I have one, too. It's pretty sad that 16:10 has fallen out of style and that there is no 27" 2560x1600 display available.
Dell has the Ultrasharp UP3017 with 2560x1600 at 30", maybe that's something you can try if you want more pixels. It's just pretty expensive and has a big bezel since it was released in 2017.
I bemoan the fact that there are so few 16:10's on the market and nothing high resolution. 16:10 is such a great aspect-ratio and the extra vertical screen real-estate is very useful when programming.
It is interesting to see some laptops move off of 16:9 to 16:10 or 3:2. This gives me hope that we'll see new/better 16:10 panels.
The image quality upgrade from HD to 4K is pretty massive. I still have a few 1200 and 1080 displays around and they look like shit compared to my main display. You can't fight time and the market forever.
Do you find any problem with text being too small? I am typing this right now on a on a 30" 2560x1600 display which is right at 100dpi which I find is very readable. In the past I had tried 27" displays at 2560x1440 which has a dpi of 108 which made things just small enough to be hard to read. Obviously I could scale stuff in the OS, but that typically left me with some UI elements looking fuzzy/distorted. My ideal I think would be a 29" 5k monitor, so that probably is never going to happen.
I inherited an old iMac with a 21" 4k monitor. There is simply no going back. I just ordered another one to have 2 of them. Everything looks better and even though almost no displays in a good price range have the same cd/m2 ("nits"), I am still looking forward to my new 2x4k life!
It has been years since I gamed regularly but my brother and I were probably some of the best at a particular FPS. It has to be about 15+ years ago. When we played in the physical presence of others we noticed that we were some of the only ones to turn the display settings way down while keeping resolution the maximum. Probably 800x600 or 1280x1024 in those days. The game ran smoother, and the less complex textures made movement standout.
People are playing CS:Global Offensive because its a smoother, less complex texture compared to other modern games (ie: Overwatch).
I'd dare say that the "serious" FPS players stick to Counterstrike, and other easier-to-render games with 200+ FPS. (even if the monitor doesn't support it, the higher FPS results in smoother gameplay and fewer hiccups).
There's of course a huge casual crowd playing Overwatch, PUBG and Fortnite. But CS tournaments remain a thing to this day.
No, but in 2002/3 we would play Quake during our CCNA classes every now and again instead of class work. The hardware was old so it was the original quake.
Eventually I want to go to 4k but price was a non-starter for me. I wanted 3 monitors and I was able to grab 3x2k (1440p) screens on black Friday last year for around $200/ea. I have them arranged in a "Tie-fighter" orientation (1 horizontal in the middle and 2 vertical on the sides) with an older 1080p screen above the center monitor (it's just for security cams/monitoring).
I split the 2 vertical monitors into 3rds (top, middle, bottom) and I have keyboard shortcuts to move/resize windows as well as snap every window to it's designated space. I have been extremely happy with this setup so far.
I use a 32" monitor at 4K with 1x scaling. It is a productivity booster for me. More horizontal space is just much nicer to host debug sessions and jump between code sections. At the same time (of debugging), I can tile web browser to the other side and either do some lookups, or run a Jupyter notebook.
Most software lets you increase text size. This lets you maximize functional resolution by letting ui elements remain small and text to remain legible. I don't need my window header to be twice as thick.
I do the same, but with a 36" screen to match the pixel pitch of standard size 1080p monitors. I can't imagine giving up 75% of my work area in exchange for prettier fonts.
Similar. My last screen upgrade is a 32" unit at 2560x1440. It has more-or-less the same pitch as my previous 23.5" 1920x1080 devices. With no scaling everything is the same size but I can have more visible. Sometimes I use the larger one effectively as two portrait screens instead of one landscape. One of the older monitors rotates, I have that set portrait too.
Couldn't agree more. My primary monitor is a 43" 4k LG at unscaled, native resolution. I can fit five 94 column wide terminals tiled across, each showing 140 lines of text.
Is the text super crisp? Nope. Would I give up all this space for smoother text? Not a chance. Would I replace it with a 43" 8k monitor? In a heartbeat.
Oled for a monitor is tough because burn in a very real for high contrast static images. They have done a good job but I watch a lot of high end oled tv reviews and it doesn’t take too long for menu bars and the like to start ghosting.
Have you experienced any of the reported OLED burn-in issues?
I would love to upgrade to an OLED but my screens are on at least 16 hours a day with semi-static content. That's a hefty price to take a chance on burn-in.
Its the C9 and I have all the anti burnin features turned on, I have no issues, you can see the tv moving the whole screen a few pixels every so often.
