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I don't know why anyone would buy this goofy monitor, the LG 27GN950-B has a gorgeous 4K@144Hz HDR screen, works great for gaming and for reading text / coding,

I don't know why anyone would buy this goofy monitor, the LG 27GN950-B has a gorgeous 4K@144Hz HDR screen, works great for gaming and for reading text / coding, and is cheaper too. You could get this monitor, a pair of great AudioEngine A2 speakers and a webcam, and still have money left over

giantrobot 5y ago
You'd need a monitor, speakers, and a webcam. Each with their own connection cables to the computer and everything but the webcam needing wall warts for power. There's a value is reducing desk clutter. It may not be the main reason to pick one monitor over another but it definitely has a value to some people.
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
That monitor looks like the ugly run-of-the-mill gaming accessory, and the AudioEngine A2 are terrible speakers (I've owned them). Gaming gear has good specs in general, but aesthetically pleasing it is not.
turtlebits 5y ago
4k on a Mac without non-integer scaling makes the UI too large (essentially running at 1080p).
eddyg 5y ago
A 5K display offers about 1,000 extra horizontal and 700 extra vertical pixels. When you're working with 4K images and video, that’s enough space for video editing tools on the side and timelines at the bottom, all while viewing "UltraHD" in its full, unscaled beauty. Until you've experienced what it's like to use a 5K (or even 6K, which will really spoil you), it's hard to appreciate why 4K is insufficient for many professionals.
- silon42 5y ago
  for that resolution, I'd want a ~40 inch or more.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Since you're talking about video editing, the lack of HDR is very nearly a deal breaker for that professional market. Also this is an 8bit + FRC panel if you care about that sort of thing. Regardless multi-monitor setups exist and are well supported, so it's not hard to get both a 4k preview at 1:1 scaling and have plenty of room for controls by just running 2 displays. It'd be nice to have it all - 5k, >60hz, and a decent HDR support. Even just 90hz would be a good improvement, but 120hz gets you zero pulldown for 24fps video! But alas that display doesn't exist. This display doesn't seem to really strike a good balance of what's achievable, it feels like a stop gap placeholder for the now canceled 27" iMac
  - coob 5y ago
    Which is why Apple make the XDR for the professional market.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      It's not >60 Hz though
      - gannonburgett 5y ago
        You don't really ever need >60Hz for editing though. You're working with 60fps, at most, but even more likely 30fps or 24fps.
        wlesieutre 5y ago
        I'm not much into video editing, but is it not useful that 120 hz is a multiple of 24, while 60 hz is not?
        kllrnohj 5y ago
        Remember all those 120hz and 240hz plasma TVs back in the day that couldn't take any >60hz input signal? Yeah that wasn't just pointless marketing. It was so they could show 24fps and 48fps video content smoothly, without 3:2 pulldown artifacts. If you're working in a professional video studio, chances are you're probably going to encounter 24fps video. So yeah, still matters beyond gaming.
- llampx 5y ago
  Pixels are nothing without the corresponding physical real estate imo
  - orangecat 5y ago
    Reading text is far more pleasant at high DPI, especially with proper scaling which you don't get at 27" 4k.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    This is why I have a comically large 43” 4k which I operate at 1x. It’s roughly the same density as a 27” at 1440. High DPI is nice and all, but I’ll take more space to work over pixel density any day.
    - ansible 5y ago
