Checking in with 2xWQHD @ 144hz. Definitely invest in a good set of monitors...
Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#332I don't know. Text is important to me, but high refresh rate is much more. Even scrolling text or dragging windows around at >120 Hz is a game changer. Going back to the MBP display gives me instant headache until I re-adapt. It's hard to describe, it's like all of a sudden everything has a very distracting input lag. Now I just need to wait for a 4k 144Hz IPS that can be driven via MBP (or just get what's on the mar…
4k can be driven by Mac at 120Hz, but the mac has to be new enough (2018+ is my guess, based on thunderbolt 3 upgrade in 2018) and have a discrete graphics card.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benefit of a 3840x1600 screen over two monitors with lower resolution is that 3840/2 = 1920 and 3840/3 = 1280. Those are horizontal resolutions for 1080p and 720p respectively. The fact that these are standard resolutions means basically every app works as designed regardless of whether you have 2 or 3 windows side by side. This isn't true for ultrawides with resolutions like 3440x1440 that don't divide cleanly i…
That Dell tool sounds a lot like Microsoft's PowerTool FancyZones. Have you tried FancyZones? It can optionally take over the Win+Left/Right shortcuts from Aero snap (the drag to side/quadrants tool built into Windows). I've been drooling over the Samsung curved ultra-wides since like January as a possibility for my gaming desktop. In March one of my gaming desktop's monitors blew so I've been done to just one monito…
I haven't used FancyZones. I will check that out, thanks for the tip.
The financial aspect of this is definitely the toughest part to justify. A single monitor with this resolution is always going to be more expensive than multiple smaller monitors. The cost was justified in my experience, but that will vary depending on your use cases and budget.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#334It's frustrating that consumer Hi-DPI display development has completely stalled in the last five years. As mentioned in the article, macOS works best using true 2x integer scaling. Using 2x scaling, a 4k monitor will result in an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development. A superior option is iMac/LG 5k display results which nets an equivalent workspace of 1440p. The only opti…
Why is everyone so attached to scaling? What is this shit software that 1) everyone relies on and 2) whose UI and font size can't be adjusted like any normal software (or web page) since the 90s? Is this yet another brainfart from Apple?
Scaling just works greatly as Apple implements it. Especially, if your screen has a 200ppi or larger. Trying to change the font sizes across all applications is a sysiphus task and eventually you end up with one, which doesn't behave greatly. Especially, if one of the applications is Linux running in a VM. I have a Dell 24" 4k - and for 4k at 2x, the screen should be about 22". But with macOS I can set it to a virtual resulution of 2300, which works great.
On my 15" MB Pro, I usually use the 1680 resolution, but if needed, I can quickly change it to 1920.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#335I had a 34" 4K monitor in 2019, and it was a mess in Windows 10. I sold it and picked up an ultra-wide, 38" 3840x1600 (~109 PPI) and I couldn't be happier. I agree that a "good" monitor is a necessity, but I disagree with OP that "good" = 4K 120 Hz. With any legacy application, and even many modern ones, UIs were either fuzzy, or tiny, or a mix of the two, even with all of the Windows per-program custom high-DPI sett…
For what it’s worth, the “fuzzy” version is usually about what you’d be getting on a display if it wasn’t HiDPI. Also don’t forget to exclude the rarer, but still happens scenario where the UI is scaled twice for some reason, so everything is huge.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#336Well timed article for me. I'm looking to buy an external monitor to go along with my older (mid 2015) 15" MBP. I was searching hacker news and elsewhere for opinions last night. I got confused, frustrated and gave up. Today is no exception. The only thing I know is, I want a large hi-res monitor that is at least comparable to my laptop.
4k 60Hz should work no problems. Last Macbook that didn’t supported it was 2012 retina.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#337I still use a CRT, because features I want are still ludicrous expensive in newer tech (although they are getting cheaper over time). 1. Arbitrary resolutions, great to run old software and games, even better to run new games at lower resolution to increase performance. 2. Arbitrary refresh rates. 3. Zero (literally) response time. 4. Awesome color range (many modern screens still are 12bit, meanwhile silicon graphic…
>many modern screens still are 12bit Unless you're using a really cheap screen, most LCDs are 8 bits per color. The cheap ones use 6 bits + 2 bits FRC. 12 bits (presumably 4 bits per color) seems insanely low because it would mean only 16 possible shades per primary color. >meanwhile silicon graphics had a CRT screen in 1995 that was 48bit Source for this? 10 bit color support in graphics cards only became available…
> 10 bit color support in graphics cards only became available around 2015.
That's off by a decade.
> 256 color monitors
Is that a thing that exists?
> We've only switched to 10 bit because of HDR.
You can get clear banding on an 8 bit output, and 10 bit displays are used at the high end. 10-bit HDR isn't immune to banding, since most of the increased coding space goes into expanding the range. There's a good reason for 12 bit HDR to exist.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh! Is that what those funny looking "hoods" are about? I thought for a second they might be functional, but I guess they're just decorative? "Gaming" equipment (monitors, chairs, mice, keyboards, etc. ) rarely seems worth it to me, simply because they spend too much effort and cost on things that are non-functional, but make the thing look attractive to the target audience. I am not a part of that audience, so I fin…
> Oh! Is that what those funny looking "hoods" are about? I thought for a second they might be functional, but I guess they're just decorative?
The main use of those monitor hoods is to remove glare caused by ambient lighting. They're common (and often included) accessories for displays intended to be used for photo editing, color grading, and similar types of work. I was kind of surprised to see one on a "gaming" monitor though.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#339Earlier 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.
I'm in the same boat. More real estate is the big win. I made a pandemic purchase of a TCL 43" 4k TV to use as a monitor primarily for programming. I sit a bit further from it: 30" rather than 24ish when working on the laptop. I drive it with a 2019 inexpensive Acer laptop running Ubuntu 20.04 and xfce. Every so often an update kills xWindows, but I can start it in safe mode and get things working.
I do find my head is on a swivel comparatively, but while noticeable without being a negative. Overall I like it. A lot. The only thing that is painful is sharing the desktop over Webex/skype. That does bog the system down and requires manual resizing of font size to inflate it so that viewers on lower resolution systems can cope with it.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#340I prefer real-estate to sharp fonts, so I run my 4K screens (24" and 27") with no scaling at all.
Couldn't agree more. My primary monitor is a 43" 4k LG at unscaled, native resolution. I can fit five 94 column wide terminals tiled across, each showing 140 lines of text.
Is the text super crisp? Nope. Would I give up all this space for smoother text? Not a chance. Would I replace it with a 43" 8k monitor? In a heartbeat.