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Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

michael.stapelberg.ch

311–320 of 470 posts

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I am not quite sure what that is. Sleep works great with my PC (motherboard is ASRock WRX80 Creator) and M1 MBP, but I can only adjust brightness through the OSD.

There’s a Mac app called Lunar that uses DDC (a protocol for sending commands to a screen) to allow you to adjust the brightness and volume of an external monitor with the usual keys on your MacBook keyboard (in clamshell mode at least) or with a slider. Very convenient, can’t recommend enough.

Oh OK sorry but yeah I wouldn't use that. If this is usually supported on Dell monitors, I would bet it works on these.

Personally, I rarely adjust brightness on my desktop displays and my ZMK keyboard volume buttons work reliably cross-platform.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#312

I just purchased 2 of the 6Ks and I am keeping both. AMA. I do not understand the complaints about pixel density. The display is 223 ppi, which is the same or slightly higher than Apple displays. I am using them in a dual display configuration with an M1 Macbook Pro via TB4 and a Windows PC with an RTX 4090 via DisplayPort. The KVM feature makes switching back and forth a breeze. I am using 175% scaling (in Windows)…

Does the refresh rate go higher if you configure it to 4k or 2k?

Sorry I haven't tried and not near them atm, but I am quite confident it does not.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#313
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original commenter but, it... has a certain look to it. It's not something that can be totally solved by the OS or any scaling algorithm because fundamentally you have to deal with rendering fractional portions of a pixel to a physical screen where there is no such thing as a fractional pixel. It just always looks different, and IMO worse, than integer scaling. You have to trade off distortions for bluriness…

I don't understand why 'distortion' (things being rendered ± 1 pixel over on some screens vs. on others) is a problem unless your GUI frameworks and/or apps count on pixel-exact layouts for some UI elements. But why would they? Isn't the entire web built on a reflowable format that works pretty well? Shouldn't those tiny 1-pixel differences be like the easiest possible variation for a GUI system's layout engine to co…

This post has more information, as well as tons of other related info: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#314
post #222

I just purchased 2 of the 6Ks and I am keeping both. AMA. I do not understand the complaints about pixel density. The display is 223 ppi, which is the same or slightly higher than Apple displays. I am using them in a dual display configuration with an M1 Macbook Pro via TB4 and a Windows PC with an RTX 4090 via DisplayPort. The KVM feature makes switching back and forth a breeze. I am using 175% scaling (in Windows)…

Ugly camera blob up top bother you at all?

I think I misunderstood this question earlier so here's another go at it...

Aesthetically, no. I am grateful that there aren't any gamer aesthetics involved, but my desk is not a showroom; it's a workspace. However, the cloth that wraps the speaker cluster seems cheap, like it could rip or get pilly over time. That is the only aspect that bothers me. I like that the cameras are attached because they are very nice cameras and support Windows Hello and I prefer not having a corded camera balancing on my displays.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#315
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your actual use case apart from technology fetishism?

I can't speak for him, but for me? Straight integer scaling of 4k and 1440p. I loathe fractional scaling, and I cannot wait for the day that I can run an 8k display at > 90hz without compromise

This is the exact same reason I want it.

But with OLED.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the current Apple Studio Display and Apple XDR Pro Display are both 218 ppi.

218 ppi matches the native displays on current Macs. The Dell 8k has 288 pixels per inch, which is 4x the detail of the original Mac. Macintosh 128k was released with a 72 ppi display, so every pixel was the size of a "point", a unit used in more traditional, paper-based graphic design.

Some Macbooks don't match 218 ppi. MacBook Pro 14" and 16" have 254 ppi. I don't know why Apple decided to have such a high ppi for them.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the kvm/switching feature? My current monitor is awful for that, I really just want a dedicated "cycle input" button. Or ideally, an N-position slider switch, but I can't imagine anyone would ever build such a thing.

If it works like the 3419W you have one button press to wake the OSD and then a press on the input you want to switch to. Not terrible, not great either because on the 3419 the OSD is a bit slow and the button are below the screen so you can’t reliable double click to switch.

If you ever try using the KVM feature on for instance a Phillips monitor, you'll realize the Dell feature is a dream!

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a Mac app called Lunar that uses DDC (a protocol for sending commands to a screen) to allow you to adjust the brightness and volume of an external monitor with the usual keys on your MacBook keyboard (in clamshell mode at least) or with a slider. Very convenient, can’t recommend enough.

Oh OK sorry but yeah I wouldn't use that. If this is usually supported on Dell monitors, I would bet it works on these. Personally, I rarely adjust brightness on my desktop displays and my ZMK keyboard volume buttons work reliably cross-platform.

I you don’t need it, you don’t need it, but I don’t understand the first sentence. Many different displays support DDC, my Philips at home does and the Dells and I think BenQ that we have at the office do too.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget 4K, 6K, or 8K. Pixel density is the spec when considering any display. It doesn't matter if it's a wearable, phone, laptop, monitor, TV, or stadium wrapping LED surface, the only important factors for resolution are the distance to the viewer's eyes and the distance between the pixels. For context, 20/20 vision is the ability to perceive 1 arcminute of angular resolution. Beyond that point there are diminishin…

So, if 25 cm is an optimal viewing distance, 350 ppi is maximum phone screen density required?

Generally apple picks the optimal ppi and they don’t market the ppi value, only that it’s “retina”. They will prefer odd resolutions over suboptimal ppi. For example, the m2 macbook air is 2560 by 1664 at 224 ppi. The maximum ppi you can get on an iphone is 460 ppi, so I assume in their testing they found that even people with perfect vision holding it really close had no use for sharper screens than that.

Re: Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of the point [1] is equally interesting and messy. Back in school, my old teachers (mostly old printing machine operators, and typesetters) preferred Apple over anything else especially because of the native 72ppi vs windows normal 96ppi. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)

And these days, 96 ppi is the de facto standard, via the CSS specification: https://webplatform.github.io/docs/tutorials/understanding-c... It's as if the Windows spec were retconned into being the historical norm all along, but I need to dig around to find the origin story here... Why 96 dpi? My simple guess is that 96 is also divisible by 12, and thus easy to split up into 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 18, 24 parts... you also h…

The wiki has this paragraph:

In 1996, it was adopted by W3C for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) where it was later related at a fixed 3:4 ratio to the pixel due to a general (but wrong) assumption of 96 pixel-per-inch screens

I actually never really questioned this.

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