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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

431–440 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used a 4K display, for at least a few days? If you have, I still disagree with you, but if not, I’m going to completely ignore your opinion, because I find the difference in how pleasant it is to use a good screen just so vast. Sure, you can do things on a lousy monitor, but it’s terrible and you’ll hate it. :) (My first laptop was a second-hand HP 6710b at 1680×1050 for 15″, and that set me to never accepti…

> Have you used a 4K display? I'll go one step further: I used the LG 27" 5K Display for two whole years before returning to a 34" Ultrawide with a more typical DPI. Obviously I preferred the pixel density and image quality of the high-DPI screen, but I find myself more productive on the 34" Ultrawide with a regular DPI. (FWIW, LG now has a newer pseudo-5K Ultrawide that strikes a balance between the two). I look for…

Just want to second the use of an ultrawide (3440x1440). It's such a better experience all around. I can't go back to a non-ultrawide monitor.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used a 4K display, for at least a few days? If you have, I still disagree with you, but if not, I’m going to completely ignore your opinion, because I find the difference in how pleasant it is to use a good screen just so vast. Sure, you can do things on a lousy monitor, but it’s terrible and you’ll hate it. :) (My first laptop was a second-hand HP 6710b at 1680×1050 for 15″, and that set me to never accepti…

> Have you used a 4K display? I'll go one step further: I used the LG 27" 5K Display for two whole years before returning to a 34" Ultrawide with a more typical DPI. Obviously I preferred the pixel density and image quality of the high-DPI screen, but I find myself more productive on the 34" Ultrawide with a regular DPI. (FWIW, LG now has a newer pseudo-5K Ultrawide that strikes a balance between the two). I look for…

I upgraded from dual 34" ultrawides to one 49" super ultrawide and won't look back. 5140x1440 on a single monitor at 120hz.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#433
post #328

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…

4K on a desktop is just sorta silly. Now.... 1440p is a very useful bump over 1080.

You still need to scale the resolution to make it easily readable on most common monitor sizes like 27". The end result is really good and sharp.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#434
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200 is quite cheap for a 27” monitor. A good non-gaming 1440p 27” costs about $300-400 not on sale.

> $200 is quite cheap for a 27” monitor. A good non-gaming 1440p 27” costs about $300-400 not on sale. I think grandparent post meant 1920x1080. Depending on your needs (no adaptive refresh rate, no color accuracy, only one HDMI input and one VGA input, no rotating stand, no vesa mount), you can get a 27" monitor for about USD 100. For most programmers, two 27" 1080p monitors ought to be sufficient. I'm just amazed I…

I have a single 1080p 13'' monitor (my old MacBook Pro) and that's sufficient for me. I seriously don't understand what people do with that extra space. This is enough to see 3 horizontally split files open on Emacs. And you can double it (6) if you also have vertical split, but then page becomes too small.

1080 27'' sure sounds nice, but why do you think we need two 27'' monitors?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#436

I'm currently working from home on a 14-year-old ViewSonic VA902b. 19", 1280x1024, 75 Hz. It was a freebie from a folded startup. This exactly matches monitors I used in the more distant past, like NCD X/Window terminals: 19", 1280x1024. This form factor basically determines what is the ideal pixel size for most work. Basically, 1280 is about the right number of pixels for the angle of vision subtended by the display…

At work (I remember the place well!) I have a pair of 1920x1024's. What size? Not sure. I rotated them 90 degrees, so there are two vertical panes of 1024x1920, side by side, making a 2048x1920 area.

Approximately square is the most productive size. When we're working with text, be it code or prose, the height of it is unlimited, but the width isn't. So it ends up in multiple columns.

Books are mostly oblong (taller than they are wide), but that's only if we think of them in their closed state. An typical open book is typically a bit wider than it is tall (but not greatly so), and you have two columns of text (the two pages).

That open book geometry is an awful lot like my rotated monitor setup, isn't it.

Until I rotated the monitors into this configuration, I was consistently just using one and ignoring the other. Moreover, ironically, using virtual desktops! I keep virtual desktops as large as 4x4. I would rather pane among virtual desktops with hot keys than turn my head between two excessively wide monitors placed side by side.

People made remarks about my disuse of the second monitor, which prompted me to come up with a good way of using it.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... too opinionated for my liking. Put yourself in the mindset of a typography geek. Then, by default, you will care about almost all of these things. I'm not saying you should care about all of these things all or most of the time, but that's the correct mindset to put you in sync with the author's conclusions (mostly -- I don't really think 120Hz is that big a deal).

> I don't really think 120Hz is that big a deal IMO 120 Hz monitors are overrated for pretty much everything except for FPS games (and similar fast-paced interactive titles). I have a 144 Hz display and I would not want to go back to a 60 Hz display for gaming. At some point, my monitor changed to a 60 Hz refresh rate without telling me after some driver update. The first time I played Overwatch after that happened I…

Another OW player in HN? :) I feel the same about the 144hz monitor I have, only really worth it for playing OW, the rest of the time is nice but I feel like I'm not getting enough out of it. Maybe next monitor I get will be 4k, but not sure for now.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#439

The monitor I want: - 1440p - IPS panel - size between 23 and 27 inches, ideally 24 or 25 - flatscreen, 16:9, normal monitor, no "gamer" or other weird stuff. - reasonably priced I don't live in a rich country so there's not much variety. I got tired of searching for it. All monitors with more than 1080p I've found are either "gamer" (which cost 5x as much because of the gamer tax and other features useless to me, li…

I think this is the monitor you're looking for: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ultrasharp-25-usb-c-monitor-...

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#440
post #76

The technical details are all right (or seem right to me, anyway), but this is too opinionated for my liking. No, you do not need a 4K monitor for software development. Some people might like them, some won't. [edit/clarification: someone rightfully pointed out that nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor. I was unclear here: I meant "some people won't need them" more than "dislike them"] This sounds like when Jeff…

The author is biased because of ligatures. These special glyphs are a little more dense than normal text, e.g the triple line equals and need a higher res display to look good. I personally dislike ligatures, I have no problem chunking two characters together in my head.

> e.g the triple line equals and need a higher res display to look good.

Do you mean '≡' (U+2261 identical to)? Because no, it very much doesn't; in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen a font where it looked bad short of vertical misalignment with surrounding text.

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