6 ms·

The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off.

by piker 1y ago

The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off. For example, it's clear that a lot of the Rust UI framework developers have been working on Macs for the last few years. The font rendering on many of those look bad once you plug them into a more normal DPI monitor. If they hadn't been using Macs with Retina displays they would have noticed.

stephenr 1y ago
Conversely if you only use a ~110 DPI display you won't know how bad it looks on a ~220 DPI display. The solution here is wide device testing, not artificially limiting individual developers to the lowest common denominator of shitty displays.
- mrbungie 1y ago
  Yeah sure, as long as you have a lot of resources for testing widely. Still, if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average", just as its done for (most) pop music production.
  - stephenr 1y ago
    > if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average" For Macs, 220DPI absolutely is the average.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from - my former employers equipped all the software engineers with dual-4K displays nearly a decade ago. One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world, and >2K displays have been cheap on desktop for a really long time.
      - gr4vityWall 1y ago
        I believe there are a lot of people using 1080p monitors because they bought it a while ago and they're still working fine. There's also a lot of lower-end 1080p monitors still being sold today. > One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world I personally see a lot of 1080p screens on new gaming laptops too. Lots of people get those for work from what I see with my peers. When I sold my RTX 3060 laptop with a 1080p screen, most buyers wanted it for professional work, according to them. > I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from If anything, this is exactly the place where I'd expect a bunch of people to be rocking an older Thinkpad. :)
        leguminous 1y ago
        If you look at the Steam hardware survey, most users (as in, > 50%) are still using 1080p or below. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        I don't think this is contra to my original point. Nearly 50% of all users are running at greater-than 1080p resolutions, and presumably power users are overrepresented in the latter category (and certainly, it's not just the ~2.5% of Mac users pushing the average up)
        gr4vityWall 1y ago
        FWIW, I didn't mean to reply to you in an argumentative way. Just proposing an answer to this: > I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from I still see 1080p fairly often on new setups/laptops, basically, although 1440p and 4K are becoming more common on higher-end desktops. Then again, 1440p at 27" or 32" isn't really high dpi.
        noir_lord 1y ago
    - toast0 1y ago
      Sure, but Macs are around 10% of general desktop computing. To a first approximation, they don't count. User communities vary widely. If you target macs, then a high DPI screen is a must for testing. Otherwise, I dunno; ~ 100 DPI screens are way less expensive than ~ 200 DPI screens, so I'd expect that installed base is significantly higher for standard DPI. But there's probably enough high DPI users that it's worth giving it a look. To address a question elsewhere, personally, I don't see the benefit to pushing 4x the pixels when ~ 100 DPI works fine for me. My eyes aren't what they were 20 years ago, and it's just extra expense at every level.
- MBCook 1y ago
  I can’t tell you how often I see this. Brand new designs or logos in 2024 or 2025 that look abysmal on a retina monitor because no one bothered to check. Stands out like a sore thumb.
nine_k 1y ago
As a designer, one should keep a couple of cheap, low-res monitors reset to the factory defaults for proofing what many users are going to see.
- sim7c00 1y ago
  this exactly. same ppl do for sound, listen in the car, over shity headphones etc. - that's just quality control not the fault of any piece of equipment.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    Yes this is universal in pro mixing setups, having filters or even actual physical hardware to provide the sound of stock earbuds, a crappy Bluetooth speaker, sound system in a minivan, etc.
  - edb_123 1y ago
    Well, of course it's a good idea to double check with various output methods. But if a mix sounds good on studio monitors with a flattest possible frequency response (preferably even calibrated with an internal DSP) in an acoustically treated room, there's a very high probability it will sound good on almost anything out there. At least that's my experience.
    - spookie 1y ago
      I would reccomend one to take a look at the usual frequency response of cheap drivers or the inherent flaws of the consumer tech over time and compare it with the evolution of pop music. Audio engineers are for sure taking all this into account, and more (:
- eb0la 1y ago
  I must confess I felt a lot of lust looking at the self color calibration feature. It is extremely useful if your work ends up in paper. For photography (edit: film and broadcast, too) would be great. My use case are comics and illustration, so a self-color-correcting cintiq or tablet would be great for me.
SeasonalEnnui 1y ago
Yes! I’m glad to see this pointed out - when working on UIs, I regularly move them between 3 monitors with varying resolution & DPI. 4k @ 200%, 2K at 125%, and 2K at 100%. This reveals not only design issues but application stack issues with DPI support.
ponector 1y ago
Also, it's not only about the screen resolution. Developers uses powerful macs and users have old windows - the usability is different, but devs usually don't care. Works fine on my machine! Had reported many issues where to reproduce they needed to enable 10x throttling in the browser. Or use a Windows machine.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > Developers uses powerful macs and users have old windows - the usability is different, but devs usually don't care. Works fine on my machine! Part of what QA testing should be about: performance regressions.
  - branko_d 1y ago
    This is not even a regression - it has always been there, unnoticed!
    - throw0101d 1y ago
