92 ms·

Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

• csomar 6y ago
  I couldn't care more for resolution. I use three 1080p 27" Dell monitors and the only upgrade I did was moving to IPS which slightly relieved my eye-strain. Now if you can find me a monitor which will reduce eye-strain, I'll just dump money on that. For someone who uses the screen for 10-12 hours on a normal day, headaches induced by the eyes are my biggest worry.
• tjr225 6y ago
  I will never give up my 24" 16:10 Dell Ultrasharp even if it is low def.
  • foepys 6y ago
    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.
    • santoshalper 6y ago
      I did have a dream once of a "4k Pro" that was 4000x2500. Never gonna happen.
  • cpascal 6y ago
    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.
  • Wistar 6y ago
    I have two of them and I sure like the 16:10 aspect. I recently bought a refurb Dell UP3017 30" at 2560 x 1600/60 and I love the thing.
  • santoshalper 6y ago
    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.
    • markkanof 6y ago
      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.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    My favorite 19" 4x3 LG monitor is what is keeping me from getting cross-eyed.
• defgeneric 6y ago
  If I could just get an affordable 4:3 flatscreen monitor with any pixel density I would be happy.
• bjoli 6y ago
  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!
• s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
  After going to 1440p, I cannot use 1080p monitors for programming as the text is too blurry. 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.
  • mgr86 6y ago
    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.
    • dragontamer 6y ago
      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.
    • Aaronstotle 6y ago
      Was it quake by any chance?
      • rcarmo 6y ago
        Quake(world) and Quake III Arena matches were often frantic twitchfests between blurry, nearly flat textured models :)
      • mgr86 6y ago
        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. I played a lot of MOHAA[0]. [0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor:_Allied_Assault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor:_Allied_Assault
• CarVac 6y ago
  I prefer real-estate to sharp fonts, so I run my 4K screens (24" and 27") with no scaling at all.
  • KAdot 6y ago
    I find text very hard to read on a 27" 4K monitor with no scaling. Not sure if it has something to do with me getting older and wearing glasses.
  • pier25 6y ago
    You must have super sharp vision
    • 0-_-0 6y ago
      Or nose against the monitor
    • asdff 6y ago
      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.
  • yummypaint 6y ago
    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.
  • dspillett 6y ago
    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.
  • tomchuk 6y ago
    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.
• biosed 6y ago
  Using 55" LG OLED @4k as my main display, nothing compares.
  • post_break 6y ago
    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.
  • _JamesA_ 6y ago
    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.
    • biosed 6y ago
      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.
  • pier25 6y ago
    At what distance? Do you have a picture of your setup?
    • biosed 6y ago
      about 45 to 60 cm
  • Shivetya 6y ago
    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.
• genpfault 6y ago
  So where are y'all finding 4k, high refresh-rate 16:10 panels?
• fortran77 6y ago
  His "research" was a Twitter poll? But I basically agree. I use a pair of 4K monitors and it works well. I run the UI at 150%.
• mastercheif 6y ago
  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.
  • daniel-thompson 6y ago
    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.
    • _ph_ 6y ago
      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 :).
  • kd5bjo 6y ago
    > 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.
    • Koshkin 6y ago
      > 80x25 character displays I am sure Doom and other great pieces of software were written on one of those.
• gdubs 6y ago
  Good article. Have to say though, taste is subjective, but good lord those monitors are about as elegantly designed as a Rockstar Energy drink.
  • santoshalper 6y ago
    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.
    • pmiller2 6y ago
      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.
      • DavidVoid 6y ago
        > 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.
      • amarshall 6y ago
        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.
• _bxg1 6y ago
  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.
• Aaronstotle 6y ago
  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.
  • duncanawoods 6y ago
    I struggle to hit 60Hz at 4k with 2080TI even with graphics settings knocked down a few notches. Maybe next generation.
    • kenhwang 6y ago
      1440p144hz seems to be the sweet spot that real world single graphics cards can max out on.
• mmm_grayons 6y ago
  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.
  • beckingz 6y ago
    electronic waste recycling facility? More like christmas in my opinion.
    • mmm_grayons 6y ago
      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.
• chromaton 6y ago
  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.
  • buserror 6y 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!
  • XCSme 6y ago
    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)
• boromi 6y ago
  What's the point of 120Hz if your just programming?
  • vardump 6y ago
    Can read the content clearly while smoothly 120 Hz scrolling or moving windows around.
    • boromi 6y ago
      Guess I never thought about that. Is the difference noticable. I always thought High refresh rate was for gaming.
      • kazinator 6y ago
        High refresh rate has to do with reaction times in competitive multi-player gaming. 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.
        • gsich 6y ago
          15 fps was never perfectly playable.
        • smabie 6y ago
          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.
    • kazinator 6y ago
      You can do that just fine at 60 Hz, if there is no tearing (all screen updates appear during vertical sync). You can read scrolling movie credits just fine at 24 FPS.
• ddevault 6y ago
  I have three 1080p displays and one 4K display. Text looks nicer on my 4K display, but it's just that: pretty. You don't need one.
• RHSeeger 6y ago
  > 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.
  • sydd 6y ago
    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.
    • kart23 6y ago
      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.
• whalesalad 6y ago
  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.
• zarmin 6y ago
  >Lowercase letters only have 7 (seven!) vertical pixels to work with. That’s NOT MUCH. I have more fingers than that. Quite an argument.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    Indeed. (Especially given the fact that two characters have 14 pixels in them.)
    • zarmin 6y ago
      IIRC, I have fewer fingers than that.
      • raegis 6y ago
        Yes, but you have more fingers and toes than that!
  • wondringaloud 6y ago
    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".
    • bostik 6y ago
      More like "I like looking at really smoothly rendered TTF fonts". I've tried to use TTF fonts in terminal. None of them work well enough, or renders better than the classic 6x13.
• dhosek 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• tyho 6y ago
  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. https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27MD5KA-B-5k-uhd-led-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27MD5KA-B-5k-uhd-led-monit...
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    > 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?
    • tyho 6y ago
      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. https://i.imgur.com/PXyOr7R.png https://i.imgur.com/PXyOr7R.png
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        Thanks, that is massive but surprisingly readable even at 27"/1440p. Nice cowsay btw.
• fwipsy 6y ago
  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.
  • jeromenerf 6y ago
    I also recommend them for the same reason. I use terminus. It looks great whatever the size. When writing prose, I prefer serif fonts such as go mono, at a bigger size.
    • q3k 6y ago
      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.
  • rocky1138 6y ago
    The author is apparently the same author as Fira Code, a ligature-supporting monospaced font. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
• seniorsassycat 6y ago
  Bitmap fonts will look perfect on low res displays. I've been using a 1366x768 laptop with terminus font for six years.
  • fsckboy 6y ago
    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.
  • santoshalper 6y ago
    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.
• gcbw3 6y ago
  > 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.
• tbirdz 6y ago
  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.
  • mrob 6y ago
    Agreed. Anti-aliasing is only needed if you're trying to imitate printed text, which does not improve programming or writing productivity.
• adtac 6y ago
  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.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    > 8K screens at 300% would offer similar, albeit slightly lower, real estate at even better text sharpness 5K @ 200% = 5120 / 2 = 2560 8K @ 300% = 7680 / 3 = 2560
    • adtac 6y ago
      Oops, you're right, I knew I should've just used Python instead of trying to do that in my head :)
  • plorkyeran 6y ago
    5k 27" imacs have been out for a few years now, but the screen is a pretty significant chunk of the cost.
    • adtac 6y ago
      Which is why I said "general-purpose 5K". I want to use the hypothetical perfect monitors with a i3-like window manager on Linux.
  • asdff 6y ago
    You can make text bigger without scaling in pretty much every application there is with text.
• coreai 6y ago
  After using a rMBP for 6 years, I realized that using a lower resolution and lower quality display makes absolutely no sense at all if both graphical power and budget is available (first 13' rMBP had some serious issue driving the display). Better quality image is better quality image. I think Apple's biggest selling point over any vendor right now, despite numerous issues with its hardware and software in the recent past, is absolutely top class input and output. It is such a simple concept. A great keyboard (seems to be fixed now) and absolutely incredible trackpad experience along with a display that basically is a huge step up from your past experience means that most users will prefer that setup even if they just use it for basic coding or web browsing. After looking at the first retina displays I realized that Apple didn't just change the displays but it changed how fonts behaved completely because the crisp and clear legibility was key to attract customers early on. I'd say even in 2020 most computers are struggling with good displays which can completely ruin the experience for someone using the product even if every other aspect of it was great.
  • bredren 6y ago
    I've been focused on Apple display products for the past few months as I'm looking to make an upgrade from the Dell P2715Q 4k 27" I use primarily for development. There is a three page thread on using the Apple 32" XDR for software dev on MacRumors. [1] I believe there is a major product gap at Apple right now in the mid-market display. Specifically a replacement for the LED 27" Cinema Display which was announced 10 years ago next month. [2] I am speculating that Apple could announce a new 27" 5k in part because of the rumored announcement of a new Mac Pro but also because the build quality of the LG 5k Ultrafine is just not great and there are obvious synergies with XDR production and Mac Pro. I think this should be announced at WWDC is because developers specifically are being left out of good display products and Apple should be looking out for what they stare at all day. While there are no supply chain rumors of such a display, I wargamed what this product might be and its pricing anyway.[3] In short, I speculate Apple will release a 27 inch IPS display, 5120 x 2880 @ 60Hz with standard glass at $1999, Nano-texture Glass at $2799. I had not paid a lot of attention to the refresh rate, but it does seem like kind of a miss that the XDR does nor offer this. --- [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/xdr-for-software-dev.2220838/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/xdr-for-software-dev.22... [2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/07/27Apple-Unveils-New-27-inch-LED-Cinema-Display/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/07/27Apple-Unveils-New-2... [3] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-debuts-new-apple-mid-market-display.2235940/post-28555359 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...
• h2odragon 6y ago
  That's a lot of words to say that vector fonts suck for less than 24 px sizes. use bitmaps; there's lots of them to mitigate that problem. It was not that long ago that 640x480 was a screen and it sucked but things got done. My last (almost) 2k CRT last just long enough that i could afford a 4k LCD when it died. I'm pleased with a pair of these but once MOAR PIXELS become affordable i'll buy them.
• draw_down 6y ago
  I recently bought a Mac Mini and a display not made by Apple. This is the first time I've used a display not made by Apple in a long time, and boy is it not good. And I didn't cheap out, I thought I was getting a decent one, I read reviews and bought the one that was supposed to be good. Plainly, it looks like fucking shit. Of course Apple is not the only one capable of making decent displays, but the baseline is surprisingly awful. People just use these things all day, it's amazing. For me, it isn't a big deal because this is not my main computer, I don't use it for hours at a time. There's a line out there nowadays that hardware is amazing and software quality is in the gutter. I think they're still more closely matched than that, unfortunately.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  That's a great, comprehensive article! But I'm old, and most of the effort is wasted on me. What I need, is real estate. I have that. I use an ultrawide (5120 X 1440) monitor, broken into two screens (3440 X 1440, 1680 X 1440). Works great.
• dragosmocrii 6y ago
  This post is from the author of Fira Code, a font with ligatures that is incredibly pleasant to use. Highly recommend to give it a try if you haven't already! Shameless plug: I mentioned this as my favorite font for code editors in my blog post https://dragoshmocrii.com/my-favorite-tools-resources-for-day-to-day-software-development/ https://dragoshmocrii.com/my-favorite-tools-resources-for-da...
  • rocky1138 6y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up. Personally, I'm not a huge ligature fan in my code as my eyes tend to go directly to them instead of the code I want to read. It's great that Fira Code comes with a non-ligature version.
    • dragosmocrii 6y ago
      You're welcome! I can see how that could be a distraction for some. Personally, I enjoy the aesthetics. And as a bonus, I always get people intrigued when I show someone the code with this font that they never saw before. Nonetheless, in my opinion it's still an awesome monospace font even without the ligatures.
  • cannam 6y ago
    Fira Code is a big job (with so many ligatures) and working on it obviously takes great care, but let's not pretend that the same author is responsible for the font as a whole - unless you know something about Fira Mono that I don't?
• nsxwolf 6y ago
  I’m not willing to give up my 3840x1600 ultrawide. That real estate is now non-negotiable to me. So to improve the dpi I’ll need 7680x3200, and at 120hz I don’t think that’s happening any time soon.
  • drcross 6y ago
    Same. I'm at 7680x2160 pixels but over two 24 inch screens at 60hz. Once you get used to it you won't go back.
  • JohnBooty 6y ago
    Same here. For coding work, I almost don't even see how it's worth discussing -- sheer real estate is going to win for me, every single time. I say "almost" because I've been doing this for nearly 25 years and I've learned that other coders have shockingly diverse preferences and styles. But still. Give me IPS, give me bucketloads of real estate. Everything else is secondary.
  • deepspace 6y ago
    Agree, I use a 3840x2160 43" 16:9, which gives a 'low' density of around 100ppi, but I have absolutely no trouble reading the smallest text. There is no way that giving up the real estate would be worth an arbitrary increase in density.
  • ptomato 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm at 5120x1440 on a 49" ultrawide, and I'm not really interested in ever going back to a multi-monitor setup to get the same amount of real estate.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    It might be sooner than you think. 8K screens are easily available, 8K 120Hz screens have had working development versions for a while, and slightly cutting the height to 3200 means that you can fit the data into a single displayport 1.4 connection, using graphics cards that are already out.
• kirstenbirgit 6y ago
  The "120hz dance" reminds me of my "drag my 2 external monitors around in System Preferences every time I dock my MacBook, otherwise they switch places"-dance. It's amazing that all these display bugs still exist when Apple has presumably invested so much into their $6000 Pro Display. Dear Apple: Why not spend a little time making the software work, too?
• fossuser 6y ago
  "Now, it might be tempting to use, for example, 1.5× scaling. That would give you an equivalent of 2560×1440 logical pixels, which, you might think, is much better. This is not how you should use it! The idea of a 4k monitor is NOT to get more pixels but to get the pixel-perfect, high-density UI rendering. Otherwise, a normal 1440p display would work better. A simple rule to remember: pixel alignment outweighs everything else. 1440p display is better at displaying 1440p content than 2160p display is at it." I like this idea in theory, but I disagree with it in practice. I use two vertical 4k displays (specifically: Dell U2720Q) and I use them at the native resolution. This is because I want IntelliJ to take up an entire vertical display where I can see a lot of code without having to scroll. I can also divide the other display into two halves (horizontal line, one window on top and one on bottom - I use a third party app from the macOS app store called magnet for this). I can appreciate the smooth fonts, but the screen real estate is more valuable. I guess all of this is to say that the best option for me would be an 8k display at 2x scaling. A 4k display at 1080p though isn't worth the trade-off (I'll take lower quality text for the additional space). They do say right after that that using the 4k display at native is also fine, so maybe it's not an issue?
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  Any suggestions that are not over 500 dollars?
  • josho 6y ago
    I have an LG ultrafine 5k, and a cheap BenQ 4k. The difference is night and day. I hate the BenQ* and will dump it as soon a I can. My suggestion is to hold off until you can save up and buy one of the suggested displays when it's in your budget. * The BenQ has a matte finish which effectively blurs everything, e.g. it's like it reduces the resolution by 10-20%. The colors are not accurate to my macbook display, despite trying to color calibrate. The brightness is dimmer as well, or looses contrast if I make it bright. Built-in speakers sound awful and volume cannot be controlled by software. I could go on.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      1200 feels like a lot to spend on a monitor.
      • josho 6y ago
        Agreed. I should have also mentioned that I bought my LG as a refurbished unit which made the purchase easier to stomach.
• kazinator 6y ago
  I'm currently working from home on a 14-year-old ViewSonic VA902b. 19", 1280x1024, 75 Hz. It was a freebie from a folded startup. This exactly matches monitors I used in the more distant past, like NCD X/Window terminals: 19", 1280x1024. This form factor basically determines what is the ideal pixel size for most work. Basically, 1280 is about the right number of pixels for the angle of vision subtended by the display when viewed at the intended distance.