The new CX generation from LG comes with a 48" model which may fit people better and supports variable rate refresh which is good for gaming as some cards and consoles can support it.
Living with a C9 65" as my main television, not computer monitor, while I acknowledge the picture quality is incomparable from my point of view I am in the camp of that for a general work computer screen it would be best to wait for micro LED technology to spread. OLED still suffers the risk of burn in but this is mostly from fixed elements where the screen is level on for days if not years. Still not worth the degradation that will come as most elements are fixed and always on display with Mac OS.
So for the most part a well lit IPS display will serve users just fine these days and reserve OLED for the living room.
It's frustrating that consumer Hi-DPI display development has completely stalled in the last five years.
As mentioned in the article, macOS works best using true 2x integer scaling. Using 2x scaling, a 4k monitor will result in an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development. A superior option is iMac/LG 5k display results which nets an equivalent workspace of 1440p.
The only options for greater-than-4k displays on the market currently are the 27" LG 5K ($1200, 2014) and the Dell 8k ($3500, 2017). I'm convinced this is due to the manufacturers focusing their attention on the high-margin gaming market which has no need for resolutions higher than 4k.
I'm holding onto my 30" 2560x1600 Apple Cinema Display until I can get something that offers me the equivalent amount of screen real estate at 2x retina scaling.
Same here. I'm using my Dell 3008WFP (also 30" @ 2560x1600) until something genuinely bigger & better comes out. I bought it over a decade ago and it still works great for programming.
I still use mine at work, and am extremely happy with it. The font rendering on my iMac 5k is better of course, but for work, the additional screen estate (especially vertically) is hard to beat. I am of course contemplating the 38" Dell with 3840x1600 :).
> an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development.
I have to disagree here. I use (and have used) a 1080p display for years and don’t feel the need for anything larger. That might be an artifact of my early years on 80x25 character displays, though.
Not to take away from your point, but Doom was actually written on a NeXTstation and cross-compiled for PCs, so at a minimum they were using 1120x832 resolution (2 bit greyscale).
I'm also hanging on to my 30" Apple Cinema (and adapters to work with a new USB-C MBP). The LG 5K seems like a decent replacement though, I'm not totally clear why it seems so unpopular.
I've been using two LG 5k monitors for years and they are excellent. They got a bad reputation when they were released for build quality issues, but I haven't had a single issue.
I use a Pro Display XDR for programming / design work, I think you forgot this one. It seems like it would fit your needs (with the obviously premium price) as it’s 32”.
It’s overkill for most, but still the best display I’ve ever used and I love it. I actually tried an Asus 4K 120hz for much less but the fan noise was a deal breaker even if the screen didn’t break on arrival (it did).
Color accuracy is far more important to me than 120hz capable. The faster displays today tend to be subpar at color accuracy, illumination uniformity, etc.
I'm impatiently waiting for a slightly less overkill 6K 32" option, it's obviously the best size + resolution for Mac.
My hope is that someone will take the panel and pair it with a ~700nit backlight (vs 1k sustained 1.5k peak for XDR) and price it around $2k. Also interested to see what Apple has in store for the iMac, if the refresh comes with a new and improved display I may just go in that direction.
As someone who also stares a monitor for work have you noticed any difference in eye strain or comfort? I have two 4K monitors but considering going to 5K+. I liken it to shoes or a mattress. If we spend all day with X object it, then quality should be a priority.
No difference to eye strain or comfort vs the LG 5k I used before, although a major improvement vs my old 1440p monitor. Width makes a good improvement in Xcode and the color is very accurate to the iPhone screen which helps. I prefer one big monitor now I have this.
I agree with your analogy, literally my livelihood feeds through this screen, and I find a good monitor lasts a long time.
I think the Pro Display should be disqualified for the price :). Like with the new Mac Pro Apple made the dream Display/Machine for professional video artists with high-paying customer. As a price, they completely neglegted their power user base which requires something different than an iMac.
I can only hope that either Apple or Dell makes a more basic version of that screen based on the same panel. And of course, on a high end screen I would expect more than one input. You might want to connect your laptop to your screen too...
Alternatively, I am hoping for an iMac with a larger screen.
On the other side of things, running dual 4k displays for anything remotely intensive (a browser, IDE, instant messaging, mail client, and terminal in my case) can bring some machines to a crawl or run the fans at high speeds indefinitely. I think graphics technology has to catch up to hiDPI before I'd go past 4k.
And let's not even get into the fact that 4k 60hz is a struggle and a half -- you need HDMI 2.0 or displayport to make it work at all, and many modern laptops lack either port, forcing you to use USB-C/thunderbolt with adapters that have poor spec support and even worse documentation.
