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Ask HN: Why are monitors lagging behind in tech?

4 points by kushan2020 ↗ HN
Now that MacBook Pro comes with a really gorgeous 120hz 4K-ish display and the fact that mobile phones have had one of the best displays, it makes me wonder why do we not have such good displays in the consumer monitor segment? The only consumer retina display monitor is the Lg ultra fine 5k and that doesn’t have high refresh rate.

7 comments

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PaulHoule
That's been a long time situation.

Look at how much more you can buy in a TV set at a given price than you can buy in something called a "computer monitor"

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theandrewbailey
They exist, but they're expensive and have limited options. Haven't 4K 120Hz monitors and GPUs only been out for a year or two?

Of course, 4K 60Hz monitors have been out for years, but are still rather expensive.

vletal
Smartphones started from scratch supporting displaying the same content on displays with various sizes and DPIs. Computer apps and window managers were long stuck with bitmap / pixel perfect UI frameworks.

There was little to no demand for displays above HD before Apple gave devs the incentives to make their apps support HiDPI by introducing retina displays. Windows took really long time to offer similar support. Linux was (is?) waiting for Wayland to solve this issue.

dyingkneepad
And what exactly are you going to use your 4k 120hz screen for? It's not like there's a great need for it, when most people use their computers to stream 720p@30hz videos or worse, or don't have graphics devices capable of rendering games or even a desktop at 4k@120hz.

The industry has been pushing HDR and support for variable refresh rate, and that seems way more useful than 4k@120hz, but it's another thing consumers won't be able to notice unless they try really really hard.

Edit: also, does either DP or HDMI support 4k@120hz? I'm still running my 4k monitor at 30hz because my employer doesn't want to buy me a freaking HDMI 2.0 cable!

kushan2020
> And what exactly are you going to use your 4k 120hz screen for?

The same thing I am going to use the MacBook Pro's 120hz screen for. I think this banal argument can be made for most of consumer tech including why do I need a Retina display when I am perfectly fine with 1080p, but I believe all of these things add up to improve our daily quality of life since we spend most of our time staring at those pixels.

> also, does either DP or HDMI support 4k@120hz?

I think HDMI 2.1 supports it.