Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#771

Post by mulmen »

kbenson wrote: post #761
mulmen wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently upgraded to a 43” 4k monitor and use it the way you describe. I’m not sure I am happy with it. The real estate is nice but it might be too much. UI elements end up very far away. I rarely need all that space. I either need a bigger (deeper) desk to sit back farther or just a smaller monitor physically with the same resolution.

What I found helped when I moved to a large 4k screen is when I stopped trying to eke out every last bit of space and started using my desktop as an actual desktop analogue again. Whereas I used to full screen, and snap to half or quarters of the screen, now I have a few core apps open that take up roughly a quarter, usually a browser and email, and other apps I open up and move around to organize as I feel the parti…

Thanks for the input. I’m about a week in and that is the realization I am reaching. My window sizes are almost back to where they were before.

It has been an iterative process but I’m getting a handle on it.

I have a sit/stand desk, I’m considering moving my recliner in to the office and elevating the monitor. Working from a reclined position seems ideal but I also thought a 43” monitor was a good idea...

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#772

Post by fomine3 »

I'm waiting for 4K/32inch/120Hz monitor without local dimming(because it's power hungry) but stil no releases. Maybe due to most manufactures want to add HDR(10bit color) but 4K/120Hz/10bit exceeds DP 1.4 bandwidth so need to reduce color to 4:2:2 or use DP 2.0 or HDMI 2.1.

I really hope 120Hz going to standard for work monitor.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#773

Post by kyberias »

mulmen wrote: post #446
TylerE wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My day job involves untangling SQL that was written under fire. I consume more spaghetti than a pre-covid Olive Garden. Every vertical pixel is precious for grokking what some sub query is doing in the context of the full statement.

Have you rotated your monitor 90 degrees to portrait already?

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#774

Post by ponker »

the_af wrote: 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…

Yep - I care a lot about my monitor and spared no expense but got a 1440p 60Hz because I care more about color.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#775

Post by nyanpasu64 »

microcolonel wrote: post #447
chrismorgan wrote: post #95

Concerning the smoothing, I presume this is macOS’s glyph dilation. pcwalton reverse engineered it in order to replicate it in Pathfinder (so that it can render text exactly like Core Text does), concluding that the glyph dilation is “min(vec2(0.3px), vec2(0.015125, 0.0121) * S) where S is the font size in px” ( https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 ). Fun times. Trouble is, people then get used to m…

I've blocked font-weight: 300 in my browser because of this permanent macOS bug. It's funny because people now abuse a thoughtfully-designed CSS property to disable this dilation on webpages, to the point that that CSS property is used exclusively to account for macOS's incorrect font rendering and is inert on other platforms.

How do you block font-weight: 300? On Windows I uninstall thin fonts, but on Linux, Firefox doesn't respect my fontconfig settings to avoid using thin fonts.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#776

Post by ReticentVole »

the_af wrote: 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…

1440p, 75hz display is perfectly acceptable. If you game, the quality difference between 1440p and 4k is pretty much indistinguishable, but 1440p is much less performance intensive to render.

I upgraded from a 32" 1080p display to a 32qk500. A significant improvement in visual quality for a reasonable price (~USD$270)

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#778

Post by snuxoll »

lowercased wrote: post #738
lflux wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do). Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work. PyCharm had high CPU consumption issues with a Macbook connected to a 4k display running in a scaled resolution. Native 4k was fine, using the…

I think all the jetbrains tools did. I remember a few years ago there was some big switch over (high Sierra maybe?) and the jet brains tool fonts were janky for a while - something to do with the bundled jvm and font rendering. I think it's sorted now, but there was an 'issue' there for a while. Maybe it's still an issue in some configurations?

Still an issue - the scale factor is 2.0 or 1.0 by default depending on whether the display is HiDPI/Retina or not.

There is an option to change the scale manually (-Dsun.java2d.uiScale= in the JVM rags), but I don’t know if it helps or not.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#779

Post by esperent »

sydd wrote: post #599
RHSeeger wrote: post #26

> A good monitor is essential for that. Not nice to have. A MUST. And in “good” I mean, as good as you can get. The whole discussion starts from a what I would say is an incorrect assertion, and then goes on to describe lots of ways that letters can be made better. If, in fact, you don't need better, then a lot of the points go away. 1. There is a point of diminishing returns, past which you are spending a lot more m…

While technically the article is correct, it feels very narrow-sighted to me by placing resolution/refresh rate above everything else. Some more things to consider: - Price. If you are not a programmer in a first world country working for a magic money startup/big 4 then you wont spend $1000+ on a single monitor. Mine was a better 27" 1920 one for $300 and I'm happy with it. I'm sure there are better ones, but I cant…

I think pwm is fairly rare these days. I have two dirt cheap AOC 24" 1080p monitors (about $150 each) and they don't use pwm.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#780

Post by alwaysanon »

To his comment about truly disabling Font Smoothing on Windows I think that, in addition to disabling ClearType, there is also a font smoothing setting to turn off as well. You can disable it by: * Open System in the Control Panel * Click on Advanced System settings * Go to the Advanced tab * Click on Settings button under Performance. * Uncheck the box for Smooth edges of screen font. * Click on Apply
Post reply on HN