  • kazinator 6y ago
    At work (I remember the place well!) I have a pair of 1920x1024's. What size? Not sure. I rotated them 90 degrees, so there are two vertical panes of 1024x1920, side by side, making a 2048x1920 area. Approximately square is the most productive size. When we're working with text, be it code or prose, the height of it is unlimited, but the width isn't. So it ends up in multiple columns. Books are mostly oblong (taller than they are wide), but that's only if we think of them in their closed state. An typical open book is typically a bit wider than it is tall (but not greatly so), and you have two columns of text (the two pages). That open book geometry is an awful lot like my rotated monitor setup, isn't it. Until I rotated the monitors into this configuration, I was consistently just using one and ignoring the other. Moreover, ironically, using virtual desktops! I keep virtual desktops as large as 4x4. I would rather pane among virtual desktops with hot keys than turn my head between two excessively wide monitors placed side by side. People made remarks about my disuse of the second monitor, which prompted me to come up with a good way of using it.
• cannam 6y ago
  I came to the comments expecting lots of (irrelevant, I know) complaints about the painfully bright yellow background of the article - but nobody has mentioned it yet. Is it serving different colours to different people, or am I unusually sensitive to this colour? I found the page unreadable without switching to reader mode.
  • Krasnol 6y ago
    I have the same issue. It was painful to look at.
• WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Is it wrong that I'm at 720p 120hz still?
• asadkn 6y ago
  I have the same opinion as the author here. When I buy a 4k monitor, it's generally for the higher PPI. There's just less eye strain for me reading less pixelated fonts. Personal sweet spot me in terms of pleasant readability is: 4k 24" @ 200% scale (so same screen estate as 1080p) or 5k 27" @ 200% scale (same screen estate as 1440p).
• ashton314 6y ago
  Nice article. But for a post griping about illegibility of bad character rendering, why did they decide to make the background this egg-yolk yellow? I'd prefer a white background to that mess. Is there some reason why they chose yellow?
• speeder 6y ago
  I still use a CRT, because features I want are still ludicrous expensive in newer tech (although they are getting cheaper over time). 1. Arbitrary resolutions, great to run old software and games, even better to run new games at lower resolution to increase performance. 2. Arbitrary refresh rates. 3. Zero (literally) response time. 4. Awesome color range (many modern screens still are 12bit, meanwhile silicon graphics had a CRT screen in 1995 that was 48bit) 5. No need to fiddle with contrast and brightness all the time when I switch between a mostly light or mostly dark content, for example I gave up on my last attempt to use flat panel because I couldn't play Witcher 3 and SuperHot one after the other, whenever I adjusted settings to make one game playable the other became just splotches (for example the optimal settings for Witcher 3 made SuperHot become a almost flat white screen, completely impossible to play). 6. For me, reading raster fonts on CRT gives much less eyestrain and is more beautiful than many fonts that need subpixel antialias on flat panels. 7. Those things are crazy resilient, I still have some working screens from 80286 era (granted, the colors are getting weird now with aging phosphors), while some of my new flatpanels failed within 2 years with no repair possible.
  • strictnein 6y ago
    What CRT(s) are you using?
    • speeder 6y ago
      My personal workstation has a Samsung Syncmaster that I don't have model number available now. The maximum resolution is around what people call 2k, but 60hz, that I don't like. My current resolution is 1600x1200 75hz.
      • stordoff 6y ago
        Reminds me of a Dell CRT I used to use - 1600x1200@80Hz, and 21" IIRC. Every monitor I've had until fairly recently has felt like a compromise in some way compared to it, but taking a CRT to university was a non-starter. HD-DVDs playing on my Xbox 360 looks looked glorious on it (Xbox 360 supported 1600x1200 output, as did some games IIRC, and any widescreen content would just get letterboxed.
• the_af 6y ago
  The technical details are all right (or seem right to me, anyway), but this is too opinionated for my liking. No, you do not need a 4K monitor for software development. Some people might like them, some won't. [edit/clarification: someone rightfully pointed out that nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor. I was unclear here: I meant "some people won't need them" more than "dislike them"] This sounds like when Jeff Atwood started that fad that if you didn't have three external monitors (yes, three) then your setup was suboptimal and you should be ashamed of yourself. No. Just no. The best developers I've known wrote code with tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays. They didn't think it was an impediment. Now I'm typing this on one of these displays, and it's terrible and I hate it (I usually use an external 1080p monitor), but it's also no big deal. A 1080p monitor is enough for me. I don't need a 4K monitor. I like how it renders the font. We can argue all day about clear font rendering techniques and whatnot, but if it looks good enough for me and many others, why bother?
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I have a hard time using three monitors effectively, so that in the end they are distracting for me. Probably you need some particular personality tics to make proper use of them.
    • filoleg 6y ago
      My personal way of organizing 3 monitors: 1. Main screen. For the code editor, intense web browsing, etc. 2. Secondary screen. For debugging visuals (since I work on web stuff, it usually hosts a Chromium window; for a mobile dev, I imagine it would be an emulator/simulator), documentation referencing (with the code editor open on the main screen), etc. 3. Third screen. For all comms-related things: MS Teams/Outlook/Discord/etc. I didn't mention terminal, because I prefer a quake-style sliding terminal. For a lot of devs, I imagine that having a terminal on their secondary screen permanently would work great as well. P.S. Not that long ago, I realized that the physical positioning of monitors matters a lot (to me, at least) as well. I used to have 2 of them in landscape orientation side-by-side and one in portrait orientation to the side. It was fine, but didn't feel cohesive, and I definitely felt some unease. Finally got a tall mounting pole, and now I have the landscape oriented monitors one on top of each other instead of side-by-side (with the rest of the setup being the same). That was a noticeable improvement to me, as it felt like things finally clicked perfectly in my head.
• JohnBooty 6y ago
  I found this article utterly baffling. The author clearly knows their stuff, having created Fira Code, but my experiences couldn't be more different. I spend most of my days in a text browser, text editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving letters. So I optimize my setup to showing really, really good letters. I certainly appreciate how nice text looks on a high DPI display. But for coding purposes!? I don't find high DPI text more legible... unless we're talking really tiny font sizes, smaller than just about anybody would ever use for coding. And there's a big "screen real estate" penalty with high DPI displays and 2X scaling. As the author notes, this leaves you with something like 1440×900 or 1920x1080 of logical real estate. Neither of which is remotely suitable for development work IMO. But at least you can enjoy that gorgeous screen and pixel-crisp fonts. Otherwise, why would you buy a retina screen at all? It's not like you really have the option on Macs and many other higher-end laptops these days. And I am buying a computer to do some work, not admire the beautiful curves of a nice crisp font. So anyway, for me, I chose the Dell 3818. 38", 3840 x 1600 of glorious, low-resolution text. A coder's paradise. For purposes of software development, I won't really be interested until 8K displays become affordable and feasible. As the author notes, they integer scale perfectly to 2560×1440. Now that would rock.
  • JohnBooty 6y ago
    What's with the downvotes? HN is turning into Slashdot or Reddit, and that's not a good thing. I clearly stated my point. Maybe you disagree. However, the downvote button is not a "disagree" button. It's for posts that actively detract from the discussion. We need some kind of meta-moderation to ensure frivolous downvoters lose their downvote privileges.
    • ascar 6y ago
      I personally agree that the downvote button should be reserved for low quality comments rather than disagreement and that the diverse and high-quality comments are what makes this site and community awesome. Unfortunately neither the FAQ nor the Guidelines state anything about how to use the vote buttons. So how should HN users know when to use them? Is there even consent anymore (or ever has been?) that downvotes should not be used for disagreement? How did I form the opinion that downvotes should be reserved for low quality rather than disagreement? Somehow along the lines of contributing enough to this site to reach enough karma to downvote. Maybe the guidelines should add a section on how to vote. On the other hand, how can this really be enforced? It's a sad thing. I also stopped posting opinions that might trigger disagreement from a large majority. However, the guidlines clearly state: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• mcny 6y ago
  I bought a 1080p 27" HP 27yh for under USD 100 last Black Friday. I thought my monitor would be squarely middle of the pack but turns out it is barely above 80 ppi Display size: 23.53" × 13.24" = 311.5in² (59.77cm × 33.62cm = 2009.68cm²) at 81.59 PPI, 0.3113mm dot pitch, 6657 PPI²
  • the_af 6y ago
    The most important thing here: does your new monitor look good for you? Do you like how it renders graphics/text/whatever-you-use-it-for? If so, please disregard articles like TFA. They are trying to convince you of something you, by definition, don't need.
    • mcny 6y ago
      Yes, the monitor looks fine. It is connected to an old Dell Optiplex 390 with an i3-2100 and 8 GB of memory. I don't watch movies or play video games on it or anything. It is basically a glorified terminal for me to citrix/remote desktop to work. I've found my off-brand (Aukey) "blue" mechanical keyboard has been a greate improvement in my quality of life though (even though it is not very ergonomic). It is funny how when I started using Visual Studio around 2008 I didn't have a 1920x1080 monitor and I wanted to see all the panels and it was so painful. Right now, my biggest pain point is my horrible Internet (Wi-Fi) connection. It is especially painful because I move my mouse or type something and nothing appears on the display and I don't know whether the remote computer is slow or my network connection is crapping out again. Almost feels like I am whining about a non-issue because even fifteen years ago, I was on a dial-up "soft" modem and it would have been unthinkable to get pretty much live full 1080p remote desktop.
• tjoff 6y ago
  Strongly disagree. Any subpixel rendering on low-resolution displays must be disabled. Otherwise you get color noise and blurry text. Pixelated fonts are not bad. It is fine on HIDPI displays though because it isn't as prominent there and the effect actually works. Instead of high resolution pick a display with a decent aspect ratio. 16:9 is a joke. 16:10 is superior but not exactly a game changer. 3:2 is very rare, especially for desktop displays, and 4:3 is pretty much dead. We do not talk about 5:4.
• stephc_int13 6y ago
  I am using the same three Dell Monitors since 2008, they are still working perfectly (1680x1050) and in my opinion the text rendering with ClearText subpixel AA is excellent on both Sublime Text and VSCode. Of course, on macOS that's an other story, they didn't always had ugly fonts, but that's been the case since a very long time now and that prevented me to switch more than once (I still have use macOS in a VM to build for iOS)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • asdff 6y ago
    I'm not sure which version exactly, but somewhere along the line apple just ruined the experience for everyone without a retina laptop.
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  I've found my journey through tooling evolution to be fascinating (to me at least). When I was new and coding was slow, my worries were about so many other things (like how the language even worked) than even what text editor I used, let alone the monitor. As I became experienced, a lot of newbie problems went away and the next topmost problems emerged, leading to be obsessing over text editor, shortcuts, and even a multi-monitor setup with a vertical monitor. Then went through a minimalism phase where I was annoyed by how much time I was spending maintaining my tools rather than using them, so gone went almost all of that. Just one giant monitor and VSCode for better or worse (mainly because it does all six languages I use well enough). I'm now at a phase of thinking, "who are all these people who do so much coding in a day that these things matter?" because reading and writing code is maybe.... 35% of my job now? What I need to optimize for is reading/writing human text. And that's where I currently am: figuring out how to optimize writing documentation/design/architecture docs, given how awful making and maintaining a sequence or block diagram is currently. My conclusion so far is that I expect my needs to continue to mutate. I do not believe they are "converging" and do not believe there is any sort of golden setup I will one day discover.
  • asdff 6y ago
    Some of my colleagues love a vertical monitor for writing and reading documents.
    • Waterluvian 6y ago
      I loved it too on a mac. When I switched companies and went to an Ubuntu-based laptop, trying to keep the whole monitor scenario working consistently was frustrating, so I dropped it.
      • imhoguy 6y ago
        Try `arandr`, you can design and save your perfect layout as bash script to promptly run at any time.
      • andrewzah 6y ago
• platz 6y ago
  I was thinking about a 4k, but i'm not sure I will know how to get everything to run at 2x scale, on both windows and linux. Is this hard to do? Caveats?
  • ComputerGuru 6y ago
    It’s the default under both Windows 10 and Gnome 3 for hi-dpi displays. In fact, it’s near impossible to get fractional dpi working across the board on Gnome 3.
    • platz 6y ago
      I use i3 but I'm sure there are Nvidia settings to control the x display somehow
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ComputerGuru 6y ago
        I'm not sure how, but GTK3 applications violate the layers and are not affected by the nVidia setting. I think it's because nVidia sets a fake Xorg resolution (e.g. twice your actual) but GTK3 sees through that and uses its own internal dpi setting. I also presume this would be the case regardless of whether Gnome 3 is your DE/WM or not.
• chrismorgan 6y ago
  Concerning the smoothing, I presume this is macOS’s glyph dilation. pcwalton reverse engineered it in order to replicate it in Pathfinder (so that it can render text exactly like Core Text does), concluding that the glyph dilation is “min(vec2(0.3px), vec2(0.015125, 0.0121) * S) where S is the font size in px” (https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560). Fun times. Trouble is, people then get used to macOS’s font rendering, so that (a) they don’t want to turn it off, because it’s different from what they’re used to, and (b) start designing for it. I’m convinced this is a large part of the reason why people deploy so many websites with body text at weight 300 rather than 400, because macOS makes that tolerable because it makes it bolder. Meanwhile people using other operating systems that obey what the font said are left with unpleasantly thin text.
  • torb-xyz 6y ago
    I tried turning off smoothing and frankly the text was uncomfortably thin to read. I guess maybe their font should just be bolder by default so you don't need the glyph dilation to compensate.
    • tonsky 6y ago
      You get used to it after few days
    • chrismorgan 6y ago
      I didn’t actually know you could turn it off before today! I’ve never had a Mac, I’m used to FreeType and Windows font rendering. I have a vague feeling that Macs also have somewhat different gamma treatment from other platforms, which would be likely to contribute to thickness perception.
    • kccqzy 6y ago
      I totally agree. In Leopard that font smoothing preference wasn't a checkbox, but a drop-down menu specifying how much font smoothing. If you select "Strong" you get a result that looks even bolder than normal. Even when a website is using an extraordinarily thin font, this setting makes it readable. Apple replaced the drop down menu with a checkbox in Snow Leopard, but the underlying functionality wasn't removed until Catalina. Naturally I was very disappointed after my upgrade to Catalina because all text looked too skinny to me.
• adamch 6y ago
  Wow. He was right. I just changed my 15 inch Macbook Pro scaling away from default and WOW the text is clear. I also just turned my second monitor onto 144hz and WOW the animations are fast. My work from home setup just got significantly better.
• eqtn 6y ago
  i have a 4k 27" paired with a thinkpad. On ubuntu with gnome there is a huge performance dip on x11 with fractional scaling turned on. So i use this at 1x with font scaling of 1.25x.
• laurentdc 6y ago
  I don't know. Text is important to me, but high refresh rate is much more. Even scrolling text or dragging windows around at >120 Hz is a game changer. Going back to the MBP display gives me instant headache until I re-adapt. It's hard to describe, it's like all of a sudden everything has a very distracting input lag. Now I just need to wait for a 4k 144Hz IPS that can be driven via MBP (or just get what's on the market and run eGPU)
  • JohnBooty 6y ago
    At the end of the article, the author mentions the Acer Nitro XV273K, which Macs can drive at 4K@120hz (though you have to jump through a hoop in the Displays prefs on each boot)
  • tonsky 6y ago
    4k can be driven by Mac at 120Hz, but the mac has to be new enough (2018+ is my guess, based on thunderbolt 3 upgrade in 2018) and have a discrete graphics card.
• 0-_-0 6y ago
  I have the same monitor as the author (Acer Nitro XV273K) and it's simply amazing with VSCode. It makes working from home a very pleasant experience, I'm not looking forward to going back to the office and a 1080p monitor... Not to mention how good games look at 4K 120 fps.
• notatoad 6y ago
  this all seems like a lot of hassle to go through for some slightly smoother font edges. i like high res and high refresh rates and all that other good stuff, but i'd rather have slightly uglier fonts and not have to do an arcane dance every time i plug in a screen - i'm pretty sure that erases any negligible productivity benefits you might get from a better display.
• s9w 6y ago
  My take on having used quite a variety of displays: 1440p with a high (120, 144 etc) refresh rate is the way to go. With 4K you can lose a lot of performance especially since they are often paired with integrated graphics. Also what's the point of a higher pixel density when it's higher than you can resolve? Meaning if you have to zoom that's a sign that you get nothing more from increasing resolution. Also despite claims to the contrary, a lot of software is still not well suited for 4k resolutions. High refresh rates are completely underrated as it's at the same time a meme but also a widespread false belief that human eyes have some kind of limit that is being satiated by your 60hz displays. Scrolling code on 144hz is smooth. Bonus point that isn't mentioned in the article: HDR is a meme, don't buy into that crap. Also: CRTs are criminally underrated and still unfairly judged. We lost something from that era. Colors, black levels, subjective image quality and input lag have still not recovered from the peak of display technology in the year 2000 or so.