      If it has always been there, then your QA process has always sucked and missed it.
  - ponector 1y ago
    Usually it is not a priority, especially for enterprise software. It's ok if UI is lagging, page finish loading in 10 seconds, etc. Simply because there is usually no other choice, people have to use whatever is bought/developed.
guhcampos 1y ago
This is more widespread than we like to admit. Developers writing software on 64GB M4 Macs often don't realize the performance bottlenecks of the software they write. Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write. Developers writing services over unlimited cloud budgets often don't realize the resource wastes into which their software incurrs. And to extend this to society in general. Rich people with nice things often alienate themselves from the reality of the majority of people in the World.
- jonhohle 1y ago
  I tend to use older hardware and feel like I’m constantly fighting this battle. It’s amazing thr hardware we have and I have to wait for dozens of seconds to start an app or load a web page.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Sometimes I run "old software" on the latest hardware it could support (think Windows 2000 on 2010s machines) and it is amazing how much it flies.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I would like to ask why even fight the battle? Philosophically I am with you, e-waste and consumerism are bad, but pragmatically it is not worth punishing yourself from a dollars and cents standpoint. You can jump on Amazon and buy a mini PC in the $300 range that’s got an 8 core 16 thread AMD 6800H CPU, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, basically a well above-average machine, with upgradable RAM and storage. $240 if you buy it on AliExpress. You can grab a MacBook Air M2 for around $500. Why suffer with slow hardware? Assuming that using a computer is at least somewhat important to your workflow.
- bombcar 1y ago
  You need two "classes" of developers; which may be the exact same people - those who are on the fastest, biggest hardware money can buy - but you also need some time running on nearly the worst hardware you can find.
sz4kerto 1y ago
This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).
- Intermernet 1y ago
  People used to buy NS-10s because they knew professional studios used them. They were then underwhelmed when they sounded worse than the hifi speakers they had at home. Many audio engineers live by the mantra "if it sounds good on NS-10s, it'll sound good on anything". We need such a touchstone for software engineers.
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    It'd be moving touchstone is the problems, speakers in the consumer space don't evolve as fast as computing tech in the user space. You could get somewhat close by looking at what was a middle of the road consumer laptop from Dell/HP/Lenovo 5 years ago and buying one of those though.
mschuster91 1y ago
This is just as valid for mobile app and website development. When all you use for testing is Browserstack, local emulators and whatnot and only the latest iPhone and Samsung S-series flagship, your Thing will be unusable for wide parts of the population. Always, always use at the very least the oldest iPhone Apple still supports, the cheapest and oldest (!) Samsung A-series models still being sold in retail stores as "new", and at least one Huawei and Xiaomi device. And then, don't test your Thing only on wifi backed by your Gbit Wifi 7 router and uplink. Disable wifi and limit mobile data to 2G or whatever is the lowest your phone provider supports. And then, have someone from QA visit the countryside with long stretches of no service at all or serious degradation (think packet loss rates of 60% or more, latencies of 2 seconds+). If your app survives this with minimal loss of functionality, you did good. A bunch of issues will only crop up in real world testing. Stuff like instead of keeping a single socket to the mothership open, using fresh from scratch SSL connections for each interactions is the main bummer... latency really really eats such bottlenecks alive. Forgotten async handling leading to non-responsiveness of the main application. You won't catch that, not even with Chrome's network inspector - you won't feel the sheer rage of the end user having a pressing need and be let down by your Thing - even if you're not responsible for their shitty phone service, they will associate the bad service with your app. Oh, and also test out getting interrupted while using your Thing on the cheap-ass phones. Whatsapp and FB Messenger calls, for example - these gobble so much RAM that your app or browser will get killed by OOM or battery saver, and when the user has their interruption finished, if you didn't do it right your Thing's local state will have gotten corrupted or removed, leading the user having to start from scratch!
arresin 1y ago
This was (is?) the issue with zed and maybe the cause also.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off. That’s not the problem of using this monitor for creating the work, that’s the problem of not also using a more typical monitor (or, better, an array covering the common use cases, but which is practical depends on whether you are talking about a solo creator or a bigger team) for validating the work. Just as with software, developers benefit from a more powerful machine for developing, but the product benefits from also being tested on machines more like the typical end-user setup.
freejazz 1y ago
>The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off. Really? It's not a problem for photo retouchers, for whom a monitor like this is basically designed for.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I make a point of keeping my secondary monitor a "normal" DPI 2560x1440 display precisely to avoid this kind of problem. The loss of legibility has little impact on secondary monitor use cases, and I can easily spot-check my UI and UI graphics work by simply dragging the window over. High quality normal DPI monitors are so cheap these days that even if multi-monitor isn't one's cup of tea there's not really a good reason to not have one (except maybe space restrictions, in which case a cheap ~16" 1080p/1200p portable monitor from Amazon will serve the purpose nicely).