Even if someone offered me dual 5k displays to replace my dual 4k ones, I would turn them down right now. Before we move on to 5k displays, we need to get 4k60 down. And while I'm on my soapbox... where the hell is 4k90 or 4k120? I only bought my 4k monitors last month, with virtually unlimited budget, but they just don't exist. I imagine they've fallen victim to the same issue: the cables to support it just barely exist, and certainly can't be doubled up for dual monitor setups without a mess of wires plugged directly into a laptop or desktop.
If you use a Mac, a 5k monitor with integer scaling (2x) will take fewer GPU resources to run than a 4K with fractional scaling (1.5x). This why I refuse to switch to a 4K monitor for now. Will do the leap to a 5k monitor but the options are very slim now.
Why is everyone so attached to scaling? What is this shit software that 1) everyone relies on and 2) whose UI and font size can't be adjusted like any normal software (or web page) since the 90s? Is this yet another brainfart from Apple?
Windows has great High DPI support. It's Windows applications that often haven't seen upgrades since before even 2012. Windows' commitment to backward compatibility is the struggle. Windows hasn't had the option to just change processor architectures every dozen years on a seeming whim and subsequently force all software to be rewritten or die.
macOS X was released in 2001 with the "Cocoa" application UI library. While "Carbon" helped older Mac OS applications run for a limited time on OS X, no applications today use any graphics stack older than Cocoa's 2001 release, as the drop of all support for PPC-targeted apps insured that in macOS' switch to x86. (Cocoa had High DPI support baked in from NextStep, even if it took ~11 years to be "needed".)
Win32 was first beta tested by developers in 1992, and has had to remain stable and backwards compatibile to those first early 90s versions. There are still 32-bit apps written in 1992 that are expected to run unmodified on Windows 10 today. The last processor-architecture related API drop that Windows has been allowed by public perception and corporate strategy was Win16 support was dropped on 64-bit processors. (Hence why Windows on ARM has struggled and the current iteration of Windows on ARM now involves a 32-bit x86 emulator as a core feature.)
Mac apps did have to be upgraded, it's just that Apple has been much better at requiring upgrades. There's barely no comparison here. There is no way that you can possibly find today a version of macOS that still supports Mac Classic applications unmodified from the 90s (for instance 94's Glider Pro v1) with High DPI support, yet Windows absolutely must run applications from Windows 95. Sure, Windows sometimes still stumbles in High DPI support for pixel-perfect applications written three decades ago in the 90s, but it at least tries, macOS shrugged and gave up.
Scaling just works greatly as Apple implements it. Especially, if your screen has a 200ppi or larger. Trying to change the font sizes across all applications is a sysiphus task and eventually you end up with one, which doesn't behave greatly. Especially, if one of the applications is Linux running in a VM. I have a Dell 24" 4k - and for 4k at 2x, the screen should be about 22". But with macOS I can set it to a virtual resulution of 2300, which works great.
On my 15" MB Pro, I usually use the 1680 resolution, but if needed, I can quickly change it to 1920.
Yeah, for some reason these are all coming from "gaming" monitor makers. I think the last one is trying to conjure up a "pro" vibe with the hood, but yes - these are definitely tacky.
Acer, Asus, et al. tend to just remarket OEM technology with relatively little value-add. I suspect these are all built on the same panel, but I could be wrong.
Oh! Is that what those funny looking "hoods" are about? I thought for a second they might be functional, but I guess they're just decorative? "Gaming" equipment (monitors, chairs, mice, keyboards, etc.) rarely seems worth it to me, simply because they spend too much effort and cost on things that are non-functional, but make the thing look attractive to the target audience. I am not a part of that audience, so I find the esthetic rather garish most of the time.
The one exception for me is that I do like a couple of gaming mice. It's not so much for the hotkey functionality, but because they have a really high resolution, which makes mousing easier and more precise to me. Other than that, my setup is all really basic, office-style equipment, and I love it.
> Oh! Is that what those funny looking "hoods" are about? I thought for a second they might be functional, but I guess they're just decorative?
The main use of those monitor hoods is to remove glare caused by ambient lighting.
They're common (and often included) accessories for displays intended to be used for photo editing, color grading, and similar types of work.
I was kind of surprised to see one on a "gaming" monitor though.
Hoods are for reducing reflections on the screen. They are functional, and are not (at least originally) a “gaming” feature. Somewhat common on high-end color-accurate displays. How useful they are depends on the lighting.