  • cthalupa 6y ago
    >Bonus point that isn't mentioned in the article: HDR is a meme, don't buy into that crap. I'd wager more people are going to notice the difference between HDR and SDR than they would 4k vs 1080p. It is by far the biggest picture quality upgrade I've seen since going from SD to HD. The problem is HDR sucks on LCDs, so it's largely useless on PC. FALD isn't enough to limit the halos, even with a ton of zones. I own the PG27UQ mentioned in this article and I hate it. I'll probably just buy an LG CX 48" for my next monitor.
    • s9w 6y ago
      I mean sure HDR is impressive, but for me it's always like 3D movies.. nice for 5 minutes and then you see the flaws. Dimming zones are a really crappy way to get around the fundamental display tech limitation like you said. But OLED has insane problems with burn-in. They officially don't exist but there are endless reports of this happening. Although I can't speak with high confidence about that. In general the major problem with non-OLED displays are the black levels. Going for HDR was a silly PR move.
      • 6y ago
• ericls 6y ago
  I've seen people making great code and great product on a 1280*800 monitor. And sometimes working with limitations is the fun itself.
• rob74 6y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, if I am going to buy a 4K monitor, I would probably go for a >40 inch one to be able to fit a lot of text on it rather than say a 32-inch Hi-DPI monitor. With subpixel rendering, fonts look good enough for me even on Lo-DPI displays. I'm just afraid that with Hi-DPI becoming more and more common, subpixel rendering will eventually disappear...
  • XCSme 6y ago
    Doesn't a 4k monitor fit the same amount of information whether it's 24" or 40", if scaling stays the same?
    • rob74 6y ago
      Yeah, but if you are going to use the same scaling for the UI at 24" as you would at 40", your eyes might start bleeding :) ...my Android smartphone also has the same resolution (actually even slightly higher) as the monitor I'm using to type this, but I wouldn't dream to use the same scaling for both.
• new_realist 6y ago
  I have an 8K monitor, but unfortunately it’s unusable with AMD graphics cards (amdgpu) under Linux. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers have worked like a champ.
• komali2 6y ago
  > Well, the split does not exist anymore. Since not that long ago (yes, I’m too lazy to check) you can have both! You can have a 4k monitor that runs on 120 Hz. In fact, that discovery was the main motivation for this article. With... good color gamut? Without ghosting? If so I want to buy that monitor today.
• testfoobar 6y ago
  Anyone else gets eye strain from retina macbooks? Everything looks too sharp. The sharp contrast between the tiny pixels is visually perfect, but seemingly the perfection is what is causing me eye strain. Or perhaps it is some other effect. Its just that when I use my retina macbook for hours, my eyes hurt. In particular, it is a relief to go back to a older non-retina macbook that I use for some minor projects. The non-retina macbook seems less visually taxing on my eyes. I would appreciate any ideas.
• akersten 6y ago
  It's interesting to see an argument against ClearType/font smoothing, but not anti-aliasing in general. They both change the font from what the designer intended, so why is font smoothing so much worse? I actually disable anti-aliasing in games on my 4K display - not just for performance, but because anti-aliasing genuinely isn't needed at that density. I think the author could go all the way here too, since after all, AA is just another crutch for low-density displays.
• skizm 6y ago
  Personally I can’t go back to a 60hz monitor at this point. So really can’t go to 4K until there is a reasonably priced 144hz monitor with low input lag and response times. I’m okay sacrificing color for speed (TN panels are okay with me).
• pkulak 6y ago
  The problem is that a little more can be waaay worse. You need to to double your pixels to avoid turning everything into a blurry mess, which means 200+ PPI. But there are literally no monitors like that not made by Apple. A 4K monitor at 32 inches is 138. No thank you. Gross. There actually are some 4K 22-inch monitors, but I don't want a 22-inch monitor. I'm just going to stick with my 1440p 27" monitor until someone can sell me something better.
• Aunche 6y ago
  I agree with other commenters that monitors are subjective, but I find it surprising that FAANG companies are so stingy when it comes to monitors. We get top of the line desktops and laptops, but rather mediocre monitors.
• jrockway 6y ago
  As an early adopter to monitor technology, I have to say that I consistently regret it. I got one of the first 4k mainstream monitors. I paid $3000 for it. This was back in the day when DisplayPort didn't really "do" 4k, so it was done by pretending it was two monitors internally. This broke EVERYTHING. For years, I struggled with Linux trying to treat two monitors as one big one (and putting new windows right on the border). Welp, they fixed that. But trying to treat two monitors as though it's one was completely impossible. I eventually got it to work by enabling a bunch of random features in the nVidia driver, that when enabled together triggered a bug that broke Xrandr, so everything thought I just had one monitor. (I could not, of course, add a second monitor.) Miraculously, they never fixed that bug. It worked for half a decade at least. (At some point in there I switched to Windows, which of course supported it perfectly because the driver was specifically hacked to detect that model number and do extra stuff.) Several years later, I wanted to get a monitor that supported more colors than sRGB. Big mistake! While inexpensive, I learned that NOTHING supports color spaces correctly. The Adobe apps do, but that's about it. Online image sharing services go out of their way to MODIFY the color space that you tag an image with, so there is no hope of anything ever showing the right colors unless you manually clip them to sRGB. Things like the Win32 API, CSS, etc. have no way to say what color space a color is encoded in, so there is no way to make the operating system display the right color. ("background-color: #abcdef" just means "set the color on the user's display to #abcdef", which is a completely meaningless thing to do unless your working colorspace is sRGB, and the user's monitor works in sRGB. It worked for years, but was never correct.) The worst thing is, nobody appears to care. ("It just makes colors more vibrant!" they'll tell you) Big mistake. Do not buy unless you never want to see a color as the author intended ever again. (I solved my photography colorspace problem by switching to black and white film. Take that, colors! You can't display them incorrectly if there aren't any!) The next thing I jumped on is high refresh rate. I waited until 144Hz IPS panels were affordable, and got one. It sure is better than 60Hz, which looks like a slideshow, but there are of course problems. The first is... it is pretty optimistic to think that an IPS panel will actually update at 144Hz. They do not. The result is blur. I run mine at 120Hz with ULMB (which basically strobes the backlight at the display update rate). That looks really good. There are some artifacts caused by the IPS display, and 120Hz is noticeably slow, but moving things sure are clear. You can pan a google map and read the labels as it moves. Try that right now on your 60Hz display, you can't do it! But because of IPS, at 144Hz without ULMB, you get a smooth mush. At 120Hz with ULMB, you can read moving content (like player names attached to people in an FPS, it is trippy the first time you use it). Having said that, it's bad for anything that doesn't render at 120Hz. Web browsers, games, CAD... great! Videos... AWFUL, just awful. On a 30/24Hz video, frames get strobed 4 or 5 times, and this causes your brain to think "hey, a slide show". (You can record the display with a high speed camera, and it will look completely different from what you see in real life. Darn brain, always messing things up.) Things like pans skip and jerk, as your brain tries to interpret the video stream as a series of <image 1> <black screen> <image 1> <black screen> <image 2> <black screen> ... instead of a smooth blend of <image 1> <image 2> ... You can post-process the video to "invent" frames in the middle, so your monitor displays new image data each time it strobes the backlight. I do this with mpv and it looks great. But if you watch video in a browser, you are out of luck. My TL;DR here is that buying any sort of fancy monitor is just going to make you very unhappy. You will learn everything in the world there is to know about color space math, pixel transition times, using high speed cameras to debug issues (what a time sink), how your brain processes moving images, etc. It won't make you any happier. It won't make you better at programming. If you play competitive games, get a TN 1080p 240Hz monitor, simply because that's what everyone else uses. Don't use it for anything except the game, because every second that you use it it will make you unhappy. But it's absolutely a joy to play a game on it. (Why 1080p and not 1440p? Guess who bought a 1440p 165Hz monitor. Not anyone that has ever contributed code to the game or played the game at a professional level. But I did! Guess who gets to live with the bugs.) If you are a programmer, just buy whatever. Every single monitor ever designed will make you unhappy. If you are a programmer who works with color, get yourself a good therapist. You will be meeting with them on a daily basis, and even then, you'll still be scarred for life. It's all about damage control at this point.
• alyandon 6y ago
  I'd possibly consider upgrading from my 2x Dell 2408WFP setup if modern IPS panels weren't such absolute garbage with respect to backlight bleed compared to the IPS panels made 15 years ago. Even my old laptops with IPS panels look better than newer ones. I was in the market for a laptop last year and returned 3 different laptops with IPS panel displays from 3 different manufacturers because every single one of them had backlight bleed that was so bad that it was plainly visible even in a well lit room. The last company pushed back trying to claim that that level of backlight bleed was considered "normal" but eventually refunded my purchase once I threatened to do a chargeback through my credit card company. Do there actually exist any companies anymore that produce decent monitors with minimal backlight bleed?
• morpheuskafka 6y ago
  Wow, I just turned off the font smoothing setting on my 4K monitor and the test is dramatically easier to read. Really surprised that Apple doesn't provide a better definition of this feature/turn it off on HiDPI displays.
• foobarian 6y ago
  All my life I had an obsession with more pixels. As kids we always envied the classmates with the highest resolution graphics cards and monitors. The pinnacle of my life at one point was the unnamed best CRT ever made which got up to 1280x1024, but then LCDs happened. My new pinnacle is a beautiful 32" IPS panel on a Benq 4k monitor. I don't care for the refresh rate jump from 60 to 120 as much as 30 to 60. But I absolutely insist on large panel area, and lots of pixels to fill it with, so I don't understand how the blog author can live with 27". This is basically programmer nirvana and I don't know what could make it better, maybe some kind of VR setup with similar PPI but I doubt it.
  • sneak 6y ago
    That's a pretty low ppi setup you describe. All of the retina iMacs are 27" 5k, so >200 ppi. A 27" 4k is 160ppi, and a bigger 4k is lower yet.
    • foobarian 6y ago
      Indeed. It could be my eyesight, but given a 4k monitor at 27" or 32", I prefer 32" because I can see the (equivalent) information better.
• dijit 6y ago
  I have been looking to upgrade my aging U2412m's for some time. But 16:10 is dead; so why bother? it might only be a little horizontal space but it's a huge difference to not have it. Thankfully recent laptops are returning to 16:10 (Macbook's and Dell XPS's) But monitors still do not seem to exist.
  • robertoandred 6y ago
    MacBooks never left 16:10, thank god...
    • dijit 6y ago
      I seem to recall my macbook (2011) being 16:9, but it turns out 1280x800 is actually 16:10! It seems you're right for the retinas and upwards too, that's heartening[0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/19/17027286/laptop-widescreen-aspect-ratio https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/19/17027286/l...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• asdff 6y ago
  4k monitors are still so much more expensive and have noticeable costs on laptop performance at least. When I got a macbook air with USB-C, I was initially planning on getting two 4k monitors. However, that would mean spending ~$500 to get a 27" monitor, $120 for a thunderbolt adapter than can drive both displays at their proper refresh rate, and >$200 if I wanted an adapter that can also charge the laptop. All told, that's the total price of the laptop just in periphery. I ended up going with a $30 usb-c adapter and some ~$100 dell 1080p screens, and I'm happy as a clam.
• the_cat_kittles 6y ago
  i got two of these for ~550. i really dont know what more you could want if you arent editing videos or photos or whatever: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Acer-KG1-28-Gaming-Monitor-4K-3840x2160-1ms-GTG-60-Hz-330nit-TN-AMD-Free-Sync/264481989120?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Acer-KG1-28-Gaming-Monitor-4K-3840x...
• xyst 6y ago
  Personally, my takeaways from this article are to disable font smoothing. I disabled it on my MBP and I like how the default fonts are rendered now. They appear less bright and more crisper. I haven't changed these settings on my MBP since I got it, so it's likely enabled by default. The rationale behind it makes sense in low resolution cases, but to have it enabled by default on rMBP doesn't make sense to me. However the recommendation to reduce the resolution scaling option is a no for me. The text is wayyyy too big for me and I lose out on the screen real estate.
  • asdff 6y ago
    I will say I just looked at my macbook air, haven't touched that setting myself and it is disabled by default in new catalina macs at least.
  • elondaits 6y ago
    That part of the article does not apply to my 13'' 2015 MBP... I checked and it already uses 2x resolution by default. Perhaps it applies to larger screens or newer models.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  My 5 years old iMac 5K 27" monitor is just fine, thank you. But lately I'm beginning to notice the effect of the brightness of modern displays in my eyes...
• zargon 6y ago
  I have been using my current home PLP setup for 10 years. Dell U3011 (2560x1600) in middle and Dell 2007FP (1200x1600) on the sides. Off and on I have looked for high dpi replacements, but never found anything suitable. At the beginning of the year, my U3011 started blanking out on me. As it became more frequent, I started shopping again. But wow, the monitor situation right now is sad. There are no high dpi monitors with enough vertical space. And since they're all at least as short as 16:9, they're unusable in portrait as well. I ended up repairing the U3011. It's going to have to last me a while. There's just no upgrade path.
• sdflhasjd 6y ago
  More than 5 years ago, I bought two 24" 4k monitors from Dell (UP2414Q), with a PPI of ~180 (and sitting over a foot away), they give me a retina experience with my desktop. They were an early product from Dell, so despite great picture quality, they are buggy and have large bezels. This week, one of them failed. While looking for a replacement, I was expecting the range of 24" "retina" displays to have improved somewhat. Surprisingly, it seems the opposite has happened. Dell no longer make an Ultrasharp range 24" monitor with 4k, everything is now 27". Although they do make a 'P' series equivalent, it's an old model released around the same time as my original ones, with similar bugs and early hardware (no 4k 60hz HDMI) 27" is sadly too large for me to fit two side-by-side on my desk (and even if they would fit, 27" is too large for my liking). Now I'm left struggling to find a replacement, I may have to live with downgrading to something like 120 PPI with a 2k (1440p) 25" display. It's sad that retina really hasn't caught on much in the desktop monitor space, we should really have 3k as a standard resolution for smaller desktop monitors.
  • zaphoyd 6y ago
    FYI: The Dell P2415Q does have 4K60hz over HDMI as long as you get one manufactured recently. They did a silent spec bump in 2017 or 2018 or so. I use a number of these and while they are still slightly buggy, I've found them much better in that department than the UP2414Q.
• Slartie 6y ago
  Regarding the "120Hz dance", which sure is ridiculous, the author could probably give the nice little tool "SwitchResX" a try. I adore that piece of software because it allowed me to force my MacBook to properly supply my Dell U2711, which is a 2560x1440 display, with an actual 2560x1440x60Hz signal over HDMI (which was important to me because I needed the DP port for something else). That older monitor has some kind of firmware bug or maybe it's a wrong profile in MacOS or whatever, which makes it advertise a maximum of 2560x1440x30Hz or 1920x1080x60Hz to the Mac when connected via HDMI (DP works fine out-of-the-box), effectively preventing me from choosing native resolution at maximum refresh rate. I haven't been able to make MacOS override this limitation in any way using the common OS-native tricks, but SwitchResX can somehow force any custom resolution and refresh rate to be used, and the monitor is apparently able to deal with it just fine, so I've been running this setup for years now with no complaints whatsoever. Also no manual work was ever needed after display disconnect/reconnect or MacOS reboot. I had problems once after a MacOS update, which required a SwitchResX update for it to be working again, but other than that I'm in love with this nifty low-level tool.
  • mthoms 6y ago
    I had a similar problem with an older MacBook that would only (officially) power my 4k display at 30Hz. SwitchResX was the magic solution to bring it up to 60Hz.
• lexicality 6y ago
  Alternatively, just make your text bigger? I use 120% zoom on a 1080p monitor and it looks great. Paying $900 so you can squint at tiny text a bit better seems silly to me...
  • cosmotic 6y ago
    It looks great to you but a lot of people think it looks blocky or blurry or both, and are willing to pay more to have what they prefer.
• arturb 6y ago
  As a web developer, I have Eizo ev2785 with 125% scaling and it worked fine so far. From code maintenance perspective, I noticed that if you feel that there isn't enough space on your screen, it might be the right time to refactor and split it to the smaller chunks: extract another view partial, class etc.
