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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

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Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#741

Post by TylerE »

hadlock wrote: post #579
sgt wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

27" x 1440p has been my go-to for a while now. Works well without scaling between win/mac/linux, does not dominate the desk completely, high quality monitors are readily available in this resolution etc etc.

I think my dream set up would be a 27" 1440P (What I currently have at home, with a pair of smaller (19" maybe?) 1080p screens on either side setup in portrait. Basically a similar screen area to 2x27", but without a bezel right in the center of my field of view, and the 1080x1920 screens will be a good size for displaying full page (e.g. PDF) at more or less full screen.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#742

Post by willis936 »

This presents itself as a treatise, but it very much is not. It totally ignores critical aspects that should influence monitor choice.

In decreasing importance (imo):

- cost

- contrast ratio / black level

- all aspects related to temporal feel that aren’t refresh rate (response/decay time, sample and hold, backlight strobing, etc.)

- color gamut

- color precision (nobody wants banding from 6 bpc + FRC)

You can’t honestly make recommendations to people for $1000 monitors without even addressing these points, even if you don’t think they’re important for your workflow. It is very poor form.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#743

Post by seanmcdirmid »

the_af wrote: post #717
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you talking about screen size when the article is talking about pixel density? You can have a lot of pixels but low pixel density because your screen is huge, while my first 200+ PPI display was on an iPhone 4, my watch has a 200+ PPI display as well. I don't think many would accept phones or watches with lower pixel densities these days, but somehow the display we use for work is different? You are right tha…

I'm talking about tiny screens and resolutions, so it's both. I don't see the strawmen. Phones and watches are a different use case, so I'm not sure what you mean. I don't type code in either.

You are still conflating display size with pixel density, so I’m not sure what you are arguing against. You talked about in other post about how you had to scale your displays because your OS didn’t support resolution independence, is that what you mean by tiny?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#744

Post by newman8r »

thekevinscott wrote: post #740

For the past decade I’ve been holding out hope for a competitive e-ink monitor to use for coding, but it seems we’re still years away. Dasung and Onyx both offer (somewhat small) monitors but from what I can tell the reviews are less than stellar. A great e-ink monitor - that would be my dream monitor.

I'd love a monitor like that for off-grid, low power use. I'd probably also want a linux distro specifically tailored to an e-ink format.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#745

Post by forgotmypw17 »

orestis wrote: post #373

Do all that, of course. But when you’re writing applications for other people, go buy a shitty middle of the pack laptop, resolution 1280x768, with the windows start bar and menu bars eating like 150pixels of that, and try to use your software there.

For web, try a 25-dollar or 5-year-old phone.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#746

Post by Polylactic_acid »

asdff wrote: post #206
Waterluvian wrote: post #86

I've found my journey through tooling evolution to be fascinating (to me at least). When I was new and coding was slow, my worries were about so many other things (like how the language even worked) than even what text editor I used, let alone the monitor. As I became experienced, a lot of newbie problems went away and the next topmost problems emerged, leading to be obsessing over text editor, shortcuts, and even a…

Some of my colleagues love a vertical monitor for writing and reading documents.

I tried putting my 27" monitor vertical but I found I had to move my head to see the top and that was much less useful than multi column.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#747

Post by Polylactic_acid »

ksec wrote: post #157
bredren wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been focused on Apple display products for the past few months as I'm looking to make an upgrade from the Dell P2715Q 4k 27" I use primarily for development. There is a three page thread on using the Apple 32" XDR for software dev on MacRumors. [1] I believe there is a major product gap at Apple right now in the mid-market display. Specifically a replacement for the LED 27" Cinema Display which was announced 10…

I kind of thinking such Display's "Design" could overlap with the new iMac. One reason Apple used to having a "Chin" in the iMac was to distinguish it as a Computer and not a Monitor / Cinema Display. Judging from the leaks, New iMac would not have a Chin at all, and since there is no similar sized Cinema Display in the Line up this doesn't really matter. I just wish they bring back Target Mode, or something similar…

We had a blind installed over a window at the office because the apple users found it unbearable reflecting off their screens.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#748

Post by notyourday »

jseliger wrote: post #261
thomaslord wrote: post #239

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…

3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming This seems like a long-standing problem with Linux, rather than a reason to dislike high-res screens.

Strange. I'm not seeing any issues with Linux and 4k. I'm running a plain Debian 10 with OpenBox running on 4x 4k (3x 28" in a row and one 11" 4k under the right-most) monitors though, granted, I only normally have one web browser that follows me around, across work spaces pinned to the right monitor, mostly maximized Sublime on the middle monitor and a pile pile of alacritty/xterm windows on the left-most monitor. The small monitor which content also follows me around contains clipboard, clocks, Slack and monitoring.

What is the software that people are using that creates problems?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#749

Post by loeg »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #284
thomaslord wrote: post #239

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…

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.

43" 4k is approximately 100dpi, like 21" 2k. It seems like a reasonable form factor to me (at 1x), but there aren't many of them that do high refresh rate, and they're all very expensive.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#750

Post by smabie »

the_af wrote: post #733
smabie wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's true. Developing modern code on a Apple 2 is unproductive. It's suboptimal, and worse. Maybe you don't want to use the word "unproductive," and that's fine. But larger screens, faster computers, and more expressive programming languages all contribute to increased productivity over the older alternatives.

> Developing modern code on a Apple 2 is unproductive Are we talking about developing modern code on an Apple 2 now? If so I misunderstood the parent post, because they were using the past tense. In any case, consider this: how do you feel about your current suboptimal, unproductive hardware & software of choice right now? Your current programming language and monitor resolution cannot be used to code. It's simply no…

No, I mean, it can. It's just going to (probably) be less productive than what exists in the future. All I'm saying is that the productive/unproductive dichotomy isn't useful and we should instead talk about productivity as a continuum.
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