The monitors linked are actually quite good, the gaming styling they have is rather unfortunate.
Interesting info, but overly opinionated. I tried turning off font smoothing just now but the lack of boldness made everything appear dimmer, and I had to strain my eyes a bit when reading my code. Also I use my MacBook without a separate screen, with no scaling, so I really have to disagree with this:
> This will make everything on the screen slightly bigger, leaving you (slightly!) less screen estate. This is expected. My opinion is, a notebook is a constrained environment by definition. Extra 15% won’t magically turn it into a huge comfortable desktop
For me a notebook is not a constrained environment, and screen scaling very much makes the difference between "a huge comfortable desktop" and not.
For me, I find 1440p + high refresh rate as the true sweet spot, the "affordable" monitor listed in this post is $900.
That's not a bad deal for a 4k high refresh rate monitor, but if you play any games you would need at least a 2080 or 2080ti which is another 700-1200, 1440p high refresh monitors go for around $300-400.
Great theory. I'd definitely love to have 4k 120hz displays, but until I'm not broke, I'll stick with my old low-res monitors I picked up for $20 apiece. They suck, but not everyone has the money for $500 panels, let alone the insanely-priced four-figure ones the author recommends. I'll probably just suffer through another decade of garbage text until they get cheap.
Yep. I've got my own little fleet of machines, mostly laptops with busted displays, that I run as servers for my own personal edification. Dirt cheap and useful. I've even got a pentium box that still works fine.
These monitors and most of the ones mentioned in the thread are tiny. Whatever happened to the dream of the full-wall display? I really like my 43" 4K LG monitor, but apparently this type of monitor is rarely produced these days. A quick Newegg search shows exactly 1 monitor with similar specs and it's more than twice the cost of what I paid for mine two years ago.
I use 232" 4K monitors side by side; Before that I had 230" 1920x1200 (not 1080p!) side by side too; to me it's sufficiently "a wall" that I put them about 80cm from me, each angled a bit inward.
Quite frankly anything bigger and you get a kink in your neck by having to move your head so much!
Having a large monitor (> 30") makes it harder to read your content all at once, and you constantly have light/information in your peripheral vision (which is not good for the eyes). Asuming that you keep them as the same distance as "normal" monitors (1m - 1.5m)
You can't play a game at 15 FPS. It's a moving slideshow. And it was never fun. 30 fps looks pretty bad, and even 60 fps is decently choppy. I'm not sure what your exact point is, but once you try 144hz or higher, you'll never, ever, go back.
>You can read scrolling movie credits just fine at 24 FPS
Honestly I actually struggle with that. But working and gaming at 60hz is still perfectly fine with me. I even purposely run my Valve Index VR headset at 90hz instead of 120hz because I don't need the extra frames
I notice that the main topic for > 100Hz monitor owners is how smooth it is to drag windows about. When they show off the monitor, they grab a window and wiggle it really fast. Given no-one has yet come up with a more meaningful demo I'm starting to think it's the only benefit!
There is probably a term for this type of performance chasing. It's like car owners bragging about their top speeds despite only ever driving on roads with speed limits.
Only benefit I've noticed is it's easier to read text and smooth-scroll at the same time. Otherwise it just makes mouse movements and rapid console vomiting look nice. It's really unnecessary for programming in my opinion, use the budget for more pixels.
The hedonic treadmill is getting brutal. Going up to a 4k/34" monitor was nice but it quickly became normal. The main effect was how bad it made 1440p/27" monitors!
Luxury. Once you have gone so high you can't go back. I have a 144 Hz monitor now. Even when not playing games, scrolling, moving the mouse, moving windows. It's smooth and I never want to go lower again. Using the computer is fun again.
I have a 1440p 144hz monitor and a 4k 60hz monitor. I prefer the higher dpi one. I personally don't feel that extra-smoothnes during web browsing or web development when on the 144hz one, it maybe feels a bit better, but I don't mind 60hz.
I had to use 4k@30 Hz for the past week (waiting on a USB-C to DisplayPort cable to replace HDMI) and actually gotten used to it. Turning off animations and smooth scrolling helps.
> A good monitor is essential for that. Not nice to have. A MUST. And in “good” I mean, as good as you can get.
The whole discussion starts from a what I would say is an incorrect assertion, and then goes on to describe lots of ways that letters can be made better. If, in fact, you don't need better, then a lot of the points go away.
1. There is a point of diminishing returns, past which you are spending a lot more money for very little benefit.
2. There exists a point beyond which "better letters" are unlikely to contribute much to daily work.
Both of those points are, to some extent, the same point. But either way, the idea that you MUST get as good of a monitor as you can" is, in my opinion, untrue and not worth basing an entire document on.