by piker 1y ago

stephenr 1y ago

Conversely if you only use a ~110 DPI display you won't know how bad it looks on a ~220 DPI display. The solution here is wide device testing, not artificially limiting individual developers to the lowest common denominator of shitty displays.

mrbungie 1y ago
Yeah sure, as long as you have a lot of resources for testing widely. Still, if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average", just as its done for (most) pop music production.
- stephenr 1y ago
  > if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average" For Macs, 220DPI absolutely is the average.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from - my former employers equipped all the software engineers with dual-4K displays nearly a decade ago. One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world, and >2K displays have been cheap on desktop for a really long time.
    - gr4vityWall 1y ago
      I believe there are a lot of people using 1080p monitors because they bought it a while ago and they're still working fine. There's also a lot of lower-end 1080p monitors still being sold today. > One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world I personally see a lot of 1080p screens on new gaming laptops too. Lots of people get those for work from what I see with my peers. When I sold my RTX 3060 laptop with a 1080p screen, most buyers wanted it for professional work, according to them. > I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from If anything, this is exactly the place where I'd expect a bunch of people to be rocking an older Thinkpad. :)
      - leguminous 1y ago
        If you look at the Steam hardware survey, most users (as in, > 50%) are still using 1080p or below. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        I don't think this is contra to my original point. Nearly 50% of all users are running at greater-than 1080p resolutions, and presumably power users are overrepresented in the latter category (and certainly, it's not just the ~2.5% of Mac users pushing the average up)
        gr4vityWall 1y ago
        FWIW, I didn't mean to reply to you in an argumentative way. Just proposing an answer to this: > I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from I still see 1080p fairly often on new setups/laptops, basically, although 1440p and 4K are becoming more common on higher-end desktops. Then again, 1440p at 27" or 32" isn't really high dpi.
        noir_lord 1y ago
  - toast0 1y ago
    Sure, but Macs are around 10% of general desktop computing. To a first approximation, they don't count. User communities vary widely. If you target macs, then a high DPI screen is a must for testing. Otherwise, I dunno; ~ 100 DPI screens are way less expensive than ~ 200 DPI screens, so I'd expect that installed base is significantly higher for standard DPI. But there's probably enough high DPI users that it's worth giving it a look. To address a question elsewhere, personally, I don't see the benefit to pushing 4x the pixels when ~ 100 DPI works fine for me. My eyes aren't what they were 20 years ago, and it's just extra expense at every level.
MBCook 1y ago
I can’t tell you how often I see this. Brand new designs or logos in 2024 or 2025 that look abysmal on a retina monitor because no one bothered to check. Stands out like a sore thumb.