• starpilot 6y ago
  Missing from article are any specific productivity or health benefits that come from an upgrade to 4K. For a sane guide, check out the /r/monitors google doc link in https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/comments/h8vb4s/rmonitors_weekly_recommendation_thread_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/comments/h8vb4s/rmonitors_...
• brento 6y ago
  I need new eyes after viewing this website. I think yellow burned out my retinas!
• satvikpendem 6y ago
  I want to get a 240hz ultrawide personally, both for games and instead of having 3 separate monitors (I hate the bezels between them). Samsung is making a good one, 49 inches, HDR 1000, 240hz, and adaptive sync [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15396/sausng-odyssey-2020-monitors-g7-g9-up-to-240hz https://www.anandtech.com/show/15396/sausng-odyssey-2020-mon...
• johncalvinyoung 6y ago
  I hate the idea of scaling and blur, but I find I really like 6K-equivalent on my 27" 4K monitor at my desk (driven by a MBP below the monitor). And no, I don't have budget for a Pro Display XDR, as beautiful as it is. If I could get an IPS 6K panel for 15-2500, I'd save my pennies.
• HiddenCanary 6y ago
  The author mentions to go for a 120hz monitor. Is a 144hz one also sufficient?
• buserror 6y ago
  I think that it's a long article to just say that a 1) good 2) big screen, or two, or 3 is a good idea. The bigerrer, the beterrer. I wrote a lot of code on Mac classic format (512x342) using Monaco 9 -- it was great; next step was 640x480, and 800x600, and then (for a rather long time) 1024x768. It was still perfectly fine, as (at the time) Apple screens were some of the best, nice crisp, clear with good contrast. I didn't feel particularly handicapped because of the screen real estate, you just adapt to what you have. Now my main machine is Linux with 2*32" 4K screen side-by-side, and about 60cm from me. I use Liberation Mono 17pt as a terminal font, and 9pt is just microscopic on the screen. And guess what? I still wish I had a bit more screen space sometime! :-) One thing I always tell more junior developers who ask me about what the most valuable piece of information about programming in my whole career is: Get a good SCREEN, get a good KEYBOARD, and get a good CHAIR, the rest are just details. Oh, also, make sure the screen(s) are perpendicular to any window, and watch that posture! </walks off waving is cane in the air> :-)
• rkagerer 6y ago
  TLDR: Buy a high-end gaming monitor, and plug into GPU with modern connectivity... to make your fonts look better.
• kstenerud 6y ago
  He puts up some nice technical arguments, and I'm sure a 4k monitor is right for him, but really it comes down to what you're actually comfortable with. I stopped worrying about resolution the moment I got my first 19" (CRT) monitor. Resolution was high enough to fit as much text as I needed, and really that's all that ever mattered. I've used retina displays but I've never felt they make enough of a difference to matter. I've worked on 32" displays, and while they're nice, I've never felt like I'm missing real estate when I move back to a 1080p display. Font smoothing has never bothered me, but what DOES bother me is this trend towards lower contrast, and "flat UIs" that lack any differentiation between sections in the UI. Win95, while ugly by today's standards, was easy to read and follow. And the black-on-white text is something I miss dearly.
• mthoms 6y ago
  For those using JetBrains IDE's and MacOS: Try experimenting with the font rendering settings in the prefs. There's a "middle" option of "greyscale-only" text aliasing in addition to the regular off or on settings. Depending on your monitor, font choice, and personal preferences you might see an improvement by playing around with these. Anecdotally, when I had an older MBP with a weak integrated GPU, lowering the anti-aliasing setting to greyscale (or off) seeming to increase the responsiveness and framerate on my 4K display in JetBrains IDE's. It was particularly noticeable when scrolling.
• itnAAnti 6y ago
  I had a 34" 4K monitor in 2019, and it was a mess in Windows 10. I sold it and picked up an ultra-wide, 38" 3840x1600 (~109 PPI) and I couldn't be happier. I agree that a "good" monitor is a necessity, but I disagree with OP that "good" = 4K 120 Hz. With any legacy application, and even many modern ones, UIs were either fuzzy, or tiny, or a mix of the two, even with all of the Windows per-program custom high-DPI settings tweaked. The UX was not consistent enough to be enjoyable, so I ditched it.
  • amarshall 6y ago
    For what it’s worth, the “fuzzy” version is usually about what you’d be getting on a display if it wasn’t HiDPI. Also don’t forget to exclude the rarer, but still happens scenario where the UI is scaled twice for some reason, so everything is huge.
• hrayr 6y ago
  Well timed article for me. I'm looking to buy an external monitor to go along with my older (mid 2015) 15" MBP. I was searching hacker news and elsewhere for opinions last night. I got confused, frustrated and gave up. Today is no exception. The only thing I know is, I want a large hi-res monitor that is at least comparable to my laptop.
  • tonsky 6y ago
    4k 60Hz should work no problems. Last Macbook that didn’t supported it was 2012 retina.
• pmiller2 6y ago
  This is all very interesting. I've recently, and very seriously considered getting a medium sized UHDTV (say, 40-50") to use as a display. The purpose of this would mostly be to render very high resolution photos while keeping more of the image visible at full resolution than is possible on a smaller screen. Anybody actually gone and done this?
• neilobremski 6y ago
  And I suppose writers must have a Moleskine notebook and use clear penmanship? Hmm ...
• zzo38computer 6y ago
  Really the problem is they are using vector fonts; I use bitmap fonts in my xterm, and it is not as bad as the vector fonts used in Firefox. The text is not blurry if you are using bitmap fonts. How can I force Firefox and other programs to prefer bitmap fonts? (What I have tried, just results in no text being displayed at all.) (High DPI is probably useful if you are doing a lot of print previewing, though.)
  • GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Uncheck the checkbox "allow sites to use their own fonts", then Firefox will use configured fonts.
    • zzo38computer 6y ago
      I did that. But I still can't seem to configure it to use bitmap fonts. I got it to use bitmap fonts for the tab titles, the location bar, and the status bar, but it won't use bitmap fonts for anything else.
• zackees 6y ago
  Best screen experience is a 6-foot TV at 4k @ 60hz. This allowed me to move the screen back 6 feet. The result was an improvement of my eyesight (I'm near sighted) within 6 months.
• sbierwagen 6y ago
  >But even today you can peek into the future, if you have extra $4,000 to spare. This is Dell UP3218K, world’s first and only 8k monitor: Note that the UP3218K isn't the brightest monitor in the world. I've read some reviews that claim you need a darkened room to see the full color gamut.
  • tonsky 6y ago
    I don’t really understand the concerns about brightness. On my current display I work at 20% brightness, otherwise my eyes start to hurt.
• gautamcgoel 6y ago
  I use a 2k Dell monitor which I picked up for around $400 a few years ago. To me, this strikes a nice middle ground between high resolution and affordability/comparability.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  Huh, 4k screens have come down. I could replace this eight-year-old 24" 93dpi Dell screen with a 27" 183dpi HP screen for $540 (plus shipping). I think that's around what I paid for this one when it was new. (why that HP screen? First thing on Wirecutter's 'best monitors' list, which I think was how I chose the one I'm looking at right now.) I guess it'd be nice to turn off Illustrator's glitchy anti-aliased previews for good. But this monitor still works perfectly fine. Call me when I can get a color e-paper display with a 60hz or better refresh rate, I'm increasingly tired of staring into a giant light all the time.
• Androider 6y ago
  3840 x 1600 is the perfect resolution for programming in my opinion, and is now starting to become more widely available in 38" wide form factor (equivalent to a "normal" 32" but wider). At this size, you can finally comfortably have 2-3 normal-size windows side by side: your editor/IDE, your browser/app, and one third for documentation, without having to go multi-monitor. The 1600p vertical resolution is fantastic for coding. If you're interested in this size, LG 38WN95C is a great one just starting to become available that hits all the marks: Thunderbolt, 144HZ refresh rate (including G-Sync and Adaptive Sync), IPS panel (must) and looks "normal" without any gamer aesthetics or RGB lighting. Unfortunately it's going to be a very long time before we get high-dpi equivalents. 4K, which is frequently 1080p equivalent in terms of workspace, is just not doable after you've been using 1600p.
• slavoingilizov 6y ago
  This is a great article. Even if you disagree with the conclusion and recommendation, it shows what you need to look out for when buying a monitor. I had to go through a similar exercise recently. The DisplayPort / USB-C / Thunderbolt story is just insane. I was looking for a monitor to use with both MacOS and Windows. HDMI can't do 4k @ 60Hz, DisplayPort cables never tell you which version they support. I ended up with LG UHD 4K 27UL650, which I'm very happy with, but switching between Mac and Windows is still difficult, because this monitor only has 1 DisplayPort input. I've settled to using HDMI for Mac and 30Hz instead of switching cables all the time. Improvement in experience is very subjective but I agree with the author on everything except maybe the 120Hz.
  • city41 6y ago
    Have you considered a KVM switch? I really like mine. It allows up to four computers leaving me with two extras that sometimes come in handy (plugging in someone else's laptop or sometimes I connect my Raspberry Pi on).
    • slavoingilizov 6y ago
      Which one are you using?
      • city41 6y ago
        I can't find the one I bought anymore. Seems they may have discontinued it. It was basically the same as this one, except with 4 ports instead of 2 https://www.amazon.com/JideTech-Keyboard-Security-Education-Conference/dp/B07C5G1XFJ/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=JideTech+KVM+Switch+HDMI+4+Port+USB+Keyboard+Video+Mouse&qid=1593621353&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/JideTech-Keyboard-Security-Education-... FWIW, the first one I got was defective, but the replacement has worked like a champ.
• tarsinge 6y ago
  Wow just followed the steps for my retina Macbook and I love it, my thanks to the author.
• hinkley 6y ago
  I recently bought a Thunderbolt 3 monitor as what I have vowed is my 'Last Thunderbolt 3 purchase (except replacing broken things)'. I'm holding out for Thunderbolt 4, when I can (hopefully) treat my wiring topology like USB instead of daisy chained all to hell and back. Because of this, I looked at good qualities in a secondary monitor that were survivable on a primary. For instance sound quality and real estate are less important, raising the priority of PPI, color gamut, and VESA mount.
• rubatuga 6y ago
  Good to know details: In 2018, as the article says, macOS stopped using subpixel antialiasing across all Macs. On low DPI screens however, the loss of subpixel antialiasing made fonts look blurrier, and look smaller and less dark. This occurs on high DPI screens as well, albeit to a lower degree. To bring low DPI screens up to the same level of "darkness", the behaviour of "Use font smoothing when available" was changed to simply makes fonts bolder. This is a plus for people who have difficulty reading the screen. Furthermore, the author seems to have an obsession around "pixel-crisp" fonts, during the section about the correct resolution for your display. What macOS does is render at 2x resolution, then scale down the image to the monitor's native resolution. Looking back, this was an amazing choice made by Apple, and has allowed for an amazingly bug-free high DPI experience. Even today, Linux and Windows have serious issues with high DPI. 99% of macOS users don't notice that their desktop is not running at native resolution, nor would they care. If the author just focused on monitors, this article would be a lot better. Also, 120Hz might be nice for a desktop, but if you are plugging in a laptop, you will notice your power consumption double. For battery life, choose a 60Hz monitor.
• yc-kraln 6y ago
  Checking in with 2xWQHD @ 144hz. Definitely invest in a good set of monitors...
• gowld 6y ago
  This person recommends 3 monitors, NONE of which appear to offer adjustments that are critical for ergonomic health. I don't find this perspective trustworthy. I'm not going to sacrifice my spine for slightly fancier characters.
• city41 6y ago
  I have the Samsung CHG90, which is 3840x1080. It's literally a 4k TV cut in half horizontally. It enables me to very comfortably display three windows side by side. More than anything I have ever bought, this monitor has improved my productivity. They now have a newer version that is 5120x1440. The trade off is this monitor is very low res, about 100ppi. I don't know anything about how the various OSes render text. But I have found that by far, Ubuntu renders the text the best. Text in both OSX and Windows looks absolutely dreadful on this monitor, but Ubuntu is really quite pleasant. Which is not at all what I was expecting.
• foolmeonce 6y ago
  I'll upgrade when color E-Ink is ready, has a good spectrum and has 20" for a (near?) reasonable price.. I'm not sure who needs a high DPI Lite Brite, but it's certainly not relevant at my age.
  • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    I would LOVE to code outside on a Color E-Ink display. It's fairly impractical to work outside with modern screens.
• mv4 6y ago
  I work with documents a lot, and my current preference is two ultra-wide monitors, allowing me to have 4 windows side-by-side.
• orestis 6y ago
  Do all that, of course. But when you’re writing applications for other people, go buy a shitty middle of the pack laptop, resolution 1280x768, with the windows start bar and menu bars eating like 150pixels of that, and try to use your software there.
  • tln 6y ago
    Good call. I use this https://github.com/mattkersley/Responsive-Design-Testing https://github.com/mattkersley/Responsive-Design-Testing too, modified with 1366 x 768 as one of the three "key sizes" to design for.
  • godelski 6y ago
    While we're on it, make sure this is a low end laptop in terms of components too. Make sure your application is usable. No one needs a chat client that eats several gigs of RAM and a significant portion of your CPU.
    • disposedtrolley 6y ago
      Yeah, more teams need to do this and consider performance on low-end devices to be a feature. When Android Kit Kat was under development, the team used nerfed Nexus 4's to simulate a low end Android phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_KitKat#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_KitKat#Development
    • xigency 6y ago
      Throttle your internet connection or add simulated latency too!
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    For web, try a 25-dollar or 5-year-old phone.
• gauchojs 6y ago
  Conclusion after reading tens of comments here: no way to know if I'm young enough for 27" 4k (which is finally affordable in my country) or if I should go with 2560x1440 at 24", which feels outdated in 2020... And that isn't a great step over my working 22" 10-year old 22" FHD Dell. How long until we have affordable 'Macbook like' crispness as 22" or 27"? (Also Linux still sucks with fractional scaling.)
  • fenesiistvan 6y ago
    I am on a beach, read 500 comments, totally confused about what monitor to buy :)
• alkonaut 6y ago
  4K at 200% scaling feels wrong for a big monitor like a 27". The desktop looks like a 1080 desktop. And if the monitor is to be used as a gaming monitor too then 4K is again wrong because even with the best graphics cards, 4K@120 is out of reach. The perfect 27” monitor for me would be one that has 5K@120 because at 200% scale you’d get a desktop that looks “1440-size” and when gaming you can run half resolution at 1440@120 with a decent graphics card. These don’t exist though, at least not as IPS I think, so I’ll stick with my 1440@144 for a while longer.
  • metafunctor 6y ago
    The LG UltraFine is a 27-inch 5K (5120 x 2880) IPS display. The maximum refresh rate is 60 Hz, so not the best for gaming; but it's designed for a Mac anyway. I've had a couple for over three years now and it's the best display for a Mac I know of, outside of Pro Display XDR, I suppose.
    • alkonaut 6y ago
      Yeah an alternative is always to just keep the screen I have now (1440@144) for gaming, and simply get a second screen for work with High DPI. Seems silly to get a 5K@120Hz mega expensive screen to play games at half resolution. I'll buy a bigger desk instead.
• epx 6y ago
  I opted for spending money in a 34" 21:9 display which is just 1080p in vertical axis, and it was not cheap.
• edanuff 6y ago
  Echoing some of the comments here, part of this depends on whether you’re using MacOS or not and what else you’re using the monitors for. I use 4K monitors for both Mac and Windows and I stick close to the Apple recommended HiDPI approach which means your 4K display isn’t larger than 24” and your 5K display isn’t larger than 27”. YMMV but most people who have a bad 4K experience are trying to do 4K at 27” or greater. Due to DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth limitations, the 5K 27” monitor market never got - great range of options. You either have the Thunderbolt-based monitors that are mostly for use in the Mac ecosystem (and only some Mac models) or a few expensive dual-cable DisplayPort 1.2 options or DisplayPort 1.4 options with an assortment of compatibility issues.
• mister_hn 6y ago
  Using a 4K monitor with Gnome Shell and scaling 2x. I find it very pleasant for my eyes
• ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Wow $2000 USD for a monitor? I thought I was pushing it yesterday when I got a new 27' monitor for $200. I don't think as programmers we need anything more than a 27' inch 1080p. What am I missing? I don't think it's worth the expense. On another note, that mustard yellow as the background color is an eyesore.
