Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#421

Post by Dagonfly » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 11:23 PM UTC

owenwil wrote: post #105

jjcm wrote: post #98

Awesome to see them finally putting out almost consumer friendly pricing displays. Few things I'm disappointed about though: - 60hz. For this price point I'd expect higher. - Thunderbolt 3. Interesting that they didn't bump to 4, given the Mac Studio is Thunderbolt 4. This means you wont be able to daisy chain the displays. - Lack of size options. Would love to see more variety here. After moving to an ultrawide form…

The technology to do 5K @ 120hz just doesn't exist yet. 5K @ 60Hz is already maxing out Thunderbolt 4.

To shed some light:

DisplayPort 2.0 supports up to 77.37 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Wikipedia's DisplayPort article has excellent tables about bandwidths of display formats: HDR 5K@120hz (57 Gbit/s) is totally possible with DP 2.0.

One could use DisplayPort 2.0 alt-mode to carry that signal over a USB-C cable. With the main disadvantage that the USB ports on the monitor would drop to USB 2.0 speeds [1]. And alt-mode 2.0 is only available on the most recent hosts with USB4 ports.

[1] Native USB4 tunneling only supports DisplayPort 1.4a (for now). That's a huge flaw imo, cause falling back to alt-mode takes over the cable and blocks USB3/PCIe tunneling from working. In fact, that flaw is even present on this monitor:

> When connected to iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad Pro 11-inch (1st and 2nd generation), or iPad Air (5th generation), Studio Display USB-C ports deliver USB 2 data transfer speeds.

Those models don't support TB3 or USB4 on their USB-C port, so they have to use alt-mode with either compression or without HDR.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#422

Post by hahamaster » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 11:30 PM UTC

coconut08 wrote: post #132

jimrandomh wrote: post #110

It's kind of ridiculous how slow the progress in screen resolutions has been. It's disappointing that Apple is only going for 5k, not 8k; they're well positioned to fix the ecosystem and bring high-resolution large displays to everyone, if only they tried. I'm finally sitting in front of an 8k 65" screen. This gives me a nice combination of decent picel density in the center and lots of peripheral vision in which to…

maybe i'm just old and blind but i can BARELY even notice the difference between 1440p and 4k if i very explicitly and intentionally look for it let alone the difference between 5k and 8k. this seems like so beyond unnecessary that it's absurd. i might be able to be convinced that you could notice on your 8k 65 inch tv if you were standing right in front of it, but on a 27 inch display that seems incredibly unlikely…

Depends on the screen size. On a 22" screen, the difference between 4k and 1440p equates to 200dpi and 133dpi respectively - if you can't see the difference between 200dpi and 133dpi, I'm sorry, but you have either poor eyesight or glasses aren't doing their job.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#423

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 11:42 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #420

kllrnohj wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Androids pixels are display pixels, there's no post-render scaling. So no pixel cracks, no blurriness, etc... Density is instead handled mostly at layout, as it should be.

You can't just make the windows bigger on a high res display, the text will be unreadably small.

Of course you can. Text only ends up unreadably small if your text is specified in pixels. Which on a density-aware toolkit (like Android's) it isn't. https://developer.android.com/training/multiscreen/screenden...

This is also best practice on many other platforms, too (eg, 'pt' and 'em' units). This is far less commonly followed on most toolkits, though, but it's the norm on Android.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#424

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 12:07 AM UTC

mekster wrote: post #406

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

$1599 isn't quite as bad as I expected, actually. I've still got my old 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display (a puny 2560 by 1440 pixels), which i use daily. (The convenience of built-in video/mic/USB hub, with one cable, is indispensible and more important to me than resolution, and it's been really unclear to me what else could do that with a macbook). But might be ready to upgrade to this guy.

> $1599 isn't quite as bad as I expected, actually. Only if you try not to look at other vendors. It doesn't offer anything fancy except the fancy pricing.

I am interested in comparison shopping, I can't find very many other vendors that offer displays with built-in camera, mic, speakers, as well as ethernet port and USB hub, all connected with the USB-C/thunderbolt cable.

Do they exist but I'm just bad at shopping? I may be! Please help out?

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#425

Post by Smoosh » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

halfstar91 wrote: post #399

esyir wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, blind tests have shown that users are easily able to discern between 60 vs 144hz. This isn't really contested anywhere.

I know this isn't what you mean.. but I'm imagining someone blindfolded in a research lab testing this out...

Blindfolded person: "I can't see a difference!"

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#426

Post by astrange » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #423

astrange wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just make the windows bigger on a high res display, the text will be unreadably small.

Of course you can. Text only ends up unreadably small if your text is specified in pixels. Which on a density-aware toolkit (like Android's) it isn't. https://developer.android.com/training/multiscreen/screenden... This is also best practice on many other platforms, too (eg, 'pt' and 'em' units). This is far less commonly followed on most toolkits, though, but it's the norm on Android.

And now your controls are either blurry or don't match the text size or you redid them all in vector art.

Text size controls are in iOS as an accessibility feature (dynamic type) but it's not always on and it can't be the approach to HiDPI.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#427

Post by hahamaster » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

Beautiful, I'm probably going to get it.

Pity there isn't a version with a 24" panel as on the M1 iMac. 27" is great but it actually might be a liittle too big, but I'll live. I guess no product is ever ideal.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#428

Post by FireBeyond » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 4:43 AM UTC

shadowfacts wrote: post #265

owenwil wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good reason for this: Thunderbolt 4 doesn't have enough port bandwidth. TB4 can carry a max of 30Gbps but 5K @ 120hz is 32Gbps. There's no way Apple would do two cables for this, and the next gen of Thunderbolt is a while off, so the choice makes sense.

DisplayPort 1.4 (which TB3/TB4 support as an alternate mode) has enough bandwidth for 5k at up to 144Hz using display stream compression (which Apple already uses for the Pro Display XDR): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Refresh_frequency_...

Whatever Apple is doing for the XDR (which I own) is not DSC, or not standard.

Because DSC has been broken ever since the Big Sur betas. Catalina supported 1.4 and DSC and my cheese grater Mac Pro happily drove 2x27" 4K monitors in HDR @ 144Hz.

Big Sur? Nope, you get 95Hz SDR or 60Hz HDR. If you set the monitors to DP1.2 you get 120Hz SDR.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#429

Post by FireBeyond » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #204

manuelabeledo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, they are sold separately.

The VESA mount is actually a no-extra-cost configuration option on the Studio Display.

But they still want to charge us XDR owners $200 for the privilege.

Re: Apple announces 27-inch 5K Studio Display

#430

Post by esyir » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

enduser wrote: post #413

esyir wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, blind tests have shown that users are easily able to discern between 60 vs 144hz. This isn't really contested anywhere.

IMAX did tests back in the day with footage of a baseball being pitched directly at the camera. They found that the intensity of emotional response tailed off after 60hz. It's not that the higher frame rate isn't perceptible, but that raising the frame rate doesn't really have any appreciable impact unless people expect higher frame rates.

There's a notable difference between passively consumed content and interactive content.

We're fine with 24FPS for films and tv shows, but try that for an FPS and it's considered nigh unplayable. I remember when the line was "the human eye can't see past 30FPS" now it's at 60. The treadmill keeps going.