8 ms·

So far the earlier versions of DisplayPort have worked quite well as a USB-C alt mode so I am hopeful. I strongly disagree that higher resolutions are not inte

• penagwin 7y ago
  4k at 21 inches? I'm using a 4k screen at I think 31" and I have to scale everything to read the screen. My dream is a 43" 4k monitor with no scaling. But 1440p at 21" I think would be great. Personally I only use 1080p screens as secondary monitors, and would never go back to 1080p for my primary display.
  • samcat116 7y ago
    43" 4k is way too low density. For sheer size its nice, but I want some retina displays, of which there are currently very few.
    • _trampeltier 7y ago
      Na, not way to low. I have one and I'm very happy with it. I do no graphic things, so thats ok .. and no scaling .. no troubles with Linux or Windows.
    • ahartmetz 7y ago
      24" 1920x1200 is not bad. 8K is still a massive strain on hardware so I'm planning to get something like 32" 4K. Retina is nice, but real estate is useful.
      • giobox 7y ago
        24 inch 1920x1200 is ~94 PPI - this is pretty crappy by modern standards and will result in the dreaded “jaggies”. Great if you can live with this, but one shouldn’t be surprised that many people won’t. 100 PPI is what we typically had on good monitors in the late 90s, it’s 20 years later now!
    • Jach 7y ago
      How close are you sitting to this 43" 4k? Retina is a function of viewing distance. I've been enjoying a couple hundred dollar 4k 60hz 42" seiki for years, it's basically the equivalent of stacking 4 "traditionally sized" 1080ps together and eliminating the bezel. I wouldn't use it for detailed graphics work due to not so great color fidelity (though there are better models now), but everything else, for the price, mwah. It is "retina" at 33 inches. Admittedly I'm often closer than that, but not by much, and frequently I'm further away.
  • sjwright 7y ago
    “No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.
    • bcheung 7y ago
      Even if the OS supports it, many apps still write their own UI primitives and won't scale with the OS scaling, or when they do, it's not uniform so the text is either obnoxiously huge, or the UI affordances are way too small. Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.
      • mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Unfortunately with really large monitors, you have to turn your head a lot.
        • penagwin 7y ago
          If you have a high-res, large monitor, you want to arrange your windows like a grid. You don't want to actually use Google Chrome at full 4k with no scaling across the entire screen.
          • mixmastamyk 7y ago
            Still have to move your head. My 24 is big enough to require a modest amount of movement.
          • tracker1 7y ago
            I mostly grid at 42" (moom is awesome)... still have to move my head. The mac/ubuntu top menu is a bit annoying on a really big display. Still prefer it to a couple smaller screens.
      • robertoandred 7y ago
        That's a Windows problem. Macs have had high-dpi screens that work perfectly for seven years now.
  • Eric_WVGG 7y ago
    pardon my ignorance, but what is the difference in bandwidth between 4k at 21, 31, or 43"? It's the same amount of data, just bigger pixels, not more.
    • zaphoyd 7y ago
      You are correct that the size of the screen has nothing to do with data rate, except often larger displays have higher resolutions (which does affect data rate).
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    "no scaling" means jaggies. I think what you have now (4K @ 31") is the perfect compromise. It's borderline retina, so while things do get slightly better at a higher density, the improvement is much less noticeable than the improvement from non-retina to borderline-retina. The density is also such that if you turn off scaling it's still borderline usable, for the once in a blue moon situation you have to run an app that misbehaves while scaled.
    • lostmsu 7y ago
      I have 40 inch 4k, and it is very good for pretty much anything.
  • opencl 7y ago
    4K has gotten pretty cheap over the past few years, you can now make your dream a reality for $220.
  • RussianCow 7y ago
    > I'm using a 4k screen at I think 31" and I have to scale everything to read the screen. My dream is a 43" 4k monitor with no scaling. What's the issue with scaling? It exists for precisely this reason.
    • penagwin 7y ago
      Snipped from another comment I made: With 200% scaling you now only have the screen real-estate of a 1080p screen. At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time. At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit. Also once in a blue-moon you'll find some software won't scale at all, or has issues scaling. If you only have a 21" screen then you have this tiny microscopic text you have to try to read.
  • pier25 7y ago
    Scaling and resolution are two different matters. If you use a 21''@4K with 200% scaling text is sharper than a relative bigger monitor at 100% scaling.
    • penagwin 7y ago
      Yes but with 200% scaling you now only have the screen real-estate of a 1080p screen. At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time. At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit in the quandrants.
      • pier25 7y ago
        The point of hi DPI displays is not screen real state.
        • Implicated 7y ago
          For some of us it is...
          • pier25 7y ago
            If you have a 43'' 4K monitor it's not HiDPI anymore.