  • huy-nguyen 6y ago
    $200 is quite cheap for a 27” monitor. A good non-gaming 1440p 27” costs about $300-400 not on sale.
    • mcny 6y ago
      > $200 is quite cheap for a 27” monitor. A good non-gaming 1440p 27” costs about $300-400 not on sale. I think grandparent post meant 1920x1080. Depending on your needs (no adaptive refresh rate, no color accuracy, only one HDMI input and one VGA input, no rotating stand, no vesa mount), you can get a 27" monitor for about USD 100. For most programmers, two 27" 1080p monitors ought to be sufficient. I'm just amazed I never realized that a 27" 1080p monitor is barely over 80 pixels per inch. I'd imagine that doubles to a respectable 100+ ppi with 1440p monitors but I suspect it isn't worth paying more than twice the price in my context.
      • gnulinux 6y ago
        I have a single 1080p 13'' monitor (my old MacBook Pro) and that's sufficient for me. I seriously don't understand what people do with that extra space. This is enough to see 3 horizontally split files open on Emacs. And you can double it (6) if you also have vertical split, but then page becomes too small. 1080 27'' sure sounds nice, but why do you think we need two 27'' monitors?
    • ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
      I got it on amazon. It has good reviews. I’m convinced it’s more than enough for coding.
• bfung 6y ago
  Longest ad I’ve read in a long time! Well done and done right! =)
• x3sphere 6y ago
  I wouldn’t get a 4K display since most of them are still only 60Hz. Yeah, you don’t need a higher refresh rate to program but it makes daily desktop use SO much more pleasant for me. There are some high refresh rate 4K 27”s but those are pretty expensive.
  • TacoToni 6y ago
    Im personally waiting for a good 4k HDR > 60Hz monitor that is USB-C. Would be perfect for gaming and office use plugging in my Mac & PC.
• boltzmann_brain 6y ago
  > 2020 > using 1080p monitor c'mon now
• young_unixer 6y ago
  The monitor I want: - 1440p - IPS panel - size between 23 and 27 inches, ideally 24 or 25 - flatscreen, 16:9, normal monitor, no "gamer" or other weird stuff. - reasonably priced I don't live in a rich country so there's not much variety. I got tired of searching for it. All monitors with more than 1080p I've found are either "gamer" (which cost 5x as much because of the gamer tax and other features useless to me, like 144hz, gsync and "3ms response times") type of monitors, curved screens, ultra wide screens, etc.
  • hasperdi 6y ago
    What about this one / similar: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-LS24H850QFUXEN-WQHD-24-Inch-Monitor/dp/B071YQ8QP1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-LS24H850QFUXEN-WQHD-24-Inch... I'm using this and quite happy with it
    • young_unixer 6y ago
      Thanks. That looks like what I want.
  • avalexandrov 6y ago
    I think this is the monitor you're looking for: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ultrasharp-25-usb-c-monitor-u2520d/apd/210-avkg/monitors-monitor-accessories https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ultrasharp-25-usb-c-monitor-...
    • young_unixer 6y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion.
• m0zg 6y ago
  If you're using a recent Ubuntu with a 4K display, the best way I have found to make things readable without making them huge is by enabling "Large text" under Universal Access. This sort of mimics the old Unity scaling, except you have to set your Chrome to 150% and your console font size separately now. Works for me on both Lenovo Carbon X1 and 32" Z32 desktop monitor.
• chias 6y ago
  Only tangentially related, but encoding text into the subpixels themselves is still one of my favorite github repos I've stumbled across in a good long while :) https://github.com/graphitemaster/breaking_the_physical_limits_of_fonts https://github.com/graphitemaster/breaking_the_physical_limi...
• snailerz 6y ago
  Interesting reading, but... I can't understand why he states that a 4k monitor at 1.5x is worst than a 1440p monitor at 1x... Pixel density will be better, for example, in game textures and movies? I am really interested in buying a new monitor from quite a while, but I really don't get that part, can somebody help me with that? Thanks in advance HN folks!
• nighthawk454 6y ago
  > Why is it 119.88 Herz, not 120 Herz? No idea. It seems to work the same. I'm guessing it's 119.88Hz because that's an even 5x multiple of the conventional "24Hz" of TV – which is really 23.976Hz.
  • DudeInBasement 6y ago
    na, they probably just used floating point and didn't care.
• noja 6y ago
  Ultrawide beats 4k for me.
• jedberg 6y ago
  I have two monitors. A 27" Apple Cinema display from 2012 that I got used in 2015, and an LG Ultra HD (4K) that I picked up last year new. Yes, the LG is newer, 4K, has a higher DPI, etc. But I often find myself putting my most important windows on the Apple Display. The color is just so much more beautiful and vibrant, the clarity and contrast are superior, it's just so much better. Sure, I can't fit as much code on it as the LG, but boy is it pretty. Apple definitely puts quality in their monitors. It's a shame they left the consumer market in 2016.
• dmoy 6y ago
  You can pry my cheap A- panel Korean no-name brand 8+ year old monitor with one working button (thankfully the power button!) and a bunch of stuck pixels from my cold, dead, miserly hands.
  • smabie 6y ago
    Why?
    • dmoy 6y ago
      Mostly the cheap and miserly part It works fine, and the cost/benefit of buying a newer and/or more expensive monitor isn't worth it to me. I also am the kind of person who drives a <$10k car even though I could pretty easily afford a >$50k car. Tradeoff isn't worth it imo.
• holtalanm 6y ago
  well, time to throw my brand-new BenQ 24" 1080p monitor in the garbage, I guess. but really....1080p is just fine for looking at text on a screen. Maybe the reason the text is blurry for you is that _you need glasses_.
• screye 6y ago
  I would strongly advocate for a 1440p 34" 21:9 ultra widescreen monitor. The 21:9 aspect ratio is perfect for having the standard IDE + chrome tab arrangement. It doesn't have the issues brought in by having multiple monitors and 1440p is a good middle-ground resolution.
• fuball63 6y ago
  I still use an old boxy crt as my second monitor. It's at a low resolution, even for it, but it's primarily for slack and video meetings. I code and webbrowse using OSX full screen swipe mechanism on the main laptop screen. I often reflect on how blurry and oddly colored the crt is in comparison, and that how back in the day I never noticed or cared. It works fine for slack, and I prefer bigger text for chat anyway. Because it is still working, I don't see a reason to put it in a landfill or be "recycled".
• AnthonBerg 6y ago
  OCD.
• ryanmjacobs 6y ago
  Yeah... I've got a small anecdote. I find that I write better code on lower resolution screens. Right now, I'm on a 1440x900 display at 75 dpi. And it's annoying, for sure. But it keeps my code concise and well-organized. It forces you develop your code around a mental model, instead of a visual model. I find that at 4K, my code starts spreading out -- horizontally and vertically. That's fine when you're writing it, but when you come back to it months later, it's so hard to comprehend that much information all at once IMO. It's weird. And I might not be explaining it properly. If you were to write your code on an 800x600 display, you would make sure that every function did not go over 800 vertical pixels. It would probably give you a headache if you did. I can look at code and almost immediately tell that it was written on a 4K display. Oftentimes, everything is spread out and chained obtusely. Completely different game for web dev though -- having the browser side by side with your code helps. ... Also, 4:3 is awesome for code. All I need is two, side-by-side panes of 80-column text :) 16:9 has me glancing left to right too much.
  • SSLy 6y ago
    You can change the font size everywhere.
• kickingvegas 6y ago
  Oh wow, I guess I’ll add to this thread which is so tied to the fact that we don’t have resolution independent graphics. I wrote an essay about resolution independent graphics back in 2012 here https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-everywhere/blob/master/absoluteMeasurementDPI.md https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever... HN commentary on this happened on two occasions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639616 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236429
• dentalperson 6y ago
  The other side to this is that it may also be time to upgrade your eyes (with glasses, by getting your eyes checked). It's more likely this is true if you don't think it's time to upgrade your HD monitor. Somehow I went for years without realizing that I just needed glasses. I could read everything before, but after getting the glasses everything was suddenly unnaturally crisp.
• bob1029 6y ago
  For me, 2560x1440@144 on a 27" panel is by far the Goldilocks of writing code. 1080p feels like it's not tall enough with fat editors like Visual Studio, and anything bigger in size or DPI is starting to get too difficult to keep in focus. I do also have a separate workstation with a 4K 43" monitor that I use exclusively as a standing setup. The monitor is fairly far back, but still requires me to move my head slightly to view the extents. This is the workstation I typically use for daily stand-ups so that I can have a ton of relevant information up all at once. I will also do some large-scale codebase reorganization efforts on this setup as I can have 3-4 solution explorers side-by-side and still have 90% of my monitor remaining for code editor windows, debuggers, explorer windows, browsers, etc. That said, this setup is tiresome if you are trying to laser focus on a single area of the codebase for an extended duration. I will typically alternate between these setups throughout the day as appropriate. Also, I do appreciate the color accuracy of the 4k 43" monitor (IPS/8-bit). I don't do a lot of artistic work, but when I am trying to see if a certain shade of grey makes sense for a element relative to its contents, having an accurate monitor really helps pick a good color code. With TN you get much more 'coarse' results and its hard to find a good middle point.
  • zedpoeticbits 6y ago
    I am considering a 43" 4K monitor. Which one do you have, if you don't mind?
    • bob1029 6y ago
      LG43UD79
      • zedpoeticbits 6y ago
        Thanks
• ralmidani 6y ago
  I actually “downgraded“ from a 43” 4K to a 30” (2560 x 1600). Trying to focus strained my eyes, and the brightness from the big monitor meant I had to position it as far back as I could on my desk, which made it even harder to focus and caused even more eye strain. I also realized a 16:10 ratio is more friendly for coding. Frankly, 4K/5K monitors seem like a gimmick for most people. Especially puzzling is why you would pack so many pixels into smaller (~27“) monitors and require more power and graphics muscle for imperceptibly “better” images.
• AdrianB1 6y ago
  I want to thank the author for the article, it comes at the perfect time for me. Earlier today I just had a main power line incident that resulted in burning almost half of all my electric equipment in the house, so I need to buy immediately at least one monitor and I was in doubt about spending too much on it (I need to buy other stuff too) and I am a cheap bastard, but I am moving a bit up versus what I was planning to get. I saw some discussions about multiple monitors; I am a heavy user of multiple monitors, 2 most of the time and 3 when really needed; I don't have space on my desks (home & office) for 3 monitors all the time, so it depends on the needs and not on coolness. What I plan to do now is to get an asymmetrical configuration at home with one regular (1080p) monitor for some work and gaming (the CPU is an i3 7100, so I don't do much gaming) and a larger and better one for work only cases where a lot of information needs to be on the screen at the same time. As the article did not mention multiple monitors and buying 2-3 monitors that are 120 Hz/4k resolution is extremely expensive for a home setup, I think it is worth mentioning this kind of compromise of mixing size to have one of each. Not having OCD the different size is not such a big deal, while the extra functionality/productivity helps.
  • fenesiistvan 6y ago
    Just read the comments. You will be confused again :)
• tln 6y ago
  Damnit! This article fucked up my setup. I just went in and fiddled with Display settings and my 4k TV doesn't show 1:1 scaling anymore. I mean, it's Catalina issue, but still. Tonsky: May your Helvetica always be silently replaced with Arial
• zrm 6y ago
  Does anybody make a reasonable 16:10 aspect ratio 4K monitor yet? Because I'd buy it, but I can also stick with 2K forever if nobody wants to shut up and take my money.
• pmarin 6y ago
  I prefer the low cost solution of using pixel fonts.
• JayGuerette 6y ago
  37% of programmers are using Retina displays? Since the OSX market share is ~8.5%, your numbers are way off.
• thih9 6y ago
  Offtopic, I really like how the twitter post has been embedded as a screenshot and not using twitter's scripts. Even if that means that I can't click any link in a tweet; I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise. I prefer the UX (and especially: fast load times) of an image to the one of a script. Also, an image means fewer requests and fewer potential privacy issues.
• jamescobalt 6y ago
  Talks about 4k at 120hz without mentioning that this usually sacrifices chroma, making text unreadable. Fine for games, but not for coding. No mention of Display Stream Compression. No mention of the importance of panel type (IPS vs VA vs TN). No mention of the various HDR standards (and especially how HDR400 isn't really HDR). Suggests getting a 5k, 6k, or 8k monitor while also insisting you get a 120hz display (it's going to be one or the other for the next couple of years). Suggests monitors whose adaptive sync feature only works on Nvidia GPUs. The author seems to know a lot about font rendering but he doesn't seem to know that much about monitors despite having VERY strong opinions about them. I suggest people wait till the new year before a big monitor purchase. EVE Spectrum is slated for Q4 of this year. If it delivers on its promises, it'll be the best value for what you get. And if it doesn't, you can fall back on the ROG XG27UQ or its contemporaries - assuming your GPU can support DSC, 4K, and 120hz.
• errantspark 6y ago
  Or you can just use pixel fonts (which imo look better than subpixel-aa fonts on 4k anyway) and donate the difference in monitor costs to [optimal virtue signalling charity]. Gaming on a 4k monitor sucks also, I don't know what kind of supercomputers people are running but my meager 1080Ti can't peg any of the relevant games to 144Hz at 4k.
  • mdorazio 6y ago
    > 144Hz That's your problem right there. Most people, myself included, are perfectly fine at 60Hz since we don't do competitive FPS gaming. At that refresh rate, my 2070 is perfectly happy to render games in 4k and I really don't notice any significant difference compared to 120Hz. If > 60Hz is really important to you, it's going to be another generation of video cards before single-card gaming can handle it well (probably the 3000 series cards will be capable).
• localhost 6y ago
  I'm currently using a Sony 43" 4K TV [1] as my monitor. It supports uncompressed 4:4:4 chroma subsampling [2] which makes for a huge impact on visual quality. It's also quite inexpensive. I find that the height of the monitor is about as big as I can tolerate. I certainly wouldn't mind higher resolution, but that doesn't exist at this size. LG now has a 48" OLED TV [3] that supports a 120Hz refresh rate. I'm looking forward to trying that out. Either that or the new Samsung Odyssey G9 ultrawide [4] which is about the same price. It's also 240Hz but with VA pixels (which apparently aren't that bad). The G9 will be better on the vertical axis (not too tall) given its size. The extreme curvature is also interesting - not sure about that yet. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sony-KD43X720E-43-Inch-Ultra-Smart/dp/B071FFFRXM https://www.amazon.com/Sony-KD43X720E-43-Inch-Ultra-Smart/dp... [2] https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling [3] https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled48cxpub-oled-4k-tv https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled48cxpub-oled-4k-tv [4] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--odyssey-g9-gaming-monitor-lc49g95tssnxza/ https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--ody...
• quicklime 6y ago
  The author says that you don't need to choose between 4K and 120Hz, because there are "reasonably priced" monitors on the market that have both. But their recommended monitor ($900) seems a lot more expensive than a 4K 60Hz monitor (which is around $300-$400 when I search on Amazon). The author also says (they think) that you need the discrete graphics card in a MacBook to take advantage of a 120 Hz display, and that the integrated Intel Iris graphics won't do. I was actually shopping around for a new MacBook earlier today, and noticed that the 13" MacBook Pros only come with integrated GPUs, and you have to get the 16" MBP if you want discrete graphics. So if you like the portability that a 13" laptop has, this might not be a good tradeoff (not to mention that the 16" one costs $400 to $800 more than the top-spec 13" one). I totally agree with the stuff they say about rendering fonts on 4k screens, but I don't think I'd be willing to take the hit in portability, or shell out an extra $700+, to get 120 Hz.
  • madeofpalk 6y ago
    For what it’s worth, the latest 13” MacBook Pro (with integrated intel graphics) can power the 6016x3384 Pro Display XHR at 60Hz. I am unsure what refresh rates it can achieve with a lower resolution. But really as someone who made the jump from 60Hz to 120Hz, I wouldn’t bother unless you’re gaming. I accidentally was running my monitor locked to 60Hz and when I fixed it, I barely noticed the difference - it was only really when playing FPS that I noticed.