      I just have a 42in LG TV that I use as my main work monitor. It was around $220 a few years ago. After working out the kinks with using it (because a TV is not a monitor), it's been pretty good. I also position it further away from me than I would a normal monitor. In part, that is because I would otherwise see some dimming around the edges due to the viewing angle. And also because focusing further away works better (getting old can sometimes be inconvenient). It is just 60Hz, so you might not want to use it for gaming, though there are higher refresh TVs out there these days. Of course you have to dig through the marketing fluff to see if they are a true 120Hz panel or not.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Yeah mine is actually an IPS panel. Also 60Hz, but the viewing angles are great. I do have mine set back a bit more than my previous 27", but the more important adjustment I needed to make was to set it 6-8" lower. Before that, I only felt comfortable working on the bottom half of the screen.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    While I also prefer small UI and more real estate with more pixels, even without real estate change a high DPI "retina" 2x and a regular DPI has a difference of night and day for me. But yes when I have the option I tend to choose the smaller UI settings too.
- Swizec 5y ago
  I've had the 5K LG 27" monitor for about 5 years now and 4K monitors just look blurry now. Feels like you can count the pixels even though you can't. Reading VSCode off this monitor feels like reading analog text on paper. It's amazing for eye strain. Really doesn't feel like you're staring at a screen all day.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I experienced the same thing, even more abruptly, when I switched away from a 32 inch 4K monitor to a Samsung CRG9 49-inch monitor. Feels like I can count the pixels on the 49 inch monitor. I love the wider real estate, but now I want something with at least the vertical pixel density of the 4K monitor, but the same height as a 32 inch, and the same width as a 49 inch. Whatever that comes out to be.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Or one can use 2 4K monitors side-by-side and can arguably be more productive. It's even cheaper than buying the Studio Display.
throwaway98797 5y ago
5K resolution is perfect since it can drive retina level at 1440p, the best pixel density at 27 inches. (Personal preference obv)
- nimbix 5y ago
  IMHO 4k was the worst thing to ever happen to monitors. Now we have screens ranging from 24" to 43+" all using the same physical resoluton. This means that at all the most popular screen sizes you need to use some weird 1.5 or 1.25 scaling factor which results in all sorts of weird rendering quirks, like 1px gaps when rendering engines try to fit elements to pixel boundaries. Plus SVGs often rasterize to a blurry mess since there is no rendering magic that could make a 1px line rasterize nicely over one and a half pixel.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    1080p was the same way. 1440p was almost exclusively an Apple thing. Monitor manufacturers want to sell size, not resolution. I'm starting to wonder if vector formats and layout engines need pixel hinting capabilities, like font formats already do. As far as I'm aware browser engines already have to hack in these sorts of layout tweaks to avoid, say, float-based layouts collapsing into multiple lines at odd zoom percentages. Apple's insistence on integer scaling ratios is noble, but it also renders the display part of their hardware ecosystem an island.
  - legalcorrection 5y ago
    Windows does fractional display scaling just fine. Most software these days supports it and renders perfectly. Yes, occasionally you run into some legacy pixel-based UI and get a blurry window. This will almost always be some utility software, not a program you interact with for long periods of time.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
Don't forget that the Apple Studio Display has a hard-wired power cord. Seriously. The last monitor I owned with a non-removable power cord was a CRT.
- matja 5y ago
  Surely a removable power cord would ruin the whole aesthetic!?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- woobar 5y ago
  This is not true. [1] It is non-standard power cord, but it is removable [1] https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1504473080348884992 https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1504473080348884992