  • kalleboo 7y ago
    I have a 31.5" 4K display that I use at native resolution, and while I love having all the screen real estate, I hate the jaggies. The rest of my time I spend looking at a 15" MacBook Pro or iPhone retina display, and having everything be so pixelated really distracts me and makes text harder to read. I would love a 31" display at something closer to 8K resolution so I can run it at 2x scaling and get true retina. If you need scaling at 31"... How is your vision? Do you use glasses? Or do you sit further away from the display? I had a friend who thought native 4K at 30" was too small, but it turned out he actually needed glasses, and once he got a prescription he joined my side.
    • phonon 7y ago
      https://smile.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSharp-32-8K-Monitor/dp/B0727ZQ21F https://smile.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSharp-32-8K-Monitor/dp/B0...
  • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    I run a 43" 4K Dell at work, no scaling. It is sweet. I can either fit 10 full pages of a Word document simultaneously, or I can tile 6 large terminal windows and output windows all together.
    • andrewnicolalde 7y ago
      My god your sight must be good..
      • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        Actually I have pretty bad eyesight, so I wear glasses all the time. But maybe that is the key, maybe it's more of a problem for people who have very slight near- or far-sightedness so they don't wear glasses etc., but the really fine detail is hard to see.
  • Adverblessly 7y ago
    > My dream is a 43" 4k monitor with no scaling. I had the exact same dream, which is why I bought a 4K 43" monitor. Then I found out that it was so big I had to sit further away, forcing me to scale some things up so they are readable again, though not everything (DE settings are still at 100%, but e.g. code font is at ~120% and HN is at 150%). That said, I'm very happy with my purchase. The only thing I would probably change is to get a different model (sadly, it was the only available 43" 4K 60fps model in my country at the time of purchase).
  • tracker1 7y ago
    running 42" 4K at home and it's pretty great, though physically a bit too big... I think 36-28" would be practically better, would have to move my head less and could see the whole screen at once. Using a pretty large desk, so it does sit back a way.
  • nomercy400 7y ago
    Sitting behind at 43' 4K monitor without scaling and it works great. 4x 1080p in one screen without seams is soo good. Benefits: - You get so much screen space. You can fit so many thing on one screen. There is now space for 20 icons vertially on my desktop (not that I use the desktop much, but consider it more of something to compare to). - You move your head more, as you don't have your entire screen in focus. Same goes for multi-monitor setups. - No seam in your 4x1080p screens. Some caveats: - You'll miss notifications. My field-of-view is not good enough to see the small popup in the lower-left/right of windows. I wish I got more notification in the center of my screen. - If you use it as a windows monitor, you will notice color/blurry reflections of the desk in front of you, making it harder to read the bottom 2% of the screen when you are looking at the center. Usually, this is where your taskbar is. Solution: Move the taskbar to the top. - You will still overlap your windows. Most of the time you will just increase the size of your editors/browsers to fit more content in those. I think my browser is currently larger than a 1080p screen, just because I read it a lot and it is such an important part of the screen. You do however get so much more content in your editors/browsers. - Getting headaches and eye-strain? Turn down the contrast and brightness by a lot. You are starting into an even bigger 'lamp' than usual, so save your eyes. On 1080p I usually work around 40-50 brightness and contrast, while on this 4K they are both on 30. I still wish I had something smaller though, but there simply are no developer 4k screens in the range of 33' to 38'. I do not want ultrawide, nor pay +2k so I can read my lines of code in the most color-accurate way possible.
• shmerl 7y ago
  What exactly do you gain at such resolutions on a small screen? Unless you put it right in front of you to see pixels close, you probably won't even see any difference.
  • sjwright 7y ago
    Sharp, clear and legible text even at small font sizes. Once you’ve gone “retina” you won’t go back. The smartphone market has already declared high DPI the winner here; desktops are lagging behind only due to inertia.
    • shmerl 7y ago
      The reason for desktops is rather simple. GPUs aren't there yet to support such high resolutions with high framerates at the same time. Since it's too expensive to have one monitor for each use case (one for text, one for video, one for games etc.), they provide some middle ground. I'd take high refrersh rate with medium resolution (2.5K or something) over high resolution with low refresh rate. So it has nothing to do with inertia, there are multiple reasons involved.
      • RussianCow 7y ago
        Outside of gaming, I don't buy this. You don't need an exceptionally powerful GPU to render web pages at 4K; the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true. Inertia and general lack of demand is a much better explanation. Most people either haven't experienced high-DPI monitors or just don't care that much about their PCs.
        • xnyan 7y ago
          I think one issue you are overlooking is cost of the panel itself. There's a huge difference in price between a ~200-300ppi panel that's 4.7 diagonal inches vs a laptop display (13-15 DI) and a "standard" size desktop monitor (22-27 DI). Add in the requirements of acceptable brightness and it gets expensive fast.
• tracker1 7y ago
  My vision relatively sucks... so I don't get as much from it... I run 4k @ 42" at home, and it works very well for me. I think 36-38" 4K might be a bit better, but wouldn't gain much from smaller pixels, though font/image scaling is definitely smoother on the kid's 28" 4K @ 150%