    • quicklime 6y ago
      Yeah you're right, it can do 6K at 60Hz, and according to Apple it can also do: > Up to two external 4K displays with 4096‑by‑2304 resolution at 60Hz in millions of colours So I guess if it can power 2 monitors at 60Hz, it should be able to do 1 monitor at 120hz, right?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• nahtnam 6y ago
  I just recently went from 2 4k monitors to 3 2k 144hz monitors. I'd argue as long as the panel quality is decent, 144hz is a much better quality of life improvement than 2k to 4k is
• megous 6y ago
  For coding I just use bitmap fonts, and I don't have any blurring issues this blog describes. I can do that even on old IBM T41's screen, and text still looks just fine.
• sly010 6y ago
  I concur with everything said, but it is still a bit unclear to me who is this article targeting. What is the takeaway? "Anyone who can afford a $1500 monitor should have one, so poor font designers don't have to break their back manually hinting fonts anymore"? Isn't that a bit like solving poverty by moving to a better neighborhood?
• randallsquared 6y ago
  I fully agree that higher DPI is better. I disagree that all available resolution should go to increasing sharpness and detail of text, which, after all, can only improve so much. There's only one metric that really matters for text, and that's reading speed. Any beauty or detail which doesn't serve to differentiate characters (thereby increasing reading speed) is essentially pointless. A better reason to get a better monitor is to fit more text on it. While coding or learning, there might be one or more editors, terminals, browsers, chats, etc. Can all this be behind tabs or in virtual desktops? Of course. But the value of having it all available at a flick of the eyes is so much higher! Even if you turn off all the animations, flipping virtual desktops or tabs requires a much more severe context switch than casting a glance to the right, left, or (slightly) up or down. I'm currently using a 5k2k monitor at its native resolution, and it's pretty awesome. I have been hoping for two decades that VR would solve this, allowing me to have a truly vast workspace that moved and zoomed just via eye movement, but not only is that day still far away in eye-tracking terms, VR goggles have so far all been much worse for text than high DPI screens, in my experience. I appreciate that there are VR workspaces in development, though, like Immersed, for the day when the hardware is good enough.
• nickjj 6y ago
  27" 4k is going to be pretty tough to read text at 1:1 scaling even with 20/20 vision. IMO you're better off grabbing something like a 25" 2560x1440 monitor. You can comfortably read text at a few feet away, even small text with not the best contrast. If you start scaling to 150% or 200% with your 4k display you'll end up with the same screen real estate as a 2560x1440 or even a 1080p monitor depending on how much you scale up and you'll end up paying a lot more. For example a really good 2560x1440 monitor will run you about $300-350 (IPS display, low input lag, good color accuracy, etc.). The first 2 monitors in OP's post are $1,500 to $1,730. I did a huge write up on this at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-for-software-development https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo... if anyone is curious. I evaluated a bunch of monitors and ultimately picked a 25" 2560x1440 since it's the sweet spot for PPI at normal viewing distances while having normal vision. For programming, having a 2560x1440 1:1 scaled display is going to be a huge win. You can easily fit 4x 80 column windows side by side in most code editors. After using that set up for years, there's no way I would ever want to work on a display that's less than an effective 2560x1440 resolution again.
• mumbisChungo 6y ago
  Interesting article, but I'll stick with my dual 144 hz 27" 1080p monitors for less than the cost of a single 4k 144 hz that I wouldn't be able to use for gaming without investing another $10k in my tower.
• jefftk 6y ago
  The other direction is to use a high resolution 1x monitor, without anti-aliasing. Crisp, legible text, even at very small sizes: https://www.jefftk.com/xterm-vs-gnome-terminal-4x.png https://www.jefftk.com/xterm-vs-gnome-terminal-4x.png I'm currently using a 27" external monitor at 2560x1440 ("QHD") and this is wide enough for five terminals side-by side at 83 columns each. (Monaco 10pt, anti-aliasing off, iterm2)
• fireattack 6y ago
  I only use hi-dpi monitor with non 100% scaling on my laptop, and to this day I still can't get over how bad raster images look like when they're not showing in 1:1 pixel to pixel (on web pages, mainly). It's just a blurry mess, integer scaling or not. I'm aware this article is mainly about text rendering, just want to point out something I hate with hi-dpi + non 100% scaling. Also, on Windows with 125%, I don't find text as blurry as the author showed on Mac. They look pretty crispy to me. I guess that "scaling twice" thing is a Mac only issue (at least for text)?
• alliao 6y ago
  interesting, this must be why animal crossing looks so damn good on my 4k OLED....
• M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
  e-ink monitors, anyone? saves your eyes in the long-run
• mianos 6y ago
  I am old old old, and I agree. This is probably something Mac users would notice once they are used to 'retina' resolution. At work we have two monitors on stalks and laptops. Work provides laptops to plug into these. The big (23"?) monitors are big, that's all. They hold less text than the laptop screen and it's much worse to read. I just use the laptop as it's easier on the eyes. At home I always had multiple monitors but once I got a 4K monitor, at most I have the laptop open for more screen, often CNBFed. All this is probably more based on what you are used to. If you have big screens and nothing of 'retina' resolution you are not going to care until you do.
• nothal 6y ago
  The article itself is interesting but I couldn't stop snickering after the author cited a Twitter poll as their research.
• andai 6y ago
  Surprised there's no mention of bitmap fonts. Solves all the problems for free :)
• dusted 6y ago
  I'm still in love with the default sized bitmap font used by xterm, I'd never want to look at any other font if I had a choice (which I do for terminal programs)
• asenna 6y ago
  I enjoyed the article, good suggestions. Slightly off topic but I have the 16" Macbook Pro with maxed out graphics, and as soon as I connect my monitor, the fans start getting ready for lift-off (~5.6k RPM). It's a Samsung 4k 32" (DP 1.4 to usb-c). I know this is a common issue but anyone else able to resolve this yet? It drives me crazy that this powerful machine starts sounding like jet just from connecting 1 monitor (Apple says it can support four 4k monitors). The CPU and GPU don't look to be under any stress as such.
  • nickreese 6y ago
    Try plugging it into the right side... seriously. Makes all of the difference on mine. Also try a USB-C to display port if you can.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  8K TVs are coming!!! I've been an enthusiastic user of 4K TVs as monitors for 40" TVs. They're only $200-$250 for a decent one! So much real estate. 4k at 40" is basically what the DPI of a 30" 2560x1600 was. But a 80" monitor for 8k is ridiculous. So with 8K we can finally just pick the real estate you want and the DPI will be great. It amuses me that the press always say "what will you watch on 8K!" ... this is just like 4K. The "content" on 4K isn't broadcast, streaming, or disc based. It's all generated content by game consoles and computer applications, and upscaling.
• Const-me 6y ago
  Agree about resolution. I was an early adopter. Didn’t happen voluntarily though, my client wanted me to develop embedded Linux software that drives a 4K HDMI output, so I was kinda forced to upgrade. Never looked back. When that monitor broke just after it’s 3 years warranty expired, I’ve bought very similar one with the same specs from another brand, 27” 4k IPS. However, I think 120Hz is overkill for programmers. The price/performance proportion is not great either, my current BenQ PD2700U is offered for just over $500 in the US, while the monitors recommended by OP are above 2 grands.
• sasaf5 6y ago
  Developer text editors won't benefit from 120Hz monitors. Their scrolling is not smooth pixel-by-pixel, but line-by-line. Also most developers will navigate code with search, and won't need scrolling anyways. I would rather put my cash on a display that renders still images better, and is comfortable on the eyes.
• pvorb 6y ago
  Those colorful upscaled images of ClearType text are not that helpful. I wrote a tool several years ago to illustrate the effect of subpixel font rendering: https://github.com/pvorb/subpixel-illustrator https://github.com/pvorb/subpixel-illustrator
• novok 6y ago
  The 4k 120hz monitors he is recommending all have a fan noise issue, since they all use the same basic design with a dinky small fan in the back and I think panel. I did a deep dive on it myself and decided in the end not to do it because of the fan issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_vUqe7Q6vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_vUqe7Q6vw
  • Sephr 6y ago
    The Acer monitor's fan is louder as it also includes eye tracking tech which results in increased heat output.
• easytiger 6y ago
  Was most productive working on a 800x600 15" CRT.
• Havoc 6y ago
  I bought a 4k screen for same programming rationale. Deep regret. From CRT days I know I can see 60hz but not 75hz. I had stupidly assumed that modern 60hz with freesync would be ok. It's not. Especially @ grey colour for some reason (Asus screen). The fact that I was coming from a 120hz laptop screen didn't help the situation either. Anyway...so I'm buying a 144hz 1440p gaming screen next. Screw this resolution game...I need flicker free for my sanity.
  • smabie 6y ago
    I have a Dell S2716DG [https://www.dell.com/lv/business/p/dell-s2716dg-monitor/pd https://www.dell.com/lv/business/p/dell-s2716dg-monitor/pd] and I absolutely love it: 1440p, 27in, 144hz, 1ms response time (on fast mode), and g-sync. It's great for games and looks very classy. Also the price isn't bad at around ~$500. I would highly recommend it.
    • Havoc 6y ago
      Nice screen. Seems to be quite expensive UK side unfortunately. Almost 750 usd on amazon
• ronyfadel 6y ago
  I disabled font smoothing for a hot minute: text became dimmer, and contrast was reduced. It became much harder to read text and it strained my eyes.
• ajross 6y ago
  Something's off with the analysis here. > According to my research among programmers, 43% are still using monitors with pixel per inch density less than 150 OK... > Let's take Consolas [...] at 14px, which is default in VS Code A 14 pixel font at 150 DPI is a 6.75 point type size in real world units! Good grief, I can't read that anymore. Frankly I doubt I could have read it in my 20's. I certainly never would have wanted to code in it under any circumstances.
• hyperluz 6y ago
  I'm typing this from a surface. And I have an iPad Air 3 too. There are people who get eyestrain and headaches from using both devices, due to font rendering system and frequency of lamp oscillating to adjust bright. I even installed something called Dithering Settings for Intel Graphics and bought/installed a program called Iris on my Surface Pro. I searched this article for both "eyestrain" and "fatigue" with no results. I think engineers and nerds should resolve problems regarding ergonomics and eyestrain. I feel like being cheated by the industry since my first Samsung Syncmaster 3, running at 60 Hz and everyone saying it was safe and that the eye could see no more than 60 Hz (BS!!)
• jmull 6y ago
  I'm glad I made it to the part that recommended turning off font smoothing on MacOS with retina display. I tried it (I guess I've had it on all this time) and, indeed it looks better. (This is on a recent 27" iMac with Catalina.)
• jonathanedwards 6y ago
  As a geezer with glasses, I find my laptop screen works better than a monitor. The laptop screen is down in the reading zone of my progressive lenses, yet I can still look up out the window. A big monitor requires me to use glasses without any distance vision, making me feel like I'm trapped in a fishbowl. I also love the fact that my window layout is exactly the same whether I am working at my desk or a coffeeshop. Or at least when I used to work at coffeeshops...
• lilyball 6y ago
  For all of the space given to macOS "Font Smoothing", that setting really doesn't do much at all. I'm testing on macOS 10.15.5 and the setting seems to do nothing at all for web pages (viewed in Safari), or Terminal.app, or VSCode, or MacVim, or Xcode's editor. It does affect some of the UI chrome in Safari's toolbar, and Xcode's sidebar, but not the editor. So it really seems to have no effect at all on programming.
• nycticorax 6y ago
  I find it so strange that most people still talk about their monitors' resolution in terms of pixel counts. Oh, you have a 4k monitor? Well, if that's a 43" 16:9 4k monitor, then that's pretty close to 100 dpi, so you basically have a big-ass traditional ("lodpi") monitor. Whereas if it's a 24" monitor, then it's a smallish hidpi screen. Rather than pixel counts, I find it much more helpful if you tell me the size in inches and the DPI. This is related to one reason why I'm not so crazy about 4k: At most of the usual screen sizes, they occupy an unpleasant middle ground between a traditional screen (~100 dpi) and a 2x hidpi/retina screen (~200 dpi).
  • g-b-r 6y ago
    All 3 values count, beyond a certain dpi pixels count much less, but before they count a lot (they are the "shelves" for your characters and everything else, given that sub-pixel simulation is very poor). Unfortunately most monitors around are still at a limited 1920x1080 or less. For people with poor vision big size counts a lot, good vision small might be better, etc...
• gilbetron 6y ago
  Been developing software for 30+ years, with up to 2 extra monitors, and I always go back to a single display. I'll put myself up against anybody with multiple displays. The thing is, I just alt-tab (or otherwise) to different things - it's not like I can actually perceive more than 1 window at a time, for the most part. The head twisting to see multiple displays bugs me, as does the eye movements across a huge display. Plus there is just more opportunities for distractions with more display area. Finally, I work most effectively when I hold what I need in my head, and find that multiple displays fights against that need. The only real exception to that is if I'm writing front end code of some sort, having the live updates helps a ton. Lastly, if I could have a bigger display on my laptop, I'd be up for that!
  • waheoo 6y ago
    I used to feel this way. I found it depends on the work. A lot of my old work didnt depend heavily on looking at a terminal output constantly. These days, i have to have about 3-4 things running. The extra screen just becomes a log window. You can argue the software should be redesigned, i do too, but the problem for me remains and a second screen while not solving it, alleviates it a lot. It might have something to do with using a twm, might not. All i know is that i dont miss the days of tab cycling and desktop flipping.
    • gilbetron 6y ago
      With a laptop, an extra screen does seem to help somewhat in situations like you describe, I agree. That's because a laptop screen isn't quite big enough to bother with tiling your windows. If I had a laptop with a 20" display, maybe a touch bigger, it would be plenty for 95% of my development needs. But since those don't exist, my general preference is an available external screen that I can use if needed. I like to couch/chair code a lot with my legs up, so I don't like to rely on an external monitor, so I try not to get used to one full time.
    • chiefsucker 6y ago
      Tab cycling can be a productivity killer, especially when you need to cycle between more than 4–5 applications (which can happen quite often, but OP wrote “alt-tab (or otherwise)”. What works excellent (at least for me, not necessary for you) is to set shortcuts to your most used applications (be it the function key row, or some hjkl combinations). With such a setup you can just press a key / combination from muscle memory, instead of opening the tab switcher overlay, parsing it, deciding how often you need to press tab, and then actually switching to the other application window. Keeping shortcuts to applications feels like you would only have to do the last step.
• WatchDog 6y ago
  If you want a bit more control over your monitor resolutions on macOS, I recommend RDM[0]. It lets you change a few settings around DPI and refresh rate, that arent otherwise available via the regular UI. Not all desired modes will work, it's still fundamentally limited by macOS's crappy display support, but its better than nothing. [0] https://github.com/usr-sse2/RDM https://github.com/usr-sse2/RDM
• aizatto 6y ago
  I disagree with this article. Higher resolution (to an extent) allows me to see more stuff. 4K on a 27" doesn't work for my workflow. My workflow on a laptop is to put two windows side by side so that I can compare things/read documents/code against documentation. Unfortunately most websites nowadays are designed for widths of 1280px, and anything less than that is sometimes treated as mobile or gives it a terrible responsive design. It frustrates me, endlessly. On a 16" MBPr I can get 2048x1280, which allows me to put up two windows side by side at 1024px, which does work for most sites, but sometimes there are some sites which are just broken. A big reason why I need larger windows is when doing side by side PR Reviews on GitHub, 1024px can only show 56 characters, 1280px can only show 78 characters. Personal opinion, GitHub has too much white space. I tend to have another window open to compare against documentation/etc. I've compared it at https://github.com/aizatto/character-length https://github.com/aizatto/character-length https://github.com/aizatto/character-length/commit/bae8f00feda5b832aa6fe162460968d8eaf040a5 https://github.com/aizatto/character-length/commit/bae8f00fe... For desktop: I'm comfortable is 27" 2560x1440. Two windows side by side at 1280px. Pixel pitch is 0.2331mm Using 4k at 27" is too small for me. Pixel pitch is 0.1554mm . Without the correct dongle/cable MacBooks can't even push at 4k 60hz via HDMI. Tip: use DisplayPort. I've settled on 38" 3840x1600 because it allows me to setup three windows side by side at 1280. Which works great for my workflow. Which sometime tends to be: - 1 window for source material - 1 window for my main focus - 1 window for a comparison material 38" 3840x1600 pixel pitch is 0.229mm. I settled on the Dell U3818DW, because it can charge my MBP via USB-C. Only recommendation is if your laptop is asleep, don't leave your laptop plugged int. It likes to wake it. The 1600 also gives me some extra room vertically. If you can afford it, I'd recommend giving 3840x1600 a try. A list of such monitors https://pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=384001600 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=384001600
• wdb 6y ago
  I think the creator of this site should revisit its dark mode feature because when I enable it I am getting black on black which makes the text hard to read.
