depending on your needs and eyeglass prescription.

- Currently considering at one 33 to 38" 4K screen.

In some ways the three 19" 4:3 monitors I ran 10 years ago at 1200x1024 remain the perfect balance between size and productivity, although it only.

And yes, this is an actual monitor, not a TV.

If you get a TV make sure it will do 4:4:4 chroma and 60hz over its interface (HDMI 2.0). You'll probably also need a DP to HDMI 2.0 dongle as well.

I love hiDPI on my mobile devices, and this is a best way for desktop.

With i3 I have keyboard shortcuts to move the focus to any monitor and/or to change workspace in any of them and/or to move windows between them, this seems more usable than a single monitor no matter what the resolution of it is.

If money was no object I think the best setup would be a 40" 4k in the middle, a 27" 1440p portrait on one side, and a 27" 1440p landscape on the other side, but I would rather have 3x27" than 1x40" any day of the week (and the 27" to be 1440p not to have to deal with scaling)

One benefit of having two displays is obviously having two logical displays, which can be useful sometimes. e.g. for fullscreening a video.

Recently, I've been using a 27" 4K display at work. I mostly just run it in HiDPI 1440p (or one or two notches higher than 1440p). It looks prettier, but is functionally equivalent to a 27" 1440p.

I've found that displays larger than 30" require me to turn my head, which is non-optimal. Ultrawide monitors are especially bad (tried a 34" curved Samsung for a little while). Ditto for multiple 27" monitors.

  middle: 5K, iMac (mid 2015)
  left: 4K, 27" Dell P2715Q 
  right: old Apple Cinema LED Display 27"
  mid-bottom-left: iPhone 5s, for testing
  mid-bottom-right: iPad Air, for testing, sometimes TweetDeck/HipChat with DuetDisplay

edit: also note that all the displays are 27", so they naturally fit side-by-side, that seems to be a detail, but it is quite important for seamless mouse movement (aligned virtual desktops). Even if physical pixel densities are not the same, all displays have the same virtual size: see https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/559047/aligned-displays.....

And the keyboard: http://www.daskeyboard.com, also highly recommended for a developer.

I have a 27" 1920x1080 at home and it's terrible. I usually use less than 60% of the available screen estate for displaying things. It's much too large (have to move my head from left to right inconveniently because my window manager places windows across the whole screen) and too much light is hitting my eyes from the unused areas.

At work I have a single 19" 5:4 1280x1024 LCD screen with ok colors / good contrast and I love it - just the right size. I use default keyboard shortcuts for window and workspace switching (it's mostly either browser or two vertically maximized xterms), works perfectly for me.

In terms of dimensions, it is physically less wide than the 2 24" 1080p monitors I had before while having 4 times the resolution. It's also a similar width and horizontal resolution to the 34" ultrawides that are on the market now but significantly cheaper. The DPI is similar to a 27" 1440p monitor, which might be tiny if you're coming from 29" 1080p.

I highly recommend using this DPI calculator to find a pixel size that's comfortable for you: https://www.sven.de/dpi/

My workflow has definitely improved. I normally work with 2 terminals side by side, but now I have 3 terminals or 2 terminals and a browser window. There's no bezel in the middle to ruin that center terminal.

I keep my main applications along the bottom 1300 pixels or so with email/music/monitoring along the top.

Virtual machines and laptop connections are significantly less finicky because there is only one large display to configure.

The only negative to this setup is that the Samsung is definitely a television. I need to turn it manually on whenever I wake my computer and DPMS sleep doesn't take effect immediately.

On the other hand, I got rid of my speakers and now use HDMI audio instead.

Finally, if you're getting an HDTV, make sure your computer is compatible with HDMI 2 and the television supports 4:4:4 color. You want 4k@60Hz via HDMI 2 and 4:4:4 ensures your text isn't blurry.

RTINGS is invaluable for finding a TV with the right color input and latencies: http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-usage/pc-monitor/best

4k on a > 32" screen won't have that advantage, DPI would be more or less like smaller screens but with a lot more screen estate. I personally wouldn't prefer that, as I already have found 30" screens slightly too big to work on - in the end I always looked only at small portions of the screen with my head turned in an akward way. 27" 4k works great for me. 2x 24" 4k might also be a great setup for some people. I personally prefer a single monitor for most tasks, because with 2 monitors at least one will always be badly aligned with the seating position.