I'd rather see a discussion of which features of a monitor contribute the most (per $) to how well they function for daily work. For gaming, I want high refresh rate and high contrast. For TV, the contrast (real black) goes up in importance. For daily work, neither of those is a huge contributor to how well I can work.
While technically the article is correct, it feels very narrow-sighted to me by placing resolution/refresh rate above everything else. Some more things to consider:
- Price. If you are not a programmer in a first world country working for a magic money startup/big 4 then you wont spend $1000+ on a single monitor. Mine was a better 27" 1920 one for $300 and I'm happy with it. I'm sure there are better ones, but I cant allow myself spending much more on one.
- No PWM. This is crucial. PWMing monitors kill your eye in hours, then you wont be able to work for the rest of the day. Some ppl I know take the eye-protection game so far that they by e-ink screens for development (sadly you cant buy large ones.).
- Adjustable, optionally can be rotated 90 degrees. If you got 2 monitors one rotated at 90 degrees is a blessing for reading code.
- small bezels. Quite important if you got 2 or more, large bezels make my setup clumsy.
- Bright. Its quite annoying if I cant read something because the sun shines in my room. Especially important for laptops.
None of these are mentioned, just that small letters should look nice and scrolling should be smooth.
PWM and flicker need to die. I easily tell when a monitor is flickering and I'm convinced they're bad for long term eye health after using one for multiple years and not knowing why my eyes started hurting so often. Refresh rate is a nice-to-have in my book above 60fps. Size and resolution are much more important. Having a 32" over a 24" changed my life.
Affordable, large E-ink screens would be revolutionary for many occupations and I hope there's more investment in the space.
Macbook Pros use PWM, which is why I had to return the latest 16 inch model. I was really bummed; but I need to protect my eyes. It was causing severe eye strain.
I adore my HP Z27. It’s 4K, usb-C, charges my 15” MBP and serves as a thunderbolt hub for other peripherals. The chrome or bezel around the screen is extremely minimal, and the only light that isn’t the backlight is a tiny little LED indicator dot that is very subtle and Apple-esque. From time to time I use it with an old PC and even RPi’s. Real intuitive mode switching and menus. Highly recommended along with a heavy duty monitor arm to keep it from shaking.
As much as I miss my 2012 MacBook Air and consider it the greatest computer I’ve ever owned... I definitely couldn’t go back to a non retina experience.
It was at this point I realized the entire premise of the article was a very long-winded way of saying "I like using high DPI monitors when I code". And then tossing in a bunch of technical details to make it sound like a "fact".
I used to long for the days of 200dpi monitors when I was younger and we lived with 72dpi or less on-screen. Now, my vision has deteriorated to the point where I honestly can't see the difference despite being a type nerd. I'm increasingly using the zoom feature in MacOS to read smaller UI elements. I suspect my days of driving my MacBook display at "more space" (2048x1280) instead of "default" (1792x1120) are numbered.
I have the ultrafine 5k. 27 glorious inches @ 218ppi. Not only does this provide a colossal amount of real estate for crisp text (I run with no scaling, which requires good eyesight), but combined with a macbook pro, provides a near perfect computing solution. One cable provides video, audio, usb hub, webcam and power. Two monitors might be better, but I find leaving the laptop screen open on a stand works well. One quarter of the ultrafine provides 2560x1440 resolution, so side by side, or corner layouts work very well.
> I run with no scaling, which requires good eyesight
I have been on the fence about upgrading to a large hi-res screen specifically with the aim of maximizing screen real estate, which effectively means little scaling. However I couldn't find much info about running hi-res monitors with little or no scaling. Could you share your experience and/or post a screenshot, just to get an idea of how big UIs end up being?
Judging by the resolution of my screenshot, it appears as though there is still some scaling going on. I can effectively reduce the scaling by zooming out in VSCode, but I'm limited by my eyes, not by the resolution of the monitor. In other words, the text becomes illegible far before it becomes pixel limited.
Disappointed that he didn't mention pixel-perfect programming fonts (e.g. proggy) which offer high-density text on low-resolution monitors while not looking nearly as bad as his Consolas example. These fonts make a huge difference imo.
Yeah, I've started using terminus... probably 10 years ago now, and I still haven't found a programming font that I liked more. Tried using some retina macbooks with hyped-font-of-the-month, they just didn't work for me.
to reinforce your point, while I can appreciate more pixels, per display or per inch, I appreciate more being able to pick up a 1366x768 laptop and be productive and not feeling like I need to whine, complain, or write supercilious blog posts.
