91–100 of 203 posts
Imho the Apple Thunderbolt Display is still a great (and way much cheaper) alternative for those of us who can't care less about refresh rate or pixel density. If this one had a bigger size (say, 32 inches) and a more 'squared' ratio, I'd consider it an upgrade.
This is the way.
I’ve been researching good monitors to upgrade from my Acer UM.CX2AA.P01 34” When the studio display got released I started to get excited. After all the reviews I’ve read I will definitely NOT buy it. Thanks for writing this! Planning on saving up until the Pro Display XDR gets updated and getting that instead.
I thought I was young enough to be living past the era of dial up, but now I realize my own dial up is the display.
They sort of imply that only the Studio display would have given him a DPI increase over his previous 27" 1440p display. Any 4k screen would have also done that. Then he concludes that 600nits is unnecessary and that he doesn't need or want the USB-C ports. I have no idea why he went with the apple display instead of any good 4k screen for 400$, or two of them.
A 24" 4K screen has the same DPI as a 27" 5K screen. So a 4K screen will natively provide a smaller desktop layout regardless of screen size, particularly on macOS.
Not quite. 24" 4K (3840 x 2160) is 184 DPI. A 27" 5K (5120 x 2880) is 218 DPI.
I'm pretty sure that 24" 4K would be high enough that I would not be able to notice the lower DPI compared to my current 27" 5K iMac.
I base this on the fact that I normally view the iMac from about 19" away, occasionally leaning in to as close as 13". At 218 DPI, viewing from those distances gives 72 PPD (pixels per degree) and 49 PPD. I don't see any difference, and so conclude that I'm fine with anything about 49 PPD.
At 19" distance a 24" 4K would give me 60 PPD. Somewhere around 15" it would drop below the 49 PPD I know for sure is good enough for me. At 13" it would be down to 42 PPD.
I'm pretty sure that would still be fine, because if I get close enough to my iMac for it to be 42 PPD (just a little under 10 inches) it is still fine for me.
The main issue I have with 24" 4K is that there doesn't seem to be many models and they cost a lot. Newegg for instance only has 3: LG 24MD4KL for $690, LG 24MD4KLB for $900, and a refurbished LG for $649. B & H has those first two for $697 and $882, and an LG 24UD58 for $297. I'm not sure why that last is so much cheaper than the others--it has a pretty low maximum brightness but I didn't notice anything else too bad in the specs.
Fortunately, similar calculations for 4K 27" and tests at various distances from the iMac to match the PPD of 4K 27" at my distances suggest that 4K 27" would work for me and there are a gazillion of them in the $300-600 range.
I've been recently looking into this because my 2017 27" 5K iMac has developed a vertical line of bad pixels [1]. (And wow...I need to clean that screen. Those photos show a lot of dust and dirt that I do not see with the naked eye). That line is in the middle of the right half of the screen and the way I sit has me centered in front of the left half of the screen, so it is pretty much ignorable most of the time but it has prompted me to start thinking of upgrading to a new Mac system, with a Mac Studio being the most likely candidate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is the UltraFine 5k’s chassis creaky, it can’t handle the heat the display produces and has an extremely high rate of cracking with pieces flaking off. The whole product is abysmal in terms of quality, I don’t know how LG thought it was ok to release.
What's weird to me is it doesn't take a genius to guess at what an Apple monitor would have looked like. Why can zero other companies execute on something like this? Sure Apple has advantages with scale, but it's not like they're squeezing tight margins. There was a lot of room under the cost of the Pro Display XDR. I'm not sure why none of these other companies can really execute on high quality hardware.
I don't understand why the only manufacturer in the 5k 27" screen market was LG for half a decade and now only LG and Apple. There should be so much room here.
They sort of imply that only the Studio display would have given him a DPI increase over his previous 27" 1440p display. Any 4k screen would have also done that. Then he concludes that 600nits is unnecessary and that he doesn't need or want the USB-C ports. I have no idea why he went with the apple display instead of any good 4k screen for 400$, or two of them.
On a Mac, the UI on 4k at 27" is too large. That is why the Studio Display is 27" 5k and the 24" iMac is 4.5k. You can do non-integer scaling to change the UI size, but then it becomes blurry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is the UltraFine 5k’s chassis creaky, it can’t handle the heat the display produces and has an extremely high rate of cracking with pieces flaking off. The whole product is abysmal in terms of quality, I don’t know how LG thought it was ok to release.
What's weird to me is it doesn't take a genius to guess at what an Apple monitor would have looked like. Why can zero other companies execute on something like this? Sure Apple has advantages with scale, but it's not like they're squeezing tight margins. There was a lot of room under the cost of the Pro Display XDR. I'm not sure why none of these other companies can really execute on high quality hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's weird to me is it doesn't take a genius to guess at what an Apple monitor would have looked like. Why can zero other companies execute on something like this? Sure Apple has advantages with scale, but it's not like they're squeezing tight margins. There was a lot of room under the cost of the Pro Display XDR. I'm not sure why none of these other companies can really execute on high quality hardware.
Hell, just take the same LG panel that's used by both the LG UltraFine and the Apple Studio Display, put it in a well-built metal case, don't waste money on things like the A13 CPU, 64GB of flash, 13 megapixel camera, high-quality speaker system, etc, don't spend as many engineering resources on making the monitor as thin-and-light as possible. You could've made the standard monitor for anyone who wants a 5k 27" scre…
They sort of imply that only the Studio display would have given him a DPI increase over his previous 27" 1440p display. Any 4k screen would have also done that. Then he concludes that 600nits is unnecessary and that he doesn't need or want the USB-C ports. I have no idea why he went with the apple display instead of any good 4k screen for 400$, or two of them.
Maybe because he wanted a 27" display and not a 24" one? You wanna stick to integer DPI scaling for the most part, and at 2x scale, a 4k 27" display has way too big GUI elements. There aren't many good options in the HiDPI 27" market, just half-measures like the 4k 27" screens you mention which require fractional scaling.
I've seen this said a lot. This is my setup, and I do not think the GUI elements are way too big. I find it to be a very comfortable computing experience, with very little eyestrain.