I was thinking about a 4k, but i'm not sure I will know how to get everything to run at 2x scale, on both windows and linux.
Is this hard to do? Caveats?
Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
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Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#92This is going to sound like I want to eat the cake and still have it, but I wish there was some sort of balance between real estate, sharpness, and affordability. A 24in 4K monitor without scaling makes text too small, but at 200%, it's no different from a 1080p monitor real estate-wise (even though text is much crisper). My current monitor, a 1440p 24in screen at 100%, serves all of my real estate needs, but leaves…
5k 27" imacs have been out for a few years now, but the screen is a pretty significant chunk of the cost.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#93Good article. Have to say though, taste is subjective, but good lord those monitors are about as elegantly designed as a Rockstar Energy drink.
Yeah, for some reason these are all coming from "gaming" monitor makers. I think the last one is trying to conjure up a "pro" vibe with the hood, but yes - these are definitely tacky.
Acer, Asus, et al. tend to just remarket OEM technology with relatively little value-add. I suspect these are all built on the same panel, but I could be wrong.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#94After using a rMBP for 6 years, I realized that using a lower resolution and lower quality display makes absolutely no sense at all if both graphical power and budget is available (first 13' rMBP had some serious issue driving the display). Better quality image is better quality image. I think Apple's biggest selling point over any vendor right now, despite numerous issues with its hardware and software in the recent…
For the trackpad I agree, but definitely not for the keyboard. And apple was late(!) to hires screens and to hidpi and now has lower res and density than the competition (e.g. 16:10 better 4k on dell xps or 3:2 screens with MS and others).
Also, apple had TN screens forever when the similarly priced competition had higher res IPS screens.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#95Concerning the smoothing, I presume this is macOS’s glyph dilation. pcwalton reverse engineered it in order to replicate it in Pathfinder (so that it can render text exactly like Core Text does), concluding that the glyph dilation is “min(vec2(0.3px), vec2(0.015125, 0.0121) * S) where S is the font size in px” (https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560). Fun times.
Trouble is, people then get used to macOS’s font rendering, so that (a) they don’t want to turn it off, because it’s different from what they’re used to, and (b) start designing for it. I’m convinced this is a large part of the reason why people deploy so many websites with body text at weight 300 rather than 400, because macOS makes that tolerable because it makes it bolder. Meanwhile people using other operating systems that obey what the font said are left with unpleasantly thin text.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#96After going to 1440p, I cannot use 1080p monitors for programming as the text is too blurry. Honestly I don't see the need of 2160p on a monitor, it usually just causes display issues and it's a performance drain. For gaming/everyday use, 2k w/ a high refresh rate is the sweet spot imo.
Eventually I want to go to 4k but price was a non-starter for me. I wanted 3 monitors and I was able to grab 3x2k (1440p) screens on black Friday last year for around $200/ea. I have them arranged in a "Tie-fighter" orientation (1 horizontal in the middle and 2 vertical on the sides) with an older 1080p screen above the center monitor (it's just for security cams/monitoring). I split the 2 vertical monitors into 3rds…
4K is affordable if you're fine with a basic screen. I got a 32 inch 4K monitor (ET322QK) for $290 on a previous black Friday.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#97I will never give up my 24" 16:10 Dell Ultrasharp even if it is low def.
I bemoan the fact that there are so few 16:10's on the market and nothing high resolution. 16:10 is such a great aspect-ratio and the extra vertical screen real-estate is very useful when programming.
It is interesting to see some laptops move off of 16:9 to 16:10 or 3:2. This gives me hope that we'll see new/better 16:10 panels.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#98Bitmap fonts will look perfect on low res displays. I've been using a 1366x768 laptop with terminus font for six years.
to reinforce your point, while I can appreciate more pixels, per display or per inch, I appreciate more being able to pick up a 1366x768 laptop and be productive and not feeling like I need to whine, complain, or write supercilious blog posts.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#99Wow. He was right. I just changed my 15 inch Macbook Pro scaling away from default and WOW the text is clear. I also just turned my second monitor onto 144hz and WOW the animations are fast. My work from home setup just got significantly better.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#100i have a 4k 27" paired with a thinkpad. On ubuntu with gnome there is a huge performance dip on x11 with fractional scaling turned on. So i use this at 1x with font scaling of 1.25x.