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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

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Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#291

Post by gorgoiler »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #284
thomaslord wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Person who actively dislikes 4k here. In my experience: 1. No matter what operating system you're on, you'll eventually run into an application that doesn't render in high dpi mode. Depending on the OS that can mean it renders tiny, or that the whole things is super ugly and pixelated (WAY worse than on a native 1080p display) 2. If the 4k screen is on your laptop, good luck ever having a decent experience plu…

FWIW, my main monitor is a 43" 4k display, and it works perfectly fine on AwesomeWM - but I' don't use any scaling, the 4k is purely for more screen real estate - literally like having 4 perfectly aligned borderless 24" monitors. I can fit 10 full A4 pages of text simultaneously.

Which display in particular are you recommending, and what is the latency like?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#292

Post by tonsky »

chrismorgan wrote: post #95

Concerning 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 m…

this is interesting, thank you! And font-weight: 300 has been an old personal nemesis. That explained at least part of it! Do you know if font dilation is on by default?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#293

Post by tonsky »

torb-xyz wrote: post #176
chrismorgan wrote: post #95

Concerning 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 m…

I tried turning off smoothing and frankly the text was uncomfortably thin to read. I guess maybe their font should just be bolder by default so you don't need the glyph dilation to compensate.

You get used to it after few days

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#294

Post by jcastro »

gnicholas wrote: post #153
dsabanin wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my 3 monitor setup. In 20 years of coding, I finally reached peak productivity in my workspace. No switching between windows, ease of throwing a window aside for monitoring, laying out information and tools side to side. It’s incredible once you readjust your habits and learn to use that new space. I compare it to having a large, wide desk when you’re working on something. Who wouldn’t want that? I was one of…

> I compare it to having a large, wide desk when you’re working on something. Who wouldn’t want that? I have used between 1-3 monitors over the last decade, and there sure are advantages to having 3 for certain tasks. However, I noticed that having multiple monitors resulted in me having a dedicated screen for email (usually the smallest, my laptop screen). This decreased my productivity. Perhaps not everyone has thi…

When I need to concentrate I just turn off my two side ones and focus on the middle one.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#295

Post by enobrev »

jseliger wrote: post #261
thomaslord wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Person who actively dislikes 4k here. In my experience: 1. No matter what operating system you're on, you'll eventually run into an application that doesn't render in high dpi mode. Depending on the OS that can mean it renders tiny, or that the whole things is super ugly and pixelated (WAY worse than on a native 1080p display) 2. If the 4k screen is on your laptop, good luck ever having a decent experience plu…

3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming This seems like a long-standing problem with Linux, rather than a reason to dislike high-res screens.

Why not both? If I'm on linux, with no interest in changing and perfectly happy with my display, and 4k doesn't work easily on my system, why would I be interested in a 4k screen?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#296

Post by acdha »

arvinsim wrote: post #209
acdha wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acclimation is a huge factor: if you’re used to writing on a small laptop that will seem normal but few people won’t see a benefit moving to a larger display even if they don’t expect it. That’s one of the few durable research findings over the decades. Multiple monitors are slightly different: the physical gap means it’s not a seamless switch and not every task benefits.

> Multiple monitors are slightly different: the physical gap means it’s not a seamless switch and not every task benefits. Probably why ultrawides are gaining popularity.

Yes — I notice this a lot while doing anything where I have an app and debugger / log windows open simultaneously. The extra width is an enormous win.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#297

Post by ianhowson »

rootusrootus wrote: post #120
bredren wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been focused on Apple display products for the past few months as I'm looking to make an upgrade from the Dell P2715Q 4k 27" I use primarily for development. There is a three page thread on using the Apple 32" XDR for software dev on MacRumors. [1] I believe there is a major product gap at Apple right now in the mid-market display. Specifically a replacement for the LED 27" Cinema Display which was announced 10…

> 27 inch IPS display, 5120 x 2880 @ 60Hz with standard glass at $1999 That's $200 more than it costs with the computer built in. Would rather see it more aggressively priced, or at least bring back target mode.

I've got a Planar IX2790 and it's great. Article is spot-on re. scaling -- it's much nicer to look at all day (native 2x scaling) vs. 4k at 1.5x scaling.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#298

Post by _ph_ »

JohnBooty wrote: post #77

I found this article utterly baffling. The author clearly knows their stuff, having created Fira Code, but my experiences couldn't be more different. I spend most of my days in a text browser, text editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving letters. So I optimize my setup to showing really, really good letters. I certainly appreciate how nice text looks on a high DPI display. But for coding purposes!? I don't…

That Dell would be the screen I would buy right now for coding. I am currently using a 5k iMac at home and a 30" Dell (2560x1600) at work. I really loved the resolution of the iMac, but for my work, I need screen estate. The font rendering on the 30" at 1x scaling is good enough, and having a lot of screen estate is essential for me. Having 50% more horizontal space would of course be great :).

The new 32" Apple display would be great of course, but the price is just off. For coding, I don't care how much reference quality the color setup is. My only hope is, that Dell soon offers an affordable display based on that panel.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#299

Post by chrismorgan »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #286
chrismorgan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the whole point in question: that higher resolution for a given size is an extremely good thing.

Not really. There is an end point. Also, resolution is not free, this is a tradeoff, when you push more pixels on screen it means more work for the GPU (or CPU in some cases) and more loading time and space to load all those high-dpi resources... At this point I clearly prefer lower latency and higher framerate over more pixels.

Sure, to a point. But the step-up in question here (1080p to 4K, at sizes like 15–27″) has clearly visible benefits.

And sure, resolution isn’t free, but at these levels that was an argument for the hardware of eight years ago, not the hardware of today. All modern hardware can cope with at least one 4K display with perfect equanimity. Excluding games (which you can continue to run at the lower resolutions if necessary), almost no software will be measurably affected in latency or frame rate by being bumped from 1080p to 4K. Graphics memory requirements will be increased to as much as 4×, but that’s typically not a problem.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#300

Post by slavoingilizov »

This is a great article. Even if you disagree with the conclusion and recommendation, it shows what you need to look out for when buying a monitor.

I had to go through a similar exercise recently. The DisplayPort / USB-C / Thunderbolt story is just insane. I was looking for a monitor to use with both MacOS and Windows. HDMI can't do 4k @ 60Hz, DisplayPort cables never tell you which version they support.

I ended up with LG UHD 4K 27UL650, which I'm very happy with, but switching between Mac and Windows is still difficult, because this monitor only has 1 DisplayPort input. I've settled to using HDMI for Mac and 30Hz instead of switching cables all the time.

Improvement in experience is very subjective but I agree with the author on everything except maybe the 120Hz.

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