8 ms·

Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been n

Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise. Why is this? 5k/6k at 27" would be the sweet spot for me, and potentially 8k at 32". However, I'm not willing to drop $2k per monitor to go from a very nice 27" 4k to 27" 5k. You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. And an Quest 3 headset has 2 displays at far higher PPI for $600.

4ggr0 11mo ago
as a gamer 8k makes me sweat because i can't imagine what kind of hardware you'd need to run a game :O probably great for text-based work, though!
- pornel 11mo ago
  You don't really need 8K for gaming, but upscaling and frame generation have made game rendering resolution and display resolution almost independent.
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    And if all else fails, 8K means you can fall back to 4K, 1440p or 1080p with perfect integer scaling.
    - layer8 11mo ago
      Except that the hardware doesn’t necessarily offer perfect integer scaling. Oftentimes, it only provides blurry interpolation that looks less sharp than a corresponding native-resolution display.
      - jsheard 11mo ago
        The monitor may or may not offer perfect scaling, but at least on Windows the GPU drivers can do it on their side so the monitor receives a native resolution signal that's already pixel doubled correctly.
      - Aurornis 11mo ago
        Most modern games already have built-in scaling options. You can set the game to run at your screen’s native resolution but have it do the rendering at a different scale factor. Good games can even render the HUD at native resolution and the graphics at a scaled resolution. Modern OSes also scale fine. It’s really not an issue.
        layer8 11mo ago
        Games are not what I had in mind. Last time I checked, most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling (i.e. nearest-neighbor, no interpolation).
        jsheard 11mo ago
        > most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en-us/mergedProjects/nvdsp/CS_Display_Scaling.htm https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en... https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-034.html https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-0... https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000057030/graphics.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... I don't know what the situation is on Mac and Linux, but all of the Windows drivers offer it.
        Aurornis 11mo ago
        With very high PPI displays the gamma corrected interpolation scaling is far better than nearest neighbor scaling. The idea is to make the pixels so small that your eyes aren’t resolving individual pixels anyway. Interpolation appears correct to your eyes because you’re viewing it through a low-pass filter (the physical limit of your eyes) anyway. Reverting to nearest neighbor at high PPI would introduce new artifacts because the aliasing effects would create unpleasant and unnatural frequencies in the image. Most modern GPU drivers (nVidia in particular) will do fixed multiple scaling if that’s what you want. Nearest neighbor is not good though.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  Once you get into the high pixel densities you stop running everything at native resolution. You have enough pixel density that scaling the output doesn’t produce significant visible artifacts. With 8K small pixels you could pick a number of resolutions up to 4K or higher and you wouldn’t even notice that the final product was scaled on your monitor. People with Macs with retina displays have been doing this for years. It’s really nice once you realize how flexible it is.
  - 4ggr0 11mo ago
    i'm actually going to do the reverse move, was gaming on a 4K display, but going to downgrade to 3440x1440 to get more performance. but of course the gaming displays i find apparently aren't ideal for working, because text looks worse. add to that that the internet seems to be split if wide-monitors are the best thing ever or actually horrible. why is it all so complicated, man.
    - zamadatix 11mo ago
      My only gripe is nearly all common "ultrawide" models should really be thought of as "ultrashort" in that they don't offer more width, just less height. E.g. a 21:9 ultrawide variant of 4k should really be 5040x2160. Instead they are nearly all 3840x1600. That may well be cost/price optimal for certain folks, I'm not saying it's bad for the product itself to exist, but nobody was looking at a 1600p monitor thinking "man, I wish they'd make a wider variant!" they started with 4k and decided it would be nice if it were permanently shortened.
      - 4ggr0 11mo ago
        yeah, that really confused me as well. the whole 4K, 2K, 2.5K, ultrawide, ultrahigh, microwide, 8K shit just gets confusing, especially because it's neither accurate nor standardized.
      - tstrimple 11mo ago
        I think they are calling those 5k2k monitors. I'm quite happy with my 45" LG 5k2k OLED monitor. Much more usable than the 32:9 monitors after seeing both in person.
Paianni 11mo ago
The Asus PA27JCV is rather less than $2k...
littlestymaar 11mo ago
> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise. It's mostly because the improvement over 4k is marginal. In fact, even from 1920x1080 it's not so big of a deal, which is why people keep buying such monitors in 2025. A the worse is that the higher spending consumer segment of PC parts, the gamers, can't really use high resolution display at their full potential because it puts such a burden on the GPU (DLSS helps, but the results is even smaller of an improvement over 1920x1080 than regular 4k is)
rickdeckard 11mo ago
Because the vast majority of Monitor Sales-Volume are (public) tenders from companies buying huge volume, and those companies still mostly look for monitors <4K (without fancy specs and without i.e. USB-C). If 4K reaches mass-market for those, the specs will shift down and there will be room in the (much smaller) Premium-Tier monitor segment Heck, even if you just want USB-C and an integrated webcam on an average display, the price-hike compared to one without it is crazy, because everything except those basic office-monitors is still niche-production...
layer8 11mo ago
The likelihood of dead pixels increases quadratically with resolution, hence panel yield drops correspondingly. In addition, the target audience who has hardware (GPUs) that can drive those resolutions is smaller.
swiftcoder 11mo ago
> and potentially 8k at 32" What's your actual use-case for this? I run a 32" 4K, and I have to stick my nose within a foot (~30cm) of the display to actually spot individual pixels. Maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be I'd kill for a 40" 5k or 6k to be available - that's significantly more usable desktop real estate, and I still wouldn't be able to see the pixels.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > I'd kill for a 40" 5k or 6k to be available There are a number of 40” 5K wide monitors on the market. They have the same vertical resolution as a 4K but with more horizontal pixels.
  - swiftcoder 11mo ago
    Yeah. I guess that's the way. I'm not wild about such a wide aspect ratio, and all the head-turning or chair-swivelling it implies.
- ak217 11mo ago
  Pixels are very noticeable at 32" 4K. If you don't notice them, your eyes still do - they try to focus on blurry lines, causing eye strain. You might not notice, but it adds up over the years. It's simple math. A 32" 4K monitor is about 130 PPI. Retina displays (where you could reasonably say the pixels are not noticeable, and the text is sharp enough to not strain the eyes) start at 210 PPI. Subjectively, the other problem with 32" 4K (a very popular and affordable size now) is that the optimal scaling is a fractional multiple of the underlying resolution (on MacOS - bizarrely I think Windows and Linux both know how to do this better than MacOS). Which again causes blur and a small performance hit. I myself still use an old 43" 4K monitor as my main one, but I know it's not great for my eyes and I'd like to upgrade. My ideal would be a 40" or 42" 8K. A 6K at that size would not be enough. I am very excited about this 32" 6K Asus ProArt that came out earlier this year: https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proart-display-6k-pa32qcv/ https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proar... - it finally gets Retina-grade resolution at a more reasonable price point. I will probably switch to two of these side-by-side once I can get them below $1K.
throw0101d 11mo ago
> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. There's been a bit of a 'renaissance' of 5K@27" in the last ~year: > In just the past few months, we've taken a look at the ASUS ProArt Display 5K, the BenQ PD2730S, and the Alogic Clarity 5K Touch with its unique touchscreen capabilities, and most recently I've been testing out another new option, the $950 ViewSonic VP2788-5K, to see how it stacks up. * https://www.macrumors.com/review/viewsonic-vp2788-5k-display/ https://www.macrumors.com/review/viewsonic-vp2788-5k-display... There are 15 monitors discussed in this video: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINM4EysdbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINM4EysdbI The ASUS ProArt PA27JCV is USD 800 (a lot less than $2k): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojwowaY3Ccw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojwowaY3Ccw
- wooger 11mo ago
  And it has terrible reviews... 5k is appealing, but I'll take a 4k with a much nicer panel, much better anti-reflective coating, faster refresh rate etc.
znpy 11mo ago
Ah yes. It’s the same with memory… 8gb/16gb is incredibly common, even though 16gb memory was a thing in like 2008 already. It’s only with high end machines that you get 64/128gb memory, which should be much more common in my opinion.
mschuster91 11mo ago
> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise. Multiple reasons. The first one being yield - yes you can get 8K screens, but the larger they get, the more difficult it is to cut a panel with an acceptably low rate of dead/stuck pixels out of a giant piece of glass. Dead pixels are one thing and bad enough, but stuck-bright pixels ruin the entire panel because they will be noticeable in any dark-ish movie or game scene. That makes them really darn expensive. The second reason is the processing power required to render the video signal to the screen, aka display controllers. Even if you "just" take regular 8 bit RGB - each frame takes up 33 million pixels, so 796.262.400 bits. Per frame. Per second? Even at just 30 FPS, you're talking about 23.887.872.000 bits per second - 23 gigabits/s. It takes an awful, awful lot of processing power just to shuffle that data from the link SerDes around to all the control lines and to make sure they all switch their individual pixels at the very same time. The third is transferring all the data. Even if you use compression and sub-sampling, you still need to compress and sub-sample the framebuffer on the GPU side, transfer up to 48 GBit/s (HDMI 2.3) or 77 GBit/s (DP 2.1) of data, and then uncompress it on the display side. If it's HDCP-encrypted, you need to account for that as well - encrypting and decrypting at such line speeds used to be unthinkable even two decades ago. The fact that the physical transfer layer is capable of delivering such data rates over many meters of copper cable of varying quality is nothing short of amazing anyway. And the fourth is generating all the data. You need absurdly high definition textures, which requires lots of VRAM, lots of regular RAM, lots of disk I/O, lots of disk storage (your average AAA game is well beyond 100GB of data at-rest for a reason!), and then render power to actually render the scene. 8K has 16x (!) the pixels of regular FullHD (1080p). What's stopping further progress? Other than yield and simple physics (similar to microchips, the finer the structures get the more difficult and expensive it is to make them), the most pressing issue is human visual acuity - even a human with very good vision can only make useful sense of about 74 of the theoretical 576 megapixels [1]. As we already established, 8K is at 33-ish megapixels, so the usual quadratic increase would already be far too detailed for 99.999% of humans to perceive. Yes, you could go for intermediate sizes. 5K, 6K, weird aspect ratios, whatever - but as soon as you go there, you'll run into issues with video content because it can't be up- or downscaled to such intermediates without a perceptible loss in quality and, again, a lot of processing power. [1] https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html
Aurornis 11mo ago
> You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. 8K at jumbo TV size has relatively large pixels compared to an 8K desktop monitor. It’s easier to manufacture. > And an Quest 3 headset has 2 displays at far higher PPI for $600 Those displays are physically tiny. Easier to deal with lower yields when it’s only taking a few square inches. Ultra high resolution desktop monitors would exist in the middle: Very small pixel sizes but also relatively large unit area. However, the demand side is also not there. There are already a number of 5K, 6K, and 8K monitors on the market. They’re just not selling well. Between difficult software support for scaling legacy apps, compatibility issues with different graphics cards and cables, and the fact that normal monitors are good enough, the really high resolution monitors don’t sell well. That doesn’t incentivize more. If we get to a place where we could reliably plug a 6K monitor into any medium to high end laptop or desktop and it just works, there might be more. Until then, making a high res monitor is just asking for an extremely high return rate.
- Kon5ole 11mo ago
  >> You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. >8K at jumbo TV size has relatively large pixels compared to an 8K desktop monitor. It’s easier to manufacture. I don't think that's true. I've been using a 8k 55" TV as my main monitor for years now. It was available for sub-800 USD before all such tv's vanished from the market. Smaller pixels were not more expensive even then, the 55"s were the cheapest. 4k monitors can be had for sub-200 usd, selling 4x the area of the same panel should be at most 4x that price. And it was, years ago. So they were clearly not complicated or expensive to manufacture - but there was no compelling reason for having 8k on a TV so they didn't sell. However, there IS a compelling reason to have 8K on a desktop monitor! That such monitors sell for 8000 usd+ is IMO a very unfortunate situation caused by a weird incompetence in market segmentation by the monitor makers. I firmly believe that they could sell 100x as many if they cut the price to 1/10th, which they clearly could do. The market that never appeared for tv's is present among the world's knowledge workers, for sure.
  - dmayle 11mo ago
    I've been using an 8k 65" TV as a monitor for four years now. When I bought it, you could buy the Samsung QN700B 55" 8k, but at the time it was 50% more than the 65" I bought (TCL). I wish the 55" 8k TVs still existed (or that the announced 55" 8k monitors were ever shipped). I make do with 65", but it's just a tad too large. I would never switch back to 4k, however.
ebbi 11mo ago
One of the best things I've done for my setup is convert old 5k iMacs to work as external display. Only downside are the massive borders by todays standards, but it still has the Apple aesthetics, the 5k resolution is beautiful for my use cases (spreadsheets, documents, photo editing), and has HDMI inputs so I can play PS5 on it.
prpl 11mo ago
30 or 32" 5k is what I'd love - maybe 6k at 32

4ggr0 11mo ago

as a gamer 8k makes me sweat because i can't imagine what kind of hardware you'd need to run a game :O probably great for text-based work, though!

pornel 11mo ago
You don't really need 8K for gaming, but upscaling and frame generation have made game rendering resolution and display resolution almost independent.
- jsheard 11mo ago
  And if all else fails, 8K means you can fall back to 4K, 1440p or 1080p with perfect integer scaling.
  - layer8 11mo ago
    Except that the hardware doesn’t necessarily offer perfect integer scaling. Oftentimes, it only provides blurry interpolation that looks less sharp than a corresponding native-resolution display.
    - jsheard 11mo ago
      The monitor may or may not offer perfect scaling, but at least on Windows the GPU drivers can do it on their side so the monitor receives a native resolution signal that's already pixel doubled correctly.
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      Most modern games already have built-in scaling options. You can set the game to run at your screen’s native resolution but have it do the rendering at a different scale factor. Good games can even render the HUD at native resolution and the graphics at a scaled resolution. Modern OSes also scale fine. It’s really not an issue.
      - layer8 11mo ago
        Games are not what I had in mind. Last time I checked, most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling (i.e. nearest-neighbor, no interpolation).
        jsheard 11mo ago
        > most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en-us/mergedProjects/nvdsp/CS_Display_Scaling.htm https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en... https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-034.html https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-0... https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000057030/graphics.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... I don't know what the situation is on Mac and Linux, but all of the Windows drivers offer it.
        Aurornis 11mo ago
        With very high PPI displays the gamma corrected interpolation scaling is far better than nearest neighbor scaling. The idea is to make the pixels so small that your eyes aren’t resolving individual pixels anyway. Interpolation appears correct to your eyes because you’re viewing it through a low-pass filter (the physical limit of your eyes) anyway. Reverting to nearest neighbor at high PPI would introduce new artifacts because the aliasing effects would create unpleasant and unnatural frequencies in the image. Most modern GPU drivers (nVidia in particular) will do fixed multiple scaling if that’s what you want. Nearest neighbor is not good though.
Aurornis 11mo ago
Once you get into the high pixel densities you stop running everything at native resolution. You have enough pixel density that scaling the output doesn’t produce significant visible artifacts. With 8K small pixels you could pick a number of resolutions up to 4K or higher and you wouldn’t even notice that the final product was scaled on your monitor. People with Macs with retina displays have been doing this for years. It’s really nice once you realize how flexible it is.
- 4ggr0 11mo ago
  i'm actually going to do the reverse move, was gaming on a 4K display, but going to downgrade to 3440x1440 to get more performance. but of course the gaming displays i find apparently aren't ideal for working, because text looks worse. add to that that the internet seems to be split if wide-monitors are the best thing ever or actually horrible. why is it all so complicated, man.
  - zamadatix 11mo ago
    My only gripe is nearly all common "ultrawide" models should really be thought of as "ultrashort" in that they don't offer more width, just less height. E.g. a 21:9 ultrawide variant of 4k should really be 5040x2160. Instead they are nearly all 3840x1600. That may well be cost/price optimal for certain folks, I'm not saying it's bad for the product itself to exist, but nobody was looking at a 1600p monitor thinking "man, I wish they'd make a wider variant!" they started with 4k and decided it would be nice if it were permanently shortened.
    - 4ggr0 11mo ago
      yeah, that really confused me as well. the whole 4K, 2K, 2.5K, ultrawide, ultrahigh, microwide, 8K shit just gets confusing, especially because it's neither accurate nor standardized.
    - tstrimple 11mo ago
      I think they are calling those 5k2k monitors. I'm quite happy with my 45" LG 5k2k OLED monitor. Much more usable than the 32:9 monitors after seeing both in person.

Paianni 11mo ago

The Asus PA27JCV is rather less than $2k...

littlestymaar 11mo ago

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise. It's mostly because the improvement over 4k is marginal. In fact, even from 1920x1080 it's not so big of a deal, which is why people keep buying such monitors in 2025. A the worse is that the higher spending consumer segment of PC parts, the gamers, can't really use high resolution display at their full potential because it puts such a burden on the GPU (DLSS helps, but the results is even smaller of an improvement over 1920x1080 than regular 4k is)

rickdeckard 11mo ago

Because the vast majority of Monitor Sales-Volume are (public) tenders from companies buying huge volume, and those companies still mostly look for monitors <4K (without fancy specs and without i.e. USB-C). If 4K reaches mass-market for those, the specs will shift down and there will be room in the (much smaller) Premium-Tier monitor segment Heck, even if you just want USB-C and an integrated webcam on an average display, the price-hike compared to one without it is crazy, because everything except those basic office-monitors is still niche-production...

layer8 11mo ago

The likelihood of dead pixels increases quadratically with resolution, hence panel yield drops correspondingly. In addition, the target audience who has hardware (GPUs) that can drive those resolutions is smaller.

swiftcoder 11mo ago

> and potentially 8k at 32" What's your actual use-case for this? I run a 32" 4K, and I have to stick my nose within a foot (~30cm) of the display to actually spot individual pixels. Maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be I'd kill for a 40" 5k or 6k to be available - that's significantly more usable desktop real estate, and I still wouldn't be able to see the pixels.

Aurornis 11mo ago
> I'd kill for a 40" 5k or 6k to be available There are a number of 40” 5K wide monitors on the market. They have the same vertical resolution as a 4K but with more horizontal pixels.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  Yeah. I guess that's the way. I'm not wild about such a wide aspect ratio, and all the head-turning or chair-swivelling it implies.
ak217 11mo ago
Pixels are very noticeable at 32" 4K. If you don't notice them, your eyes still do - they try to focus on blurry lines, causing eye strain. You might not notice, but it adds up over the years. It's simple math. A 32" 4K monitor is about 130 PPI. Retina displays (where you could reasonably say the pixels are not noticeable, and the text is sharp enough to not strain the eyes) start at 210 PPI. Subjectively, the other problem with 32" 4K (a very popular and affordable size now) is that the optimal scaling is a fractional multiple of the underlying resolution (on MacOS - bizarrely I think Windows and Linux both know how to do this better than MacOS). Which again causes blur and a small performance hit. I myself still use an old 43" 4K monitor as my main one, but I know it's not great for my eyes and I'd like to upgrade. My ideal would be a 40" or 42" 8K. A 6K at that size would not be enough. I am very excited about this 32" 6K Asus ProArt that came out earlier this year: https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proart-display-6k-pa32qcv/ https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proar... - it finally gets Retina-grade resolution at a more reasonable price point. I will probably switch to two of these side-by-side once I can get them below $1K.

throw0101d 11mo ago

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. There's been a bit of a 'renaissance' of 5K@27" in the last ~year: > In just the past few months, we've taken a look at the ASUS ProArt Display 5K, the BenQ PD2730S, and the Alogic Clarity 5K Touch with its unique touchscreen capabilities, and most recently I've been testing out another new option, the $950 ViewSonic VP2788-5K, to see how it stacks up. * https://www.macrumors.com/review/viewsonic-vp2788-5k-display/ https://www.macrumors.com/review/viewsonic-vp2788-5k-display... There are 15 monitors discussed in this video: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINM4EysdbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINM4EysdbI The ASUS ProArt PA27JCV is USD 800 (a lot less than $2k): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojwowaY3Ccw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojwowaY3Ccw

wooger 11mo ago
And it has terrible reviews... 5k is appealing, but I'll take a 4k with a much nicer panel, much better anti-reflective coating, faster refresh rate etc.

znpy 11mo ago

Ah yes. It’s the same with memory… 8gb/16gb is incredibly common, even though 16gb memory was a thing in like 2008 already. It’s only with high end machines that you get 64/128gb memory, which should be much more common in my opinion.

mschuster91 11mo ago

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise. Multiple reasons. The first one being yield - yes you can get 8K screens, but the larger they get, the more difficult it is to cut a panel with an acceptably low rate of dead/stuck pixels out of a giant piece of glass. Dead pixels are one thing and bad enough, but stuck-bright pixels ruin the entire panel because they will be noticeable in any dark-ish movie or game scene. That makes them really darn expensive. The second reason is the processing power required to render the video signal to the screen, aka display controllers. Even if you "just" take regular 8 bit RGB - each frame takes up 33 million pixels, so 796.262.400 bits. Per frame. Per second? Even at just 30 FPS, you're talking about 23.887.872.000 bits per second - 23 gigabits/s. It takes an awful, awful lot of processing power just to shuffle that data from the link SerDes around to all the control lines and to make sure they all switch their individual pixels at the very same time. The third is transferring all the data. Even if you use compression and sub-sampling, you still need to compress and sub-sample the framebuffer on the GPU side, transfer up to 48 GBit/s (HDMI 2.3) or 77 GBit/s (DP 2.1) of data, and then uncompress it on the display side. If it's HDCP-encrypted, you need to account for that as well - encrypting and decrypting at such line speeds used to be unthinkable even two decades ago. The fact that the physical transfer layer is capable of delivering such data rates over many meters of copper cable of varying quality is nothing short of amazing anyway. And the fourth is generating all the data. You need absurdly high definition textures, which requires lots of VRAM, lots of regular RAM, lots of disk I/O, lots of disk storage (your average AAA game is well beyond 100GB of data at-rest for a reason!), and then render power to actually render the scene. 8K has 16x (!) the pixels of regular FullHD (1080p). What's stopping further progress? Other than yield and simple physics (similar to microchips, the finer the structures get the more difficult and expensive it is to make them), the most pressing issue is human visual acuity - even a human with very good vision can only make useful sense of about 74 of the theoretical 576 megapixels [1]. As we already established, 8K is at 33-ish megapixels, so the usual quadratic increase would already be far too detailed for 99.999% of humans to perceive. Yes, you could go for intermediate sizes. 5K, 6K, weird aspect ratios, whatever - but as soon as you go there, you'll run into issues with video content because it can't be up- or downscaled to such intermediates without a perceptible loss in quality and, again, a lot of processing power. [1] https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html

Aurornis 11mo ago

> You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. 8K at jumbo TV size has relatively large pixels compared to an 8K desktop monitor. It’s easier to manufacture. > And an Quest 3 headset has 2 displays at far higher PPI for $600 Those displays are physically tiny. Easier to deal with lower yields when it’s only taking a few square inches. Ultra high resolution desktop monitors would exist in the middle: Very small pixel sizes but also relatively large unit area. However, the demand side is also not there. There are already a number of 5K, 6K, and 8K monitors on the market. They’re just not selling well. Between difficult software support for scaling legacy apps, compatibility issues with different graphics cards and cables, and the fact that normal monitors are good enough, the really high resolution monitors don’t sell well. That doesn’t incentivize more. If we get to a place where we could reliably plug a 6K monitor into any medium to high end laptop or desktop and it just works, there might be more. Until then, making a high res monitor is just asking for an extremely high return rate.

Kon5ole 11mo ago
>> You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. >8K at jumbo TV size has relatively large pixels compared to an 8K desktop monitor. It’s easier to manufacture. I don't think that's true. I've been using a 8k 55" TV as my main monitor for years now. It was available for sub-800 USD before all such tv's vanished from the market. Smaller pixels were not more expensive even then, the 55"s were the cheapest. 4k monitors can be had for sub-200 usd, selling 4x the area of the same panel should be at most 4x that price. And it was, years ago. So they were clearly not complicated or expensive to manufacture - but there was no compelling reason for having 8k on a TV so they didn't sell. However, there IS a compelling reason to have 8K on a desktop monitor! That such monitors sell for 8000 usd+ is IMO a very unfortunate situation caused by a weird incompetence in market segmentation by the monitor makers. I firmly believe that they could sell 100x as many if they cut the price to 1/10th, which they clearly could do. The market that never appeared for tv's is present among the world's knowledge workers, for sure.
- dmayle 11mo ago
  I've been using an 8k 65" TV as a monitor for four years now. When I bought it, you could buy the Samsung QN700B 55" 8k, but at the time it was 50% more than the 65" I bought (TCL). I wish the 55" 8k TVs still existed (or that the announced 55" 8k monitors were ever shipped). I make do with 65", but it's just a tad too large. I would never switch back to 4k, however.

ebbi 11mo ago

One of the best things I've done for my setup is convert old 5k iMacs to work as external display. Only downside are the massive borders by todays standards, but it still has the Apple aesthetics, the 5k resolution is beautiful for my use cases (spreadsheets, documents, photo editing), and has HDMI inputs so I can play PS5 on it.

prpl 11mo ago

30 or 32" 5k is what I'd love - maybe 6k at 32