• bovermyer 6y ago
  The author is very clearly not a gamer.
• mov_ 6y ago
  This is a fantastic post, I just bought a 28", 158 dpi monitor recently and spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to maximize the font quality. Since there weren't any suggestions for linux, this is what I did for Ubuntu 20: * 2x scaling * Downloaded libfreetype, enabled subpixel rendering option, replaced existing libfreetype.so (I think Ubuntu 20 might already have this enabled, but just to be safe I did it manually) * Turned off all hinting options in font configuration * Turn on lcddefault filtering (necessary if you have subpixel rendering enabled) * Specifically set 158 dpi in Alacritty terminal config (Not entirely sure that's necessary?)
  • st-isidore 6y ago
    Thanks, I saved this to use later when I get a better monitor. How did you devise these steps though if I may ask? And what are these things?
    • mov_ 6y ago
      You're welcome, I hope it helps! To preface this, I think Ubuntu 20 comes with good font rendering options by default, so my suggestions are mostly unnecessary. I just wanted to experiment to see if I was missing anything. All the options I'm referencing are explained in detail in this blog post (e.g., subpixel rendering and lcd filtering), they're all just configuration options in the freetype2 font renderer. I found that the Arch Linux wiki page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration) is helpful because it applies to other distributions like Ubuntu, and provides example configuration files. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration/Examples https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration/Exam...)
• pao 6y ago
  Those are the ugliest monitors I've ever seen. I thought all monitors were basically boring rectangles. No, apparently there are monitors with weird designs on them and shrouds.
• euske 6y ago
  I turn off any font/scroll smoothing and animation whenever possible. I use a good bitmap font for coding. It's readable and snappy. No hinting BS. There's no need for animation in Emacs or tmux after all.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ShinyObject 6y ago
  This is actually a rather bad time to buy a high-end monitor because if you get one right now it will likely be outdated by the end of the year. If you want a monitor that can do all of the cool things at once (2160p, hdr, 120Hz+, freesync) without using hacks like dual cables or realtime lossy compression, then you need both a video card and a monitor that support hdmi 2.1 or displayport 2.0. Currently there are very few monitors that support the newer hdmi/dp standard, and there are no video cards that do. However both of the new consoles scheduled to be released later this year (xbox series x, ps5) will support hdmi 2.1. This also implies that upcoming discrete gpus will support this as well. This means if you want a monitor that can do everything, right now there are only a tiny number of screens, and no video cards. Barring any delays, the situation should be very different in a few months.
  • fomine3 6y ago
    Agreed. I expect more products released with new interfaces. BTW current GeForce and RADEON supports DisplayPort DSC that could enable more resolution / frame rate by compression theorically but I don't know any existing displays.
• musicale 6y ago
  > Not anymore, after Apple started applying non-integer scaling by default on Macbooks That is the first thing I fix on an Apple laptop - change it to 4x HiDPI scaling!! I was very annoyed when they changed the default.
• musicale 6y ago
  I used non-antialiased bitmap fonts on a low-resolution display for terminal windows for the past 3 months, and it was great. Now I've switched back to 5K and it's fine, but there really was nothing wrong with bitmap fonts. I also tried a vintage "mechanical" switch keyboard and mouse, just for fun. I think modern macOS doesn't work quite as well with a mouse because of the weird, narrow, disappearing scrollbars (though a mouse scroll wheel or scroll ball can help with that.)
• upofadown 6y ago
  I just got used to looking at dot matrix fonts. So my fonts are completely crisp even at low resolutions. In the end it is just patterns of dots. Currently doing 6x10 fonts on a 21 inch 1920x1080 monitor. A higher rez monitor would actually end up being a nuisance.
• aqme28 6y ago
  I wish it spoke more about framerate. I find the refresh rate affects eyestrain for me a lot, so I got a higher framerate display. The difference between 1440p and 4k is barely noticeable I find. I'd rather have 1440p and high refresh over 4k and 60hz.
• jiggawatts 6y ago
  This is a fantastically well written blog article, and there needs to be more attention paid by the industry to issues such as these ones raised by the author. I've generally found that all the IT vendors have an incredibly lazy and sloppy attitude to imaging of all types, not just display scaling or font rendering. "The pixels went on to the display! Good enough! Ship it!" is the attitude. Compare this to televisions, where there 120 Hz is common, 8K is a thing now, wide gamuts and HDR are not only supported but consistent and even calibrated out of the box! Dolby and NetFlix in particular have put significant effort into making sure their customers see the original artistic intention, not some faded or garish mess. In the PC, Mac, and smartphone world it is literally impossible to send someone either a still image or video that'll look even vaguely correct. It'll be too bright, or too dim, faded, or worse: the colours will be stretched to the maximum display gamut. Photos of faces look like zombies or clowns in full makeup. HDR is simply impossible to use for still image exchange. No matter what some random JPEG committee is working on, don't even think about such nonsense as sending someone a HDR file, it will practically never work, no matter what display the recipient is using. Or even just an SDR 10-bit file. You're wasting your time. To give you an idea of how insanely bad this is, for years and years if you enabled HDR for your display under Windows 10 it would simultaneously wash out the desktop colours, dim it until it was way too dark, and then blur everything on top of that so that your 4K monitor is pointless. Clearly nobody actually tested HDR support at Microsoft. After they received complaints, both to their tech support and in public... they did nothing. For years. YEARS. I just find the whole thing incredibly sad. It's 2020. The future! The physical technology for nearly perfect display output has been available for years, but... no. You just can't have it, because the software won't allow you. It doesn't matter what display you buy. You can't have HDR, or 10-bit, or colour management on the desktop, or your browser. Firefox has had full ICC colour management for many years now. It's off by default. Internet Explorer truncates everything to sRGB even on a wide-gamut screen. Safari stretches colours for un-tagged images. The only HDR and colour-managed thing you can reliably do on a PC is watch NetFlix. That's... it.
• rs23296008n1 6y ago
  The guy needs to chill. Relax. He's got a point about PPI but don't get too hung up on pixels. Your eyes are your guide. For my purposes a single 4k 43" monitor is fine. Its not ultrawide either. No need to upgrade. I have another identical one at the other place I "nest". Its like using 4x HD (1920x1080?) monitors but no bezel in between. Very comfortable and the text doesn't hide in obscurity. Plenty of space for everything and doubles as a excellent TV when needed. Personally I think most of the trouble people have is due to staring at screens too long. You shouldn't be spending more than an hour staring at a screen continuously anyway. Even thats probably excessive. Take a break. Its kind of like those people who's eyes are so tired they change their preferences to light text on a light background. Ummmm. No. Not good. But I'm an old programmer, amongst other hats, so what would I know? I remember when 640x480 was crystal clear and so sharp and 1024x768 was "wow" extra real estate! But yeah. Go higher res and bump up the physical size at the same time. Completely addictive if you have the desk space.
• jiveturkey 6y ago
  I'm reminded of the 90s, I landed a job using IRIX as my desktop. In the days of 72dpi monitors, the 144dpi 21:9 SGI display was a wonder! I think it also worked on the Mac, but there was no scaling like there is today, where there is a render pipeline and application pixels != screen pixels.
• tambourine_man 6y ago
  I’m sorry, this guy writes about readability on a bright yellow background site? I also disagree with almost all of his assertions on font antialiasing, but I think it’s not worth refuting.
• bilalq 6y ago
  It seems there's no shortage of gripes with Apple's display support. I'm still incredibly frustrated with just how much of a mess multi-display docks are with MacOS and how it just doesn't support DisplayPort MST at all. https://medium.com/@sebvance/everything-you-need-to-know-about-macbook-pros-and-their-lack-of-displayport-mst-multi-stream-98ce33d64af4 https://medium.com/@sebvance/everything-you-need-to-know-abo...
• sholladay 6y ago
  Having read the article, I'm still not able to fully grasp why the old techniques for improving text legibility can't be "scaled" with screen resolution. We had imprecise pixels before and we still do, in the sense that they are very finite. I totally get why smoothing and other tricks aren't as necessary as they used to be, but I don't get why they have to be detrimental on Retina displays. At what resolution does this reversal happen and why?
• ipsin 6y ago
  I thought I was doing a champion job of leaving a trail of e-waste behind me, but here I see I'm not doing enough.
• steadicat 6y ago
  The article is all based around this premise: > Times of low-resolution displays are over. High-resolution displays are a commodity now. I reject that premise. 4K is basically the maximum number of pixels you can get for less than $1K, and that's only a handful more pixels than a 16" MBP screen. It does not make sense for most people to shell out the $$$ just so that they can see the same number of pixels from slightly further away. It is absolutely not the right time to upgrade your monitor. Wait until 5K+ becomes affordable again[1] so you can actually get the benefits of an external monitor (more usable screen space) without having to sacrifice the sharpness and quality of retina. [1] https://tidbits.com/2018/11/16/what-happened-to-5k-displays/ https://tidbits.com/2018/11/16/what-happened-to-5k-displays/
• awtawtwat3aw 6y ago
  lol @ monitors, new OLED tvs have hdmi 2.1, barely any bezel, and way better response/picture than any "monitor". burn-in isn't the issue it once as. will take years for people to realize this, though. feels good to live on the edge.
  • Tepix 6y ago
    They are really large, however. I'd like to see a 32 inch 6k OLED TV.
• codebook 6y ago
  I switched to 34inch 1440p ultrawide monitor after WFH began. Previous monitor was 27inch 4k monitor. As I put the monitor at the edge of the desk, I don't notice significant differences of the text quality. As I use work laptop and personal desktop both, changing to ultrawide that supports USB KVM is god blessed. It removes any clutter to switching between the PCs.
• thekevinscott 6y ago
  For the past decade I’ve been holding out hope for a competitive e-ink monitor to use for coding, but it seems we’re still years away. Dasung and Onyx both offer (somewhat small) monitors but from what I can tell the reviews are less than stellar. A great e-ink monitor - that would be my dream monitor.
  • newman8r 6y ago
    I'd love a monitor like that for off-grid, low power use. I'd probably also want a linux distro specifically tailored to an e-ink format.
• willis936 6y ago
  This presents itself as a treatise, but it very much is not. It totally ignores critical aspects that should influence monitor choice. In decreasing importance (imo): - cost - contrast ratio / black level - all aspects related to temporal feel that aren’t refresh rate (response/decay time, sample and hold, backlight strobing, etc.) - color gamut - color precision (nobody wants banding from 6 bpc + FRC) You can’t honestly make recommendations to people for $1000 monitors without even addressing these points, even if you don’t think they’re important for your workflow. It is very poor form.
• spv 6y ago
  As some one who reads pdfs all days with lots of math in them, I cant go live without my 27inch 5k display. This is post is on point.
• Rapzid 6y ago
  Yeah, IDK. As nice as "retna" displays are I still use 1080p screens on my desktop. At my viewing distance, and with sub pixel rendering, the smallest text on Hacker News is perfectly legible and even clean looking. Sure, if I get within 12 inches of the screen I can start to make out the pixels. But even then due to sub-pixel rendering it's hard to make out individual pixels at a foot if the contrast isn't too great between the text and the background. That being said interestingly one of my screens, a newer Asus that's precisely one model version higher than the other, handles high-contrast sub-pixel text rendering quite a bit worse than the other :|
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  More than resolution, it is aspect ratio that I want. I love my 1920x1200 monitor. I wouldn't trade it for a 2560×1440. The 16:9 ratio is simply too short.
• pabs3 6y ago
  Why does user interface rendering care about pixels and DPI instead of field of view?
• yellowapple 6y ago
  I agree with the problem and the severity of it, but I disagree with the proposed solution. Don't get me wrong, the more screen real estate the better, but I recently switched to GNU Unifont as my primary font and wow is it nice and crystal-clear at 12pt. Bitmap fonts might be "ugly" and inflexible, but they do seem to entirely sidestep boneheaded antialiasing strategies (provided they're configured to not be needlessly antialiased).
• arpa 6y ago
  However did we survive programming on CRTs displaying text at 80x25?
• fomine3 6y ago
  I'm waiting for 4K/32inch/120Hz monitor without local dimming(because it's power hungry) but stil no releases. Maybe due to most manufactures want to add HDR(10bit color) but 4K/120Hz/10bit exceeds DP 1.4 bandwidth so need to reduce color to 4:2:2 or use DP 2.0 or HDMI 2.1. I really hope 120Hz going to standard for work monitor.
• nonick 6y ago
  Too yellow, couldn't read. Changing to dark mode resulted in black fonts on black background. End of story.
• alwaysanon 6y ago
  To his comment about truly disabling Font Smoothing on Windows I think that, in addition to disabling ClearType, there is also a font smoothing setting to turn off as well. You can disable it by: * Open System in the Control Panel * Click on Advanced System settings * Go to the Advanced tab * Click on Settings button under Performance. * Uncheck the box for Smooth edges of screen font. * Click on Apply
• bitbang 6y ago
  Interesting bit of trivia on why the frame rate is '119.88' instead of 120: It's using the NTSC/ATSC frame-base of 1.001. Ever since old TV standards moved from black and white to color within the US, the timing has been "frames per one and one onethousandth of a second". So 120/1.001 = 119.88. Was a neat trick in the analog days to maintain compatibility with the older black and white TV sets. Fastforward to the digital age and that fractional timing difference makes keeping audio and video sync an absolute nightmare.
• Ycros 6y ago
  On lower dpi monitors I use bitmap fonts with no smoothing for coding, they are crisp. See http://upperbounds.net/index.php?menu=download http://upperbounds.net/index.php?menu=download for a bunch of these fonts (I use Proggy Clean with slashed zeroes and bold punctuation). Note that you may have to play with your font size and turn off any antialiasing in your editor to get it looking right.
• purplezooey 6y ago
  Ever since I saw that picture of Linus writing code on a shitty 90s laptop on his mom's kitchen table I feel like I don't deserve any trifle creature comforts.
• mindentropy 6y ago
  It is just me that I used to find CRT monitors much more soothing and soft to my eyes. I feel the LCD monitors to have a very synthetic contrast, brightness and colors which I find harsh to my eyes.
• swordsmith 6y ago
  The entire time I'm reading the post, I'm thinking the yellow background really hurts my eyes...
• ajtjp 6y ago
  Some people have mentioned that once you use 4K, you can't go back. I guess I'm in the group that has used 4K (or 5K, in my case), and found it easy to go back. At work, we have these 5K, 27" LG monitors: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMUB2LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k-display https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMUB2LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k... . Don't get me wrong, they're great, but... I don't feel like I'm missing anything when I go home and use my Dell U2412M (1920x1200, 24"). And working from home the past three months hasn't tempted me to upgrade my monitor, either. 1920x1200 gives me a good amount of real estate at 100% scaling, and that's the main thing I need. Now it is true that if I look at the font in this text box in Vivaldi, the rendering kind of sucks; Firefox is a bit better. There was definitely a time, around when I switched to Windows 6.x from 5.x, when I was passionate about this, and dislike for the Windows 6 font rendering was one of the reasons I stuck with XP as long as I did. Maybe 4K would help with that, but by this point I've adjusted. And even so, spending $900 on the monitor the author suggests is not the most appealing option. That's a lot of GPU upgrade you could get relative to the $300 I spent on my current monitor in 2011. Or I could double the RAM in all my personal systems and get a nice microphone (which would have more of an impact on my working from home experience). Or I could built an entire Ryzen 7 3700 desktop for that price. There are just a lot of things I'd rather prioritize. I'm also find the proposed productivity benefits dubious. As long as the fonts are acceptable enough that I don't find them actively distracting (and as mentioned, with bad enough font rendering that can be the case, so perhaps the author is simply more sensitive to that than I am), how much I can focus is going to have a lot more impact on my productivity. I do somewhat fear that this might re-ignite my former font pickiness, though...
• submeta 6y ago
  > notebooks are not good for development. They are great in mobility and convenience, and this argument might outweigh everything else for some people. I accept that. But still, a desktop monitor + external keyboard are always better than a notebook. This! I can‘t understand how some folks can make dev work with the display of their laptop alone, without an external monitor. And then the trend of trying to setup the ipad pro as the sole working environment, with an external keyboard and a trackpad. Watching those (youtube stars) trying hard to make the setup work, them looking down on a tiny screen, the angle alone! We have had much better setups for years, why giving up on this to work with an inferior setup.