nine_k 1y ago

As a designer, one should keep a couple of cheap, low-res monitors reset to the factory defaults for proofing what many users are going to see.

sim7c00 1y ago
this exactly. same ppl do for sound, listen in the car, over shity headphones etc. - that's just quality control not the fault of any piece of equipment.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Yes this is universal in pro mixing setups, having filters or even actual physical hardware to provide the sound of stock earbuds, a crappy Bluetooth speaker, sound system in a minivan, etc.
- edb_123 1y ago
  Well, of course it's a good idea to double check with various output methods. But if a mix sounds good on studio monitors with a flattest possible frequency response (preferably even calibrated with an internal DSP) in an acoustically treated room, there's a very high probability it will sound good on almost anything out there. At least that's my experience.
  - spookie 1y ago
    I would reccomend one to take a look at the usual frequency response of cheap drivers or the inherent flaws of the consumer tech over time and compare it with the evolution of pop music. Audio engineers are for sure taking all this into account, and more (:
eb0la 1y ago
I must confess I felt a lot of lust looking at the self color calibration feature. It is extremely useful if your work ends up in paper. For photography (edit: film and broadcast, too) would be great. My use case are comics and illustration, so a self-color-correcting cintiq or tablet would be great for me.

SeasonalEnnui 1y ago

Yes! I’m glad to see this pointed out - when working on UIs, I regularly move them between 3 monitors with varying resolution & DPI. 4k @ 200%, 2K at 125%, and 2K at 100%. This reveals not only design issues but application stack issues with DPI support.

ponector 1y ago

Also, it's not only about the screen resolution. Developers uses powerful macs and users have old windows - the usability is different, but devs usually don't care. Works fine on my machine! Had reported many issues where to reproduce they needed to enable 10x throttling in the browser. Or use a Windows machine.

throw0101d 1y ago
> Developers uses powerful macs and users have old windows - the usability is different, but devs usually don't care. Works fine on my machine! Part of what QA testing should be about: performance regressions.
- branko_d 1y ago
  This is not even a regression - it has always been there, unnoticed!
  - throw0101d 1y ago
    If it has always been there, then your QA process has always sucked and missed it.
- ponector 1y ago
  Usually it is not a priority, especially for enterprise software. It's ok if UI is lagging, page finish loading in 10 seconds, etc. Simply because there is usually no other choice, people have to use whatever is bought/developed.

guhcampos 1y ago

This is more widespread than we like to admit. Developers writing software on 64GB M4 Macs often don't realize the performance bottlenecks of the software they write. Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write. Developers writing services over unlimited cloud budgets often don't realize the resource wastes into which their software incurrs. And to extend this to society in general. Rich people with nice things often alienate themselves from the reality of the majority of people in the World.