Well, I don't know what DPI you are using (perhaps the display is tiny?) but it sounds low. Of course, we all used low DPI displays for years and were happy with them because we did not know better. Now that I've become accustomed to higher DPI, low DPI screens look like crap.
It's the exact reason I am actively avoiding using 120 or 144hz screens. I don't want to get used to it and then need to ditch my current display. For several years I bounced back and forth between gaming on a PC and PS4. The whiplash between 60 and 30hz was absolutely brutal - but I never noticed it back when all my displays were 30hz.
So in the end, I am not sure what advice, if any, I am trying to give you. I love my huge, high-DPI screen, but if you are happy with what you've got, you might seriously consider sticking with it for a while.
> Text can’t be made look good on low-resolution displays.
BS. Maybe true on user-hostile OSX/windows. But If LCD manufacturers provided the correct information on the DID data, it would be very trivial.
On linux and with a little trial and error (you only have to do it once per monitor ever) you can fine tune the subpixel hinting. I use a photographer loupe (magnifying glass) to look at the a white region on my ancient LCDs to see the subpixel configuration, set it on my X config and have perfect aliased text just fine. ...well, except on some gtk2 applications :) But if you work more than a few minutes on those you have other problems.
Another option for low DPI users is to use bitmap fonts instead of vector ones. I find blurriness of truetype fonts on low res displays to give greater visual fatigue than the jagged edges of misc-fixed or terminus.
This is going to sound like I want to eat the cake and still have it, but I wish there was some sort of balance between real estate, sharpness, and affordability. A 24in 4K monitor without scaling makes text too small, but at 200%, it's no different from a 1080p monitor real estate-wise (even though text is much crisper). My current monitor, a 1440p 24in screen at 100%, serves all of my real estate needs, but leaves something to be desired in terms of sharpness, so a 5K screen at 200% and similar physical size would be perfect; alas, there aren't any general-purpose 5K monitors at an affordable price. 8K screens at 300% would offer similar, albeit slightly lower, real estate at even better text sharpness, but there's just one such monitor from Dell and it's ridiculously expensive.
I hope 5K monitors become as cheap as 4K monitors over the next few years.
1,038 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadDell has the Ultrasharp UP3017 with 2560x1600 at 30", maybe that's something you can try if you want more pixels. It's just pretty expensive and has a big bezel since it was released in 2017.
It is interesting to see some laptops move off of 16:9 to 16:10 or 3:2. This gives me hope that we'll see new/better 16:10 panels.
Honestly I don't see the need of 2160p on a monitor, it usually just causes display issues and it's a performance drain.
For gaming/everyday use, 2k w/ a high refresh rate is the sweet spot imo.
I'd dare say that the "serious" FPS players stick to Counterstrike, and other easier-to-render games with 200+ FPS. (even if the monitor doesn't support it, the higher FPS results in smoother gameplay and fewer hiccups).
There's of course a huge casual crowd playing Overwatch, PUBG and Fortnite. But CS tournaments remain a thing to this day.
I played a lot of MOHAA[0].
[0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor:_Allied_Assault
I split the 2 vertical monitors into 3rds (top, middle, bottom) and I have keyboard shortcuts to move/resize windows as well as snap every window to it's designated space. I have been extremely happy with this setup so far.
Is the text super crisp? Nope. Would I give up all this space for smoother text? Not a chance. Would I replace it with a 43" 8k monitor? In a heartbeat.
I would love to upgrade to an OLED but my screens are on at least 16 hours a day with semi-static content. That's a hefty price to take a chance on burn-in.
Living with a C9 65" as my main television, not computer monitor, while I acknowledge the picture quality is incomparable from my point of view I am in the camp of that for a general work computer screen it would be best to wait for micro LED technology to spread. OLED still suffers the risk of burn in but this is mostly from fixed elements where the screen is level on for days if not years. Still not worth the degradation that will come as most elements are fixed and always on display with Mac OS.
So for the most part a well lit IPS display will serve users just fine these days and reserve OLED for the living room.
The extra real estate is a way bigger productivity enhancer than smoother fonts. Like there's not even any comparison.
But I basically agree. I use a pair of 4K monitors and it works well. I run the UI at 150%.
As mentioned in the article, macOS works best using true 2x integer scaling. Using 2x scaling, a 4k monitor will result in an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development. A superior option is iMac/LG 5k display results which nets an equivalent workspace of 1440p.
The only options for greater-than-4k displays on the market currently are the 27" LG 5K ($1200, 2014) and the Dell 8k ($3500, 2017). I'm convinced this is due to the manufacturers focusing their attention on the high-margin gaming market which has no need for resolutions higher than 4k.
I'm holding onto my 30" 2560x1600 Apple Cinema Display until I can get something that offers me the equivalent amount of screen real estate at 2x retina scaling.
I have to disagree here. I use (and have used) a 1080p display for years and don’t feel the need for anything larger. That might be an artifact of my early years on 80x25 character displays, though.
I am sure Doom and other great pieces of software were written on one of those.
It’s overkill for most, but still the best display I’ve ever used and I love it. I actually tried an Asus 4K 120hz for much less but the fan noise was a deal breaker even if the screen didn’t break on arrival (it did).
Disclosure: Apple employee
- Added a picture of the back of your 6k with the webcam. I'm sure it changes the look, however short the cable is.
- Address the lack of speakers. I see you mention using a bluetooth speaker or your home audio setup. What's it like using the MacBook Pro speakers?
- Added a picture of your setup + speaker if that's what you use regularly.
I love your minimalist look and have a similar one, but have been holding on to my LG 5k because of the speaker/webcam.
My hope is that someone will take the panel and pair it with a ~700nit backlight (vs 1k sustained 1.5k peak for XDR) and price it around $2k. Also interested to see what Apple has in store for the iMac, if the refresh comes with a new and improved display I may just go in that direction.
I agree with your analogy, literally my livelihood feeds through this screen, and I find a good monitor lasts a long time.
Still the best monitor around. $3000 MSRP now available used for $200-300.
And let's not even get into the fact that 4k 60hz is a struggle and a half -- you need HDMI 2.0 or displayport to make it work at all, and many modern laptops lack either port, forcing you to use USB-C/thunderbolt with adapters that have poor spec support and even worse documentation.
Even if someone offered me dual 5k displays to replace my dual 4k ones, I would turn them down right now. Before we move on to 5k displays, we need to get 4k60 down. And while I'm on my soapbox... where the hell is 4k90 or 4k120? I only bought my 4k monitors last month, with virtually unlimited budget, but they just don't exist. I imagine they've fallen victim to the same issue: the cables to support it just barely exist, and certainly can't be doubled up for dual monitor setups without a mess of wires plugged directly into a laptop or desktop.
Win32 was first beta tested by developers in 1992, and has had to remain stable and backwards compatibile to those first early 90s versions. There are still 32-bit apps written in 1992 that are expected to run unmodified on Windows 10 today. The last processor-architecture related API drop that Windows has been allowed by public perception and corporate strategy was Win16 support was dropped on 64-bit processors. (Hence why Windows on ARM has struggled and the current iteration of Windows on ARM now involves a 32-bit x86 emulator as a core feature.)
Mac apps did have to be upgraded, it's just that Apple has been much better at requiring upgrades. There's barely no comparison here. There is no way that you can possibly find today a version of macOS that still supports Mac Classic applications unmodified from the 90s (for instance 94's Glider Pro v1) with High DPI support, yet Windows absolutely must run applications from Windows 95. Sure, Windows sometimes still stumbles in High DPI support for pixel-perfect applications written three decades ago in the 90s, but it at least tries, macOS shrugged and gave up.
On my 15" MB Pro, I usually use the 1680 resolution, but if needed, I can quickly change it to 1920.
Have to say though, taste is subjective, but good lord those monitors are about as elegantly designed as a Rockstar Energy drink.
Acer, Asus, et al. tend to just remarket OEM technology with relatively little value-add. I suspect these are all built on the same panel, but I could be wrong.
The one exception for me is that I do like a couple of gaming mice. It's not so much for the hotkey functionality, but because they have a really high resolution, which makes mousing easier and more precise to me. Other than that, my setup is all really basic, office-style equipment, and I love it.
The main use of those monitor hoods is to remove glare caused by ambient lighting. They're common (and often included) accessories for displays intended to be used for photo editing, color grading, and similar types of work. I was kind of surprised to see one on a "gaming" monitor though.
The monitors linked are actually quite good, the gaming styling they have is rather unfortunate.
> This will make everything on the screen slightly bigger, leaving you (slightly!) less screen estate. This is expected. My opinion is, a notebook is a constrained environment by definition. Extra 15% won’t magically turn it into a huge comfortable desktop
For me a notebook is not a constrained environment, and screen scaling very much makes the difference between "a huge comfortable desktop" and not.
That's not a bad deal for a 4k high refresh rate monitor, but if you play any games you would need at least a 2080 or 2080ti which is another 700-1200, 1440p high refresh monitors go for around $300-400.