  - bogantech 5y ago
    With a lot of force anything is removable A direct reply to that tweet shows the Apple documentation stating that they consider it non removable by the end user https://twitter.com/aaron_bukovsky/status/1505001341189505029?s=20&t=QgdI4aWGoyGkXHzWqn1S6A https://twitter.com/aaron_bukovsky/status/150500134118950502...
  - zamalek 5y ago
    Let's an image with it re-attached; without a visit to the Geek Bar, at least.
    - terramex 5y ago
      Linus from LTT YouTube channel tested it and it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mtGjDRRI&t=1502s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mtGjDRRI&t=1502s It required significant force to disconnect it first time but then it goes out and in as expected.
legalcorrection 5y ago
Do you have a recommendation for a 32" monitor? Also, would that monitor you linked be good for office use?
- aaomidi 5y ago
  M32U
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    I have the same monitor. But I wouldn't advise it for color work(only 90% P3)
    - legalcorrection 5y ago
      I don't do color work thankfully. How is it for e.g. text editing in a darker room?
      - arvinsim 5y ago
        I have strong overhead light so I haven't tested it in those conditions.
      - aaomidi 5y ago
        For a darker room it's actually perfect. For a bright room it does get...a bit annoying. However honestly it's still really good. If you're looking for specifics, I recommend: https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ The one really nice thing about this monitor is the built in KVM switch. That's so bloody useful I ignored a lot of other things.
altairprime 5y ago
It’s 240ppi. No PC monitors match that.
- Matthias247 5y ago
  It's actually 217dpi. But it's still a noticable jump from the 160dpi that 4k @ 27" offers.
- zamalek 5y ago
  Why do people believe anything that Apple says these days? LG has a spec-for-spec monitor that's over 3 years old.[1] [1]: 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...
  - bartvk 5y ago
    That's the monitor that Apple sold for the past years in their stores (and has now replaced with this new monitor).
    - zamalek 5y ago
      It's still a monitor that has the same PPI.
  - altairprime 5y ago
    I recommended against the 27MD5KA; it has hardware RFI defects that break nearby Bluetooth. When it was released, the 27MD5KB wouldn’t boot reliably as the Mac Mini’s only monitor on whatever macOS was out at the time, so I couldn’t consider it a valid display for a Mac. No doubt it’s fine for PCs though.
pdpi 5y ago
A 4K display at the same pixel density as this would be a 21” diagonal. MacOS does a relatively ok job of displaying a logical resolution of 1440p on a 4K display but windows just completely shits the bed with high dpi modes. Pixel-perfect logical 1440p on physical 5k looks better than the alternatives by a wide margin.
- searls 5y ago
  This used to be true, and I think is why we STILL don't see very many high resolution monitors targeting the PC market, but Windows 10 is actually quite good at resolution scaling now. It typically picks the right default and everything scales great IME
  - pdpi 5y ago
    I'm using a 4k display at 1440p logical resolution as my secondary display, and there's a bunch of apps I won't run on it because they look like pants.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
searls 5y ago
That monitor only has 163dpi, which isn't "retina" or particularly tight to my eyes, whereas the Studio Display has 218dpi, which looks great at pixel-doubled (200%) rendering. Huge differentiation in my book
rconti 5y ago
I thought the Studio Display was supposed to have a really good webcam? But I see it mentioned as being "terrible" here, several times. What gives?
- paulannesley 5y ago
  This might help: https://daringfireball.net/2022/03/the_apple_studio_display https://daringfireball.net/2022/03/the_apple_studio_display Sounds like it shipped with some last-minute firmware bug that degraded the image quality way below what it's capable of. Should be fixed by a firmware (iOS?) update.
  - rconti 5y ago
    OOF! Thanks.