jonhohle 1y ago
I tend to use older hardware and feel like I’m constantly fighting this battle. It’s amazing thr hardware we have and I have to wait for dozens of seconds to start an app or load a web page.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Sometimes I run "old software" on the latest hardware it could support (think Windows 2000 on 2010s machines) and it is amazing how much it flies.
- dangus 1y ago
  I would like to ask why even fight the battle? Philosophically I am with you, e-waste and consumerism are bad, but pragmatically it is not worth punishing yourself from a dollars and cents standpoint. You can jump on Amazon and buy a mini PC in the $300 range that’s got an 8 core 16 thread AMD 6800H CPU, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, basically a well above-average machine, with upgradable RAM and storage. $240 if you buy it on AliExpress. You can grab a MacBook Air M2 for around $500. Why suffer with slow hardware? Assuming that using a computer is at least somewhat important to your workflow.
bombcar 1y ago
You need two "classes" of developers; which may be the exact same people - those who are on the fastest, biggest hardware money can buy - but you also need some time running on nearly the worst hardware you can find.

sz4kerto 1y ago

This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).

Intermernet 1y ago
People used to buy NS-10s because they knew professional studios used them. They were then underwhelmed when they sounded worse than the hifi speakers they had at home. Many audio engineers live by the mantra "if it sounds good on NS-10s, it'll sound good on anything". We need such a touchstone for software engineers.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  It'd be moving touchstone is the problems, speakers in the consumer space don't evolve as fast as computing tech in the user space. You could get somewhat close by looking at what was a middle of the road consumer laptop from Dell/HP/Lenovo 5 years ago and buying one of those though.

mschuster91 1y ago

This is just as valid for mobile app and website development. When all you use for testing is Browserstack, local emulators and whatnot and only the latest iPhone and Samsung S-series flagship, your Thing will be unusable for wide parts of the population. Always, always use at the very least the oldest iPhone Apple still supports, the cheapest and oldest (!) Samsung A-series models still being sold in retail stores as "new", and at least one Huawei and Xiaomi device. And then, don't test your Thing only on wifi backed by your Gbit Wifi 7 router and uplink. Disable wifi and limit mobile data to 2G or whatever is the lowest your phone provider supports. And then, have someone from QA visit the countryside with long stretches of no service at all or serious degradation (think packet loss rates of 60% or more, latencies of 2 seconds+). If your app survives this with minimal loss of functionality, you did good. A bunch of issues will only crop up in real world testing. Stuff like instead of keeping a single socket to the mothership open, using fresh from scratch SSL connections for each interactions is the main bummer... latency really really eats such bottlenecks alive. Forgotten async handling leading to non-responsiveness of the main application. You won't catch that, not even with Chrome's network inspector - you won't feel the sheer rage of the end user having a pressing need and be let down by your Thing - even if you're not responsible for their shitty phone service, they will associate the bad service with your app. Oh, and also test out getting interrupted while using your Thing on the cheap-ass phones. Whatsapp and FB Messenger calls, for example - these gobble so much RAM that your app or browser will get killed by OOM or battery saver, and when the user has their interruption finished, if you didn't do it right your Thing's local state will have gotten corrupted or removed, leading the user having to start from scratch!

arresin 1y ago

This was (is?) the issue with zed and maybe the cause also.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off. That’s not the problem of using this monitor for creating the work, that’s the problem of not also using a more typical monitor (or, better, an array covering the common use cases, but which is practical depends on whether you are talking about a solo creator or a bigger team) for validating the work. Just as with software, developers benefit from a more powerful machine for developing, but the product benefits from also being tested on machines more like the typical end-user setup.

freejazz 1y ago

>The problem with using this kind of monitor for any work that others will view on their own monitors is that your perception of what looks good will be way off. Really? It's not a problem for photo retouchers, for whom a monitor like this is basically designed for.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

I make a point of keeping my secondary monitor a "normal" DPI 2560x1440 display precisely to avoid this kind of problem. The loss of legibility has little impact on secondary monitor use cases, and I can easily spot-check my UI and UI graphics work by simply dragging the window over. High quality normal DPI monitors are so cheap these days that even if multi-monitor isn't one's cup of tea there's not really a good reason to not have one (except maybe space restrictions, in which case a cheap ~16" 1080p/1200p portable monitor from Amazon will serve the purpose nicely).