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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

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Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#791

Post by cthalupa »

s9w wrote: post #430
cthalupa wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bonus point that isn't mentioned in the article: HDR is a meme, don't buy into that crap. I'd wager more people are going to notice the difference between HDR and SDR than they would 4k vs 1080p. It is by far the biggest picture quality upgrade I've seen since going from SD to HD. The problem is HDR sucks on LCDs, so it's largely useless on PC. FALD isn't enough to limit the halos, even with a ton of zones. I own th…

I mean sure HDR is impressive, but for me it's always like 3D movies.. nice for 5 minutes and then you see the flaws. Dimming zones are a really crappy way to get around the fundamental display tech limitation like you said. But OLED has insane problems with burn-in. They officially don't exist but there are endless reports of this happening. Although I can't speak with high confidence about that. In general the majo…

> I mean sure HDR is impressive, but for me it's always like 3D movies.. nice for 5 minutes and then you see the flaws

I mean, it basically "just works" on OLEDs. I've watched thousands of hours of HDR content now and maybe 2-3 hours of it was poorly done and distracting. vs. 3D, which I can never sit through at home. (Though, I don't mind well done 3D in the theater)

>But OLED has insane problems with burn-in. They officially don't exist but there are endless reports of this happening. Although I can't speak with high confidence about that.

I've got two OLED TVs, one four years old, the other two. Neither have had any noticeable burn in, though the older one does sometimes have temporary image retention if I've an extended amount of time playing a game, or watching a channel with a static logo, etc.

I am not one of those people that sits there with MSNBC or CNN or Fox or whatever on all day every day with the logo in the same place, though. My OLED usage goes Movies > TV shows > Twitch > Youtube > everything else.

Until a better tech comes out, I'm all in for OLED, even for computer monitors. You won't see me purchase another standalone LCD screen for anything that I'll be caring about picture quality on.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#792

Post by fomine3 »

ShinyObject wrote: post #681

This is actually a rather bad time to buy a high-end monitor because if you get one right now it will likely be outdated by the end of the year. If you want a monitor that can do all of the cool things at once (2160p, hdr, 120Hz+, freesync) without using hacks like dual cables or realtime lossy compression, then you need both a video card and a monitor that support hdmi 2.1 or displayport 2.0. Currently there are ver…

Agreed. I expect more products released with new interfaces.

BTW current GeForce and RADEON supports DisplayPort DSC that could enable more resolution / frame rate by compression theorically but I don't know any existing displays.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#793

Post by fomine3 »

wondringaloud wrote: post #312
vardump wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can read the content clearly while smoothly 120 Hz scrolling or moving windows around.

Who is reading content while scrolling? That's like buying a $10,000 stabilization unit to be able to read a book while jogging.

It's very common on smartphone/tablet. Less common but also on PC.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#794

Post by noobermin »

ogre_codes wrote: post #574
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…

> 1. No matter what operating system you're on, you'll eventually run into an application that doesn't render in high dpi mode You lost me right here on line 1. 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 d…

Hmm, may be you haven't but I have.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#795

Post by jwr »

the_af wrote: post #364
jwr wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used CRT monitors, 1920x1080 displays, 4K displays and 5K displays, as well as various Retina Macbooks over many years, mostly for coding, here's my opinion: The only good solution today is the iMac 5K. Yes, 5K makes all the difference — it lets me comfortably fit three columns of code instead of two in my full-screen Emacs, and that's a huge improvement. 4K monitors are usable, but annoying, the scaling is ju…

> So no, I don't think you can develop using "tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays". At least not all kinds of software, and not everyone can. This opinion seems bizarre to me. You start by offering personal (and valid) anecdote, then end up saying "I don't think you can develop [...]". But this flies in the face of evidence. Most people by far do not use your preferred monitor setup (iMac 5K) and in my country a…

Following your logic, I can't claim anything, because there is always someone, somewhere, who will come up with a contrary opinion.

I do respect your opinion, but I still hold to mine. I also think this discussion won't lead anywhere, because we are glossing over the terms. Not every "developer" is the same, not every "software" is of the same complexity. I can fix CSS in a single 80x25 terminal, I can't do that when thinking about changes in an ERP system.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#797

Post by ajtjp »

Some people have mentioned that once you use 4K, you can't go back. I guess I'm in the group that has used 4K (or 5K, in my case), and found it easy to go back.

At work, we have these 5K, 27" LG monitors: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMUB2LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k... . Don't get me wrong, they're great, but... I don't feel like I'm missing anything when I go home and use my Dell U2412M (1920x1200, 24"). And working from home the past three months hasn't tempted me to upgrade my monitor, either. 1920x1200 gives me a good amount of real estate at 100% scaling, and that's the main thing I need.

Now it is true that if I look at the font in this text box in Vivaldi, the rendering kind of sