4 ms·

My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticea

by ksec 10mo ago

My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable." At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out. Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement. I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel. As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.

lostlogin 10mo ago
Don’t forget sound. Listening to music off a phone speaker. It’s so grating that I don’t understand why anyone would do it.
- ksec 10mo ago
  There was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough. Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era. Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it. But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better. Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
  - carlob 10mo ago
    At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.
    - bluecalm 10mo ago
      I have a newer Thinkpad (T14, Ryzen 6850) and while the sound is clear it's shameful how much better my wife's Macbook Air is. I only headphones now. I can't unhear it.
      - lostlogin 10mo ago
        Is this a new Air or an Intel one?
        bluecalm 10mo ago
        It's an M1 one.
  - JeanMii 10mo ago
    I've learned to come to terms with this mentality, mainly due to time constraints. Before, I would always do an insane amount of research and benchmarking to find the absolute best in its category, even for mundane things like a coffee grinder. I would aggregate thousands of reviews and turn them into sentiment analysis, cross-referencing reviews, and so on. Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets. Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better. For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.
wolvoleo 10mo ago
Yes this. I don't use screens below 200dpi anymore (right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling) and many people say that it's a waste because it's way too high. But I can still see pixels that are off. I just love sharp text. Which everyone is used to on their phones, I don't understand why people don't want the same on their computer which they probably use a lot more hours per day (I sure do) I'm sure I would notice and be annoyed by this fringing too unless the pixels were so small I really couldn't see them. Probably needs to be slightly higher than 200 then. But I haven't seen oled monitors with such high DPIs. The highest I've seen is 4K on 27" which wouldn't even do for me on LCD.
- ValdikSS 10mo ago
  >right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling I have Dell P2415Q, from 2015. There are, like, 4 other (legacy) models of 24" 4K out there, and that's it. I've no idea why they don't manufacture them.
  - deivid 10mo ago
    Downsizing from a 27" 5k to a 24" 4k, could not find anything besides a new company called JAPANNEXT (they are French)
    - vizzah 10mo ago
      yeah, I've tried their 24" 4k monitor, was okay, but not great, so returned. 24" is the max size I can tolerate with short-sightedness, but avoid using glasses for the monitor.
  - WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
    Good thing I have three of them. I’m set for life.
  - cocoto 10mo ago
    I also have one bought used. It’s the only way to have 4k and 200% scaling on Linux without everything being too big or too small. Size and ppi are perfect but sadly other aspects are becoming really dated (bad colors and contrast, high latency, low refresh rate etc).
rabf 10mo ago
When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.
- nasmorn 10mo ago
  If you buy a really nice monitor, which for me starts at 6K 32” - the eBay computer will no longer drive it. What I find insane is how long companies issued 19” 1080 screens to their employees. I don’t think that was a well calculated choice given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit for their 50k year employees. It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
  - nkrisc 10mo ago
    A 6K monitor seems like complete overkill unless you’re editing 4K video or sitting way too close to it.
  - IshKebab 10mo ago
    People asking for computer buying advice obviously don't need a 6K screen.
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    I wouldn't call a 6k monitor "nice", that's way above that. I would love on of those, since I can't stand blurry text, but even for me that's way too expensive to justify. So as the sibling says, if people are looking at old used pcs on ebay, they're unlikely to drop more than a grand on the screen. A 32" 4k screen is nice enough and a reasonable one [0] can be had for a third of that. My I don't-know-how-old desktop I saved from the bin at work sporting an i5-6500 could drive that with no issues. --- [0] Around 2020 I bought an LG something-or-other for 350 Euros for work, 32", 4k, some form of VA panel. It had pretty good colors and better contrast than the IPS monitor I use as a Sunday-photographer.
altairprime 10mo ago
> 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. I second this. I can tell, and I would never wish that ability on my worst enemy. Very glad there's a (slim, but exists) market catering to that — and that I no longer have to buy a monitor that costs as much as a small motorcycle to not be constantly infuriated at everything in my field of vision when working.
eloisant 10mo ago
It's all a matter of compromise. I can see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on phone screens, and I think it's worth the impact on battery life. I can see the difference in speed between VSCode and editors like Sublime or Zed, however in this case I prefer the additional features at the cost of speed/smoothness.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Mashimo 10mo ago
At work I'm using IntelliJ IDEA through a windows remote connection, loaded with a 20 year old java project that got bigger and bigger of the years :D I kind of want to see one of the Atom vs Sublime people use that for a hot minute. At home I upgraded from 60hz to 165hz and was underwhelmed. I see the difference .. but eh.
bluecalm 10mo ago
Out of curiosity can you tell the difference in font rendering on a 14 inch laptop between 1920x1200 LCD screen and a higher resolution one? I mean during normal work in normal position not trying to look really close.
balou23 10mo ago
At some point there were LCD monitors that had very noticeable to me chequerboard pattern - like with analogue TV, only half of the screen got lit up/refreshed, but with an alternating pattern rather than scan lines. After asking the owner of said screen how he could stand that... "stand what?" Yep, I guess most people are not that picky.
- beagle3 10mo ago
  It’s not necessarily picky - it’s sometimes about physically different perception. When DLP projectors first came out, I couldn’t watch them. I would see colors breaking in fast motion scenes and whenever I would move my head even slightly (and … we all move our head slightly often when watching a movie). When I told other people, some of them nodded in understanding, but the vast majority thought I was making things up - for them, it was a rock solid picture. One of my friends replied: “I can see about 300hz. Not all the time - only when I have secadic movements; but that means many fluorescents, DLPs and other light sources drive me crazy. I guess you’re also a member of crazy club” Some people can hear 26khz. Some people can see DLPs. Some people can see the alternating pattern….
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  I had a (regrettable) 19" 4x3 ViewSonic display that made that problem obvious -- way back in 2008 or so. My homework at that time revealed a couple of things: 1. Liquid crystals are individually driven by AC waveforms, not DC as one might assume. This is the nature of the beast. The frequency at which the signal alternates is not necessarily very high. Thus, sometimes, this alternating nature is visible. 2. Some displays use dithering. A given display might support just -- say -- 6 bits per subpixel. To get the full 8 or 10 or whatever number of bits that are expected as a final output, the in-between steps are approximated by switching between two values -- sometimes (again) at a fairly low frequency that is visible. ... But anyway, that ViewSonic monitor: Most people thought it looked fine, but it drove me nuts.
darubedarob 10mo ago
[dead]
beaugunderson 10mo ago
30hz is so painfully slow, I can always tell when I'm in power saving mode on the iPhone by that alone. On desktop I can't even do 60hz anymore after switching to a 144hz monitor.

by ksec 10mo ago

lostlogin 10mo ago

Don’t forget sound. Listening to music off a phone speaker. It’s so grating that I don’t understand why anyone would do it.

ksec 10mo ago
There was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough. Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era. Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it. But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better. Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
- carlob 10mo ago
  At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.
  - bluecalm 10mo ago
    I have a newer Thinkpad (T14, Ryzen 6850) and while the sound is clear it's shameful how much better my wife's Macbook Air is. I only headphones now. I can't unhear it.
    - lostlogin 10mo ago
      Is this a new Air or an Intel one?
      - bluecalm 10mo ago
        It's an M1 one.
- JeanMii 10mo ago
  I've learned to come to terms with this mentality, mainly due to time constraints. Before, I would always do an insane amount of research and benchmarking to find the absolute best in its category, even for mundane things like a coffee grinder. I would aggregate thousands of reviews and turn them into sentiment analysis, cross-referencing reviews, and so on. Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets. Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better. For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.

wolvoleo 10mo ago

Yes this. I don't use screens below 200dpi anymore (right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling) and many people say that it's a waste because it's way too high. But I can still see pixels that are off. I just love sharp text. Which everyone is used to on their phones, I don't understand why people don't want the same on their computer which they probably use a lot more hours per day (I sure do) I'm sure I would notice and be annoyed by this fringing too unless the pixels were so small I really couldn't see them. Probably needs to be slightly higher than 200 then. But I haven't seen oled monitors with such high DPIs. The highest I've seen is 4K on 27" which wouldn't even do for me on LCD.

ValdikSS 10mo ago
>right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling I have Dell P2415Q, from 2015. There are, like, 4 other (legacy) models of 24" 4K out there, and that's it. I've no idea why they don't manufacture them.
- deivid 10mo ago
  Downsizing from a 27" 5k to a 24" 4k, could not find anything besides a new company called JAPANNEXT (they are French)
  - vizzah 10mo ago
    yeah, I've tried their 24" 4k monitor, was okay, but not great, so returned. 24" is the max size I can tolerate with short-sightedness, but avoid using glasses for the monitor.
- WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
  Good thing I have three of them. I’m set for life.
- cocoto 10mo ago
  I also have one bought used. It’s the only way to have 4k and 200% scaling on Linux without everything being too big or too small. Size and ppi are perfect but sadly other aspects are becoming really dated (bad colors and contrast, high latency, low refresh rate etc).

rabf 10mo ago

When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.

nasmorn 10mo ago
If you buy a really nice monitor, which for me starts at 6K 32” - the eBay computer will no longer drive it. What I find insane is how long companies issued 19” 1080 screens to their employees. I don’t think that was a well calculated choice given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit for their 50k year employees. It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
- nkrisc 10mo ago
  A 6K monitor seems like complete overkill unless you’re editing 4K video or sitting way too close to it.
- IshKebab 10mo ago
  People asking for computer buying advice obviously don't need a 6K screen.
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago
  I wouldn't call a 6k monitor "nice", that's way above that. I would love on of those, since I can't stand blurry text, but even for me that's way too expensive to justify. So as the sibling says, if people are looking at old used pcs on ebay, they're unlikely to drop more than a grand on the screen. A 32" 4k screen is nice enough and a reasonable one [0] can be had for a third of that. My I don't-know-how-old desktop I saved from the bin at work sporting an i5-6500 could drive that with no issues. --- [0] Around 2020 I bought an LG something-or-other for 350 Euros for work, 32", 4k, some form of VA panel. It had pretty good colors and better contrast than the IPS monitor I use as a Sunday-photographer.

altairprime 10mo ago

> 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. I second this. I can tell, and I would never wish that ability on my worst enemy. Very glad there's a (slim, but exists) market catering to that — and that I no longer have to buy a monitor that costs as much as a small motorcycle to not be constantly infuriated at everything in my field of vision when working.

eloisant 10mo ago

It's all a matter of compromise. I can see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on phone screens, and I think it's worth the impact on battery life. I can see the difference in speed between VSCode and editors like Sublime or Zed, however in this case I prefer the additional features at the cost of speed/smoothness.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Mashimo 10mo ago

At work I'm using IntelliJ IDEA through a windows remote connection, loaded with a 20 year old java project that got bigger and bigger of the years :D I kind of want to see one of the Atom vs Sublime people use that for a hot minute. At home I upgraded from 60hz to 165hz and was underwhelmed. I see the difference .. but eh.

bluecalm 10mo ago

Out of curiosity can you tell the difference in font rendering on a 14 inch laptop between 1920x1200 LCD screen and a higher resolution one? I mean during normal work in normal position not trying to look really close.

balou23 10mo ago

At some point there were LCD monitors that had very noticeable to me chequerboard pattern - like with analogue TV, only half of the screen got lit up/refreshed, but with an alternating pattern rather than scan lines. After asking the owner of said screen how he could stand that... "stand what?" Yep, I guess most people are not that picky.

beagle3 10mo ago
It’s not necessarily picky - it’s sometimes about physically different perception. When DLP projectors first came out, I couldn’t watch them. I would see colors breaking in fast motion scenes and whenever I would move my head even slightly (and … we all move our head slightly often when watching a movie). When I told other people, some of them nodded in understanding, but the vast majority thought I was making things up - for them, it was a rock solid picture. One of my friends replied: “I can see about 300hz. Not all the time - only when I have secadic movements; but that means many fluorescents, DLPs and other light sources drive me crazy. I guess you’re also a member of crazy club” Some people can hear 26khz. Some people can see DLPs. Some people can see the alternating pattern….
ssl-3 10mo ago
I had a (regrettable) 19" 4x3 ViewSonic display that made that problem obvious -- way back in 2008 or so. My homework at that time revealed a couple of things: 1. Liquid crystals are individually driven by AC waveforms, not DC as one might assume. This is the nature of the beast. The frequency at which the signal alternates is not necessarily very high. Thus, sometimes, this alternating nature is visible. 2. Some displays use dithering. A given display might support just -- say -- 6 bits per subpixel. To get the full 8 or 10 or whatever number of bits that are expected as a final output, the in-between steps are approximated by switching between two values -- sometimes (again) at a fairly low frequency that is visible. ... But anyway, that ViewSonic monitor: Most people thought it looked fine, but it drove me nuts.

darubedarob 10mo ago

[dead]

beaugunderson 10mo ago

30hz is so painfully slow, I can always tell when I'm in power saving mode on the iPhone by that alone. On desktop I can't even do 60hz anymore after switching to a 144hz monitor.