giantrobot 5y ago

You'd need a monitor, speakers, and a webcam. Each with their own connection cables to the computer and everything but the webcam needing wall warts for power. There's a value is reducing desk clutter. It may not be the main reason to pick one monitor over another but it definitely has a value to some people.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

That monitor looks like the ugly run-of-the-mill gaming accessory, and the AudioEngine A2 are terrible speakers (I've owned them). Gaming gear has good specs in general, but aesthetically pleasing it is not.

turtlebits 5y ago

4k on a Mac without non-integer scaling makes the UI too large (essentially running at 1080p).

eddyg 5y ago

A 5K display offers about 1,000 extra horizontal and 700 extra vertical pixels. When you're working with 4K images and video, that’s enough space for video editing tools on the side and timelines at the bottom, all while viewing "UltraHD" in its full, unscaled beauty. Until you've experienced what it's like to use a 5K (or even 6K, which will really spoil you), it's hard to appreciate why 4K is insufficient for many professionals.

silon42 5y ago
for that resolution, I'd want a ~40 inch or more.
kllrnohj 5y ago
Since you're talking about video editing, the lack of HDR is very nearly a deal breaker for that professional market. Also this is an 8bit + FRC panel if you care about that sort of thing. Regardless multi-monitor setups exist and are well supported, so it's not hard to get both a 4k preview at 1:1 scaling and have plenty of room for controls by just running 2 displays. It'd be nice to have it all - 5k, >60hz, and a decent HDR support. Even just 90hz would be a good improvement, but 120hz gets you zero pulldown for 24fps video! But alas that display doesn't exist. This display doesn't seem to really strike a good balance of what's achievable, it feels like a stop gap placeholder for the now canceled 27" iMac
- coob 5y ago
  Which is why Apple make the XDR for the professional market.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    It's not >60 Hz though
    - gannonburgett 5y ago
      You don't really ever need >60Hz for editing though. You're working with 60fps, at most, but even more likely 30fps or 24fps.
      - wlesieutre 5y ago
        I'm not much into video editing, but is it not useful that 120 hz is a multiple of 24, while 60 hz is not?
      - kllrnohj 5y ago
        Remember all those 120hz and 240hz plasma TVs back in the day that couldn't take any >60hz input signal? Yeah that wasn't just pointless marketing. It was so they could show 24fps and 48fps video content smoothly, without 3:2 pulldown artifacts. If you're working in a professional video studio, chances are you're probably going to encounter 24fps video. So yeah, still matters beyond gaming.
llampx 5y ago
Pixels are nothing without the corresponding physical real estate imo
- orangecat 5y ago
  Reading text is far more pleasant at high DPI, especially with proper scaling which you don't get at 27" 4k.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  This is why I have a comically large 43” 4k which I operate at 1x. It’s roughly the same density as a 27” at 1440. High DPI is nice and all, but I’ll take more space to work over pixel density any day.
  - ansible 5y ago
    I just have a 42in LG TV that I use as my main work monitor. It was around $220 a few years ago. After working out the kinks with using it (because a TV is not a monitor), it's been pretty good. I also position it further away from me than I would a normal monitor. In part, that is because I would otherwise see some dimming around the edges due to the viewing angle. And also because focusing further away works better (getting old can sometimes be inconvenient). It is just 60Hz, so you might not want to use it for gaming, though there are higher refresh TVs out there these days. Of course you have to dig through the marketing fluff to see if they are a true 120Hz panel or not.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Yeah mine is actually an IPS panel. Also 60Hz, but the viewing angles are great. I do have mine set back a bit more than my previous 27", but the more important adjustment I needed to make was to set it 6-8" lower. Before that, I only felt comfortable working on the bottom half of the screen.
- can16358p 5y ago
  While I also prefer small UI and more real estate with more pixels, even without real estate change a high DPI "retina" 2x and a regular DPI has a difference of night and day for me. But yes when I have the option I tend to choose the smaller UI settings too.
Swizec 5y ago
I've had the 5K LG 27" monitor for about 5 years now and 4K monitors just look blurry now. Feels like you can count the pixels even though you can't. Reading VSCode off this monitor feels like reading analog text on paper. It's amazing for eye strain. Really doesn't feel like you're staring at a screen all day.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I experienced the same thing, even more abruptly, when I switched away from a 32 inch 4K monitor to a Samsung CRG9 49-inch monitor. Feels like I can count the pixels on the 49 inch monitor. I love the wider real estate, but now I want something with at least the vertical pixel density of the 4K monitor, but the same height as a 32 inch, and the same width as a 49 inch. Whatever that comes out to be.
arvinsim 5y ago
Or one can use 2 4K monitors side-by-side and can arguably be more productive. It's even cheaper than buying the Studio Display.

throwaway98797 5y ago

5K resolution is perfect since it can drive retina level at 1440p, the best pixel density at 27 inches. (Personal preference obv)

nimbix 5y ago
IMHO 4k was the worst thing to ever happen to monitors. Now we have screens ranging from 24" to 43+" all using the same physical resoluton. This means that at all the most popular screen sizes you need to use some weird 1.5 or 1.25 scaling factor which results in all sorts of weird rendering quirks, like 1px gaps when rendering engines try to fit elements to pixel boundaries. Plus SVGs often rasterize to a blurry mess since there is no rendering magic that could make a 1px line rasterize nicely over one and a half pixel.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  1080p was the same way. 1440p was almost exclusively an Apple thing. Monitor manufacturers want to sell size, not resolution. I'm starting to wonder if vector formats and layout engines need pixel hinting capabilities, like font formats already do. As far as I'm aware browser engines already have to hack in these sorts of layout tweaks to avoid, say, float-based layouts collapsing into multiple lines at odd zoom percentages. Apple's insistence on integer scaling ratios is noble, but it also renders the display part of their hardware ecosystem an island.
- legalcorrection 5y ago
  Windows does fractional display scaling just fine. Most software these days supports it and renders perfectly. Yes, occasionally you run into some legacy pixel-based UI and get a blurry window. This will almost always be some utility software, not a program you interact with for long periods of time.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

