Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

I have the same opinion as the author here. When I buy a 4k monitor, it's generally for the higher PPI. There's just less eye strain for me reading less pixelated fonts.

Personal sweet spot me in terms of pleasant readability is: 4k 24" @ 200% scale (so same screen estate as 1080p) or 5k 27" @ 200% scale (same screen estate as 1440p).

Only benefit I've noticed is it's easier to read text and smooth-scroll at the same time. Otherwise it just makes mouse movements and rapid console vomiting look nice. It's really unnecessary for programming in my opinion, use the budget for more pixels.

I 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 graphics had a CRT screen in 1995 that was 48bit)

5. No need to fiddle with contrast and brightness all the time when I switch between a mostly light or mostly dark content, for example I gave up on my last attempt to use flat panel because I couldn't play Witcher 3 and SuperHot one after the other, whenever I adjusted settings to make one game playable the other became just splotches (for example the optimal settings for Witcher 3 made SuperHot become a almost flat white screen, completely impossible to play).

6. For me, reading raster fonts on CRT gives much less eyestrain and is more beautiful than many fonts that need subpixel antialias on flat panels.

7. Those things are crazy resilient, I still have some working screens from 80286 era (granted, the colors are getting weird now with aging phosphors), while some of my new flatpanels failed within 2 years with no repair possible.

I found this article utterly baffling. The author clearly knows their stuff, having created Fira Code, but my experiences couldn't be more different.

    I spend most of my days in a text browser, text 
    editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving 
    letters.

    So I optimize my setup to showing really, really 
    good letters.

I certainly appreciate how nice text looks on a high DPI display.

But for coding purposes!? I don't find high DPI text more legible... unless we're talking really tiny font sizes, smaller than just about anybody would ever use for coding.

And there's a big "screen real estate" penalty with high DPI displays and 2X scaling. As the author notes, this leaves you with something like 1440×900 or 1920x1080 of logical real estate. Neither of which is remotely suitable for development work IMO.

    But at least you can enjoy that gorgeous screen and 
    pixel-crisp fonts. Otherwise, why would you buy a retina 
    screen at all?

It's not like you really have the option on Macs and many other higher-end laptops these days. And I am buying a computer to do some work, not admire the beautiful curves of a nice crisp font.

So anyway, for me, I chose the Dell 3818. 38", 3840 x 1600 of glorious, low-resolution text. A coder's paradise.

For purposes of software development, I won't really be interested until 8K displays become affordable and feasible. As the author notes, they integer scale perfectly to 2560×1440. Now that would rock.

I bought a 1080p 27" HP 27yh for under USD 100 last Black Friday.

I thought my monitor would be squarely middle of the pack but turns out it is barely above 80 ppi

Display size: 23.53" × 13.24" = 311.5in² (59.77cm × 33.62cm = 2009.68cm²) at 81.59 PPI, 0.3113mm dot pitch, 6657 PPI²