Quite frankly anything bigger and you get a kink in your neck by having to move your head so much!
You absolutely don't need 120 Hz in any single player video game produced between 1978 and 2020.
Games at 15 FPS (even less) used to be perfectly playable and fun. At 30 FPS things are smooth well past giving a damn.
You can read scrolling movie credits just fine at 24 FPS.
Personally, I find this 120 Hz endeavour pretty pointless when most applications have input lag that's way worse than a single 60 Hz frame.
There is probably a term for this type of performance chasing. It's like car owners bragging about their top speeds despite only ever driving on roads with speed limits.
The hedonic treadmill is getting brutal. Going up to a 4k/34" monitor was nice but it quickly became normal. The main effect was how bad it made 1440p/27" monitors!
But dropping down to 1080p or a smaller monitor is instantly noticeable and very very unpleasant. Everything just looks so fuzzy and hard to read.
4k @ 60 Hz 1440p @ 144HZ
The whole discussion starts from a what I would say is an incorrect assertion, and then goes on to describe lots of ways that letters can be made better. If, in fact, you don't need better, then a lot of the points go away.
1. There is a point of diminishing returns, past which you are spending a lot more money for very little benefit.
2. There exists a point beyond which "better letters" are unlikely to contribute much to daily work.
Both of those points are, to some extent, the same point. But either way, the idea that you MUST get as good of a monitor as you can" is, in my opinion, untrue and not worth basing an entire document on.
I'd rather see a discussion of which features of a monitor contribute the most (per $) to how well they function for daily work. For gaming, I want high refresh rate and high contrast. For TV, the contrast (real black) goes up in importance. For daily work, neither of those is a huge contributor to how well I can work.
- Price. If you are not a programmer in a first world country working for a magic money startup/big 4 then you wont spend $1000+ on a single monitor. Mine was a better 27" 1920 one for $300 and I'm happy with it. I'm sure there are better ones, but I cant allow myself spending much more on one.
- No PWM. This is crucial. PWMing monitors kill your eye in hours, then you wont be able to work for the rest of the day. Some ppl I know take the eye-protection game so far that they by e-ink screens for development (sadly you cant buy large ones.).
- Adjustable, optionally can be rotated 90 degrees. If you got 2 monitors one rotated at 90 degrees is a blessing for reading code.
- small bezels. Quite important if you got 2 or more, large bezels make my setup clumsy.
- Bright. Its quite annoying if I cant read something because the sun shines in my room. Especially important for laptops.
None of these are mentioned, just that small letters should look nice and scrolling should be smooth.
Affordable, large E-ink screens would be revolutionary for many occupations and I hope there's more investment in the space.
As much as I miss my 2012 MacBook Air and consider it the greatest computer I’ve ever owned... I definitely couldn’t go back to a non retina experience.
Quite an argument.
I've tried to use TTF fonts in terminal. None of them work well enough, or renders better than the classic 6x13.
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27MD5KA-B-5k-uhd-led-monit...
I have been on the fence about upgrading to a large hi-res screen specifically with the aim of maximizing screen real estate, which effectively means little scaling. However I couldn't find much info about running hi-res monitors with little or no scaling. Could you share your experience and/or post a screenshot, just to get an idea of how big UIs end up being?
https://i.imgur.com/PXyOr7R.png
When writing prose, I prefer serif fonts such as go mono, at a bigger size.
It's the exact reason I am actively avoiding using 120 or 144hz screens. I don't want to get used to it and then need to ditch my current display. For several years I bounced back and forth between gaming on a PC and PS4. The whiplash between 60 and 30hz was absolutely brutal - but I never noticed it back when all my displays were 30hz.
So in the end, I am not sure what advice, if any, I am trying to give you. I love my huge, high-DPI screen, but if you are happy with what you've got, you might seriously consider sticking with it for a while.
BS. Maybe true on user-hostile OSX/windows. But If LCD manufacturers provided the correct information on the DID data, it would be very trivial.
On linux and with a little trial and error (you only have to do it once per monitor ever) you can fine tune the subpixel hinting. I use a photographer loupe (magnifying glass) to look at the a white region on my ancient LCDs to see the subpixel configuration, set it on my X config and have perfect aliased text just fine. ...well, except on some gtk2 applications :) But if you work more than a few minutes on those you have other problems.
I hope 5K monitors become as cheap as 4K monitors over the next few years.
5K @ 200% = 5120 / 2 = 2560
8K @ 300% = 7680 / 3 = 2560