Don't forget that the Apple Studio Display has a hard-wired power cord. Seriously. The last monitor I owned with a non-removable power cord was a CRT.

matja 5y ago
Surely a removable power cord would ruin the whole aesthetic!?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
woobar 5y ago
This is not true. [1] It is non-standard power cord, but it is removable [1] https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1504473080348884992 https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1504473080348884992
- bogantech 5y ago
  With a lot of force anything is removable A direct reply to that tweet shows the Apple documentation stating that they consider it non removable by the end user https://twitter.com/aaron_bukovsky/status/1505001341189505029?s=20&t=QgdI4aWGoyGkXHzWqn1S6A https://twitter.com/aaron_bukovsky/status/150500134118950502...
- zamalek 5y ago
  Let's an image with it re-attached; without a visit to the Geek Bar, at least.
  - terramex 5y ago
    Linus from LTT YouTube channel tested it and it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mtGjDRRI&t=1502s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mtGjDRRI&t=1502s It required significant force to disconnect it first time but then it goes out and in as expected.

legalcorrection 5y ago

Do you have a recommendation for a 32" monitor? Also, would that monitor you linked be good for office use?

aaomidi 5y ago
M32U
- arvinsim 5y ago
  I have the same monitor. But I wouldn't advise it for color work(only 90% P3)
  - legalcorrection 5y ago
    I don't do color work thankfully. How is it for e.g. text editing in a darker room?
    - arvinsim 5y ago
      I have strong overhead light so I haven't tested it in those conditions.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      For a darker room it's actually perfect. For a bright room it does get...a bit annoying. However honestly it's still really good. If you're looking for specifics, I recommend: https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ The one really nice thing about this monitor is the built in KVM switch. That's so bloody useful I ignored a lot of other things.

altairprime 5y ago

It’s 240ppi. No PC monitors match that.

Matthias247 5y ago
It's actually 217dpi. But it's still a noticable jump from the 160dpi that 4k @ 27" offers.
zamalek 5y ago
Why do people believe anything that Apple says these days? LG has a spec-for-spec monitor that's over 3 years old.[1] [1]: 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...
- bartvk 5y ago
  That's the monitor that Apple sold for the past years in their stores (and has now replaced with this new monitor).
  - zamalek 5y ago
    It's still a monitor that has the same PPI.
- altairprime 5y ago
  I recommended against the 27MD5KA; it has hardware RFI defects that break nearby Bluetooth. When it was released, the 27MD5KB wouldn’t boot reliably as the Mac Mini’s only monitor on whatever macOS was out at the time, so I couldn’t consider it a valid display for a Mac. No doubt it’s fine for PCs though.

pdpi 5y ago

A 4K display at the same pixel density as this would be a 21” diagonal. MacOS does a relatively ok job of displaying a logical resolution of 1440p on a 4K display but windows just completely shits the bed with high dpi modes. Pixel-perfect logical 1440p on physical 5k looks better than the alternatives by a wide margin.

searls 5y ago
This used to be true, and I think is why we STILL don't see very many high resolution monitors targeting the PC market, but Windows 10 is actually quite good at resolution scaling now. It typically picks the right default and everything scales great IME
- pdpi 5y ago
  I'm using a 4k display at 1440p logical resolution as my secondary display, and there's a bunch of apps I won't run on it because they look like pants.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

searls 5y ago

That monitor only has 163dpi, which isn't "retina" or particularly tight to my eyes, whereas the Studio Display has 218dpi, which looks great at pixel-doubled (200%) rendering. Huge differentiation in my book

rconti 5y ago

I thought the Studio Display was supposed to have a really good webcam? But I see it mentioned as being "terrible" here, several times. What gives?

paulannesley 5y ago
This might help: https://daringfireball.net/2022/03/the_apple_studio_display https://daringfireball.net/2022/03/the_apple_studio_display Sounds like it shipped with some last-minute firmware bug that degraded the image quality way below what it's capable of. Should be fixed by a firmware (iOS?) update.
- rconti 5y ago
  OOF! Thanks.