  • teekert 6y ago
    Indeed, and more screens is even better! Ideally I would never need alt-tab anymore. I'm still waiting for a VR workspace, screen everywhere, eyes are then focused on infinity, so that's also better.
  • kovek 6y ago
    RE notebooks vs monitor+keyboard. I have a work macbook, a personal macbook, and a personal thinkpad. I keep work context on the work laptop, one personal project context (ui dev) on my macbook, and one personal project context (backend dev) on my thinkpad. I really like that context switching is a physical experience, which feels much more intuitive, concrete and solid as in "it works". I don't have to open/close tabs, do cmd-tab or maybe ctrl-tab to find the right window, or switch to another digital workspace to switch to the other context. Additionally, those devices being laptops allows me to use them almost anywhere under battery. Whenever I put a sweater under them, I can get them in a comfortable position. Managing multiple tiled windows on one screen is overhead, and so I am fine focusing on one window at a time, and so I am able to show slightly larger font which means I don't have to squint of bend forward too much. I do think it would be nice if I had slightly larger screens.
• dkersten 6y ago
  I use a 32" 1440p monitor and while I would have liked to get a 4k one instead, even with getting tax back by declaring it as a business expense (since I use it primarily for work), 4k still would have been more than I was willing to spend on it right now. I don't want to use a smaller monitor (might even like one size larger) and tend to use large fonts anyway since my eyesight isn't super great, so 1440p seemed like a much better fit for me, given the price of a good 4k one. Maybe in a year or two I can upgrade.
• wwee 6y ago
  I find this article resonates with me on many points. Particularly, high DPI and high refresh rates are not gimmicks, they have meaningful impact in making the user experience better. It's something that Apple has been pushing for years, from Retina to ProMotion. Sure, not everyone will appreciate the difference (Some people are happy with Macbook Airs, some need Threadrippers), but that doesn't mean it's not a meaningful difference for many users. One area that I disagree though: > The idea of a 4k monitor is NOT to get more pixels but to get the pixel-perfect, high-density UI rendering. Otherwise, a normal 1440p display would work better. Not in my experience. Sure, 2x scaling is ideal for sharpness. But there's a tradeoff with screen real estate. I regularly switch between a 1440p monitor at work to a 4k monitor @1.5x scaling at home. Fonts are still noticeably sharper on the 4k monitor. 4k @1.5x scaling is not pixel-perfect, but definitely sharper than 1440p.
• nennes 6y ago
  Based on the article, it looks like a poor man's decent option is a 1440p monitor at 60Hz that is running at 1:1 scaling. Benefits: * Cheap-ish * Reasonable resolution with crisp text * Small difference between 60 and 120Hz Drawbacks: * If you want crisp text and reasonable real estate, forget any other resolution than 1440p. It just won't align with the physical pixels and will look horrible. I'd love to get a 4k monitor at some point, at least that would give me the scaling option in MacOS (1440p doesn't), but if I want really crisp text I have to render the equivalent of 1080, which isn't that much real estate for something like IntelliJ.
  • fenesiistvan 6y ago
    You forgot to mention a very impotant thing: what size?
• leokennis 6y ago
  One key takeaway is that using external monitors connected to a Mac sucks. My eyes are not so good and I like big text: * On my Windows 10 laptop connected to a run of the mill 24" 1920x1080 Dell monitor, I put the scaling at 125% or 150% and everything is rendered bigger and sharp. Maybe one or two dinosaur apps are upscaled and blurry. * On MacOS, the serious OS for graphics people, I can either render everyting sharp at 1x (with tiny menu bars) or have everything rendered as a blurry mess. On a sidenote...I'm liking my Mac less and less. Reasons to stick with it are: no ads in my start menu and tracking in my calculator app like on Windows, no need to install crappy third party drivers to get peripherals to work. Is it just me or is that insane in 2020?
• Pmop 6y ago
  Currently, I work with a 720p 12.5" display, and fixed point bitmap fonts. I'm moving like crazy these days, can only rely on laptops. And Retina Macs are quite expensive where I do live; plus, we are not allowed to import used goods from other countries, and importing a new Mac yields a customs tax that's very painful to pay.
• walrus01 6y ago
  > It’s also possible to run a 4k display at native 3840×2160 pixels. It depends on the size of the display, of course, but in my experience, even 27” 4k displays are too small to run at 1×. The UI will be too tiny. There is a really nice LG 43" monitor (not a TV, it uses displayport) which is optimal for using 1:1 pixel scaling.
• freetime2 6y ago
  I just bought two new monitors this year, and went with 24 inch 1440p. My reasons were: * At the distance I sit they look fine to me. In particular I don’t notice any jarring loss in resolution compared to my MacBook retina display which sits next to them. * The “native” text size on a 24” 1440p monitor is perfect for me. Any smaller and I would struggle to read certain things. * I was concerned about HiDPI scaling on linux. Fractional scaling was still “experimental” at the time I looked. * I actually care more about other factors like the stand than 4k resolution, and would prefer to put my money towards that. * When considering buying a single large monitor and running at native 4k resolution, I had concerns about screen sharing. Would people on smaller monitors have trouble with scaling? Also, having two separate monitors helps me with window management.
• ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Really good essays. It is like reading old date ars technica the long reviews of Mac OS. Many things you notice but not sure what is that.
• ranaexmachina 6y ago
  I just wish there were more 5K displays out there. A few months ago I bought and returned a 4K display because I'm so used to 1440p so that I lost some real estate with 4K at 2x scaling. At the moment I have to upscale the fonts on most websites (e.g. 130 % on HN). Fonts look very nice (although not as nice as on the 4K display) but most UI elements are very small. Fortunately that isn't a real problem since my workflow is keyboard-driven anyway, so I rarely have to click on any buttons. In the end it's still better than the 27" 1080p display I have in my office where you could see every damn pixel. I really don't miss working there.
• needle0 6y ago
  The "Antialiased text in low PPI is better with hinting" argument is unknowingly underlain by Eurocentric assumptions. Asian characters such as Chinese or Japanese have always looked significantly better on the macOS style of text rendering compared to Windows' ClearType, so much that there exists an app called MacType, created by an Asian developer, to force Windows into using Mac-style rendering.
• hareyama 6y ago
  I have been using 42" 4k monitor. It is suitable for some task that require 4 or more windows at same time. For example, development of Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) use more than 4 windows (FPGA CAD, Waveform, HDL editor, explorer, etc...). It is comfortable that use these windows without switching of windows.
• shocks 6y ago
  I recently abandoned three 24” hd monitors for a single 43” 4k and I couldn’t go back. All the desk space, loads more screen space. I don’t need high dpi as a programmer.
• 6c696e7578 6y ago
  I love smooth fonts as much as the next guy, but lets not make that an entry requirement for code. Don't forget that code is about logic: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html#functions https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...
• watt 6y ago
  Happy user of 34WK95U 5k 34" monitor here. "Turn OFF “Font smoothing” in System Preferences → General:" is the best advice I have heard in a year.
• LordHeini 6y ago
  My current setup consists of three 24" 16x10 monitors. Don't know why i should switch. That is a total resolution of 5760*1200 plenty enough. With the added benefit that ide, browser, terminal, mail, slack and whatever neatly snap into position and can be reached with the press of a button. I don't see any reason to trade sharper text rendering for a worse aspect ratio. 16x9 just feels wrong to me; i am working and not at a cinema.
• da39a3ee 6y ago
  The article is deliberately opinionated but I basically agree: the experience of editing text on a 4k/Retina screen is vastly superior to what it was like previously and I'd never want to go back. It's clear that many of the people who think they disagree are Linux users who have (for good reasons) not yet had a period of time to try it out with good OS support. At least, not on their laptop screens. I really hope good Linux support for laptops with high DPI displays emerges, if it has not already (I've read mixed reports).
• growlist 6y ago
  I dislike anti-aliasing, and far prefer a pixel font (or whatever the correct term is) like Terminus: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  Here's the thing: Reading something extremely close to your eyes is unhealthy and causes eyestrain. (Your eyes work harder to focus on closer items.) If your monitor is so close that you can actually see the details described in the article, you're in the eyestrain land. I keep my monitors far enough away that I don't see these details anymore.
  • GregorBrandt 6y ago
    My optometrist tells me this is not true. Exercise does not hurt your eyes.
    • chiefsucker 6y ago
      From my limited understanding not the distance is the problem, but the constant focus at a point in the same distance. That’s the reason why they recommend to look at distant objects every 15 minutes or so. Starring at a tree for ten hours straight would have a similar effect, but woods are so complex that your eyes are constantly refocusing.
• gh123man 6y ago
  Has anyone tried using an LG OLED TV as a monitor? I do. I love OLED - however the LG TVs have 4 subpixels (RGBW) which messes with font rendering regardless of what settings you play with. On Windows, chrome (including chromium edge) seems to have the biggest issue. Windows cleartype fixes most of the native text elements but some apps like chrome look fuzzy no matter what. Has anyone found a good solution for this or for similar displays with non standard subpixel layouts?
• abraxas 6y ago
  We still have so far to go with screen resolution on desktops and laptops. While 200 dpi monitors are a huge improvement over the ridiculous 1080p or 1440p that most people still use we won't hit the zone of diminishing returns until we get near 600dpi. Yes even from a laptop viewing distance 200 dpi and 600 dpi is like night and day if you have good eyesight.
• habosa 6y ago
  I think a lot of people jumped straight to the comments here to discuss their personal opinion on ideal monitor setup. This is a really well-written and deep article by someone who is clearly an expert. All points are well illustrated and I learned a lot about how my MacBook renders graphics from reading it. And yeah at the end it gets into what monitor you should buy. But that wasn't the point.
• TheBlerch 6y ago
  2k (2560 x 1440) seems to be ideal for 27 in. monitors. Does anyone really find 2k insufficient on a 27 in.? And I find 1080p fine on a 24 in. monitor.
  • andrewzah 6y ago
    This is what I do. 1x27" 1440p horizontal @ 240hz, 1x27" 1440p vertical @ 60hz. It's nice.
• martopix 6y ago
  "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. But at least you can enjoy that gorgeous screen and pixel-crisp fonts. Otherwise, why would you buy a retina screen at all?" LOL Has the author considered that maybe perhaps some people prefer more screen space and less "pixel crisp fonts"?
• prepperpotts 6y ago
  My productivity has skyrocketed after our company moved remote, I think in large part because my home monitor is good and my office monitor was garbage. Staring at blurry text all day messes with your brain a lot more than you realize.
• heybrandons 6y ago
  Nice writeup! I recently switched from a 32" gaming >4k to a 27" 4k on my macbook and it's incredible. Love the single thunderbolt cable and resolution <3
• delduca 6y ago
  document.body.style.background = '#fff'
• delduca 6y ago
  document.body.style.background = '#fff'
• shmerl 6y ago
  > I don’t really care for wide gamut or even proper color reproduction. I do. Having irritating colors makes looking at text annoying as well.
• elfchief 6y ago
  From the article: > Why is it 119.88 Herz, not 120 Herz? No idea. The short version of this is that TVs generally have framerates that are a multiple of 59.94, because NTSC is actually 59.94Hz (rather than 60), for various historical reasons -- basically, for color TV to become a thing, without obsoleting every single B&W TV in existence at the time, they needed to slow the framerate down by 0.06Hz[1] There's still plenty of TV-targeted panels out there that only do 59.94Hz, and not 60Hz. Some of them are even in computer monitors! I imagine likewise that there are a lot of panels that do 119.88Hz (59.94Hz * 2) and not 120Hz. And just to be confusing, a number of things (both hardware and software) tell you that you have a 60Hz signal when you actually have a 59.94Hz signal! A really good example is windows -- refresh rate settings in the OS get quite interesting, showing 59.94 in some places, and 60 in other places![2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Color_encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Color_encoding [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2006076/screen-refresh-rate-in-windows-does-not-apply-the-user-selected-settin https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2006076/screen-refr...
• ausjke 6y ago
  Except that my PC and laptop can not do 4K/120, and yes they both are powerful enough for my daily use.
• 40four 6y ago
  Opinions or preferences aside, I thought this was very well written! Enjoyable to read, and I learned a lot about pixels, fonts, screens et-cetera that I did not know before!
• opan 6y ago
  Bitmap fonts look crisp and clear at small sizes. I find I enjoy them much more than a lot of the fonts in the article. Try out Terminus or Tewi at 9pt if you're curious. They make Fira Code and Inconsolata look blurry by comparison. I recently changed my terminal emulator from Termite to Alacritty because Pango broke bitmap fonts, and Termite uses Pango. Unfortunately several other things I use are still using Pango, and I've had to switch to subpar fonts in waybar and a few other spots.
• kurkosdr 6y ago
  If I may add a couple of things: 1. Buying 4K TVs as large PC monitors is a dangerous game, despite all the sweet lies about “convergence” supposedly enabled by HDMI. You have to make sure the TV has a true “PC mode” with true 1:1 pixel mapping and no “subsampling” (if it exists, it is usually enabled by labelling the HDMI input as “PC“), that you weren’t conned with an RGBW pixel format (or any non-RGB pixel format for that matter), and that the panel can display 6500K colour temperature in "PC mode". Also please note some TVs with IPS panels have a pronounced chevron pattern in their subpixel layout instead of the traditional 3 vertical stripes, which makes ClearType look slightly different even in true "PC mode" (I personally find it cute and inoffensive, your mileage may vary) and that all 4K VA panels have bad horizontal viewing angles. 2. Make sure your RGB levels match. That is, use “full range” for RGB 0-255 displays (PC monitors) and “limited range” for RGB 15-235 displays (TV monitors). Sometimes the drivers don’t get this right. If it’s wrong, and you get “limited range” on an RGB 0-255 display, you will get washed out blacks instead of inky blacks.
• vicedvin 6y ago
  I find your opinion very subjective. In my experience, I remember that in 2013-2014 when i switched from MBA to retina MBP i experienced the wow effect. But recently MBP fall off and screen got broken. Now using 720p 20” monitor and have not noticed significant difference. Mostly programming, as in reading and writing text, be it in text editor or shell. It is as good as before. Less screen estate, right, it does not affect my workflow much.
• Zardoz84 6y ago
  As a Guy that does back&front programming and gaming on the same PC, my subjective opinion it's that having a decent color gamut it's important. I saw details that on a old monitor (with a worse color gamut) dissaper or looks worse. Also, a ultra wide screen gives a lot of screen space to handle a code editor/IDE and a browser on the same screen at same time. At some point on the future, I would replace my secondary monitor following this priorities: * Correct color gamut. * Minimal resolution of 1080, better if is 1440. * Minimal refresh rate of 60hz, better if at least is 75hz. This push me to get a LG IPS monitor like the ultra wide main screen that I have now.
• nuc 6y ago
  I have a Dell P2415Q and even though it's relatively old, the density is even higher than the monitors mentioned there. It doesn't have the feeling of macbook's retina, but still is good enough. Wouldn't these monitors feel that they have even less clarity that this dell one?
• vcsilva 6y ago
  The author claims that high-resolution displays are a commodity now. That may be true, but those can be really expensive depending on where you live. In Brazil, most laptops are still (sadly) sold with 1366x768 displays. 1080p displays are that much more expensive, let alone 4K.
• SteveLTN 6y ago
  I'm not sure about the macOS scaling, and I couldn't find any info on the Internet about my question. When using non-integer scaling, does mac OS actually render fonts at 2x, then scales it all down? So you have a 3840x2160 monitor, set mac OS to "look like 2560x1440", it would render at 5120x2880, then scale it down to 3840x2160? To me, a more logical solution would be using the vector font of the target physical pixel value (3840x2160) and skip all scaling etc.
• gabssnake 6y ago
  Was used to HDPI screens at home and previous gig. Now at work with Linux and some cheap Dell 24"s: just zoom like 200%, until text is huge. If you only fit 80 cols like god meant to, type will be clear, you can have your monitor further away, improve your posture and eye strain. Code might even get better. Guess coders care little about typography, like everyone else, mostly out laziness and lack of appreciation.
• kkwuijmwju 6y ago
  jjmanhnajnwjs
• kkwuijmwju 6y ago
  bru
• kkwuijmwju 6y ago
  what are you doing?????????????????????????????im a hacker
• Finesse 6y ago
  How to enable subpixel antialiasing on latest macOS: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/337871/188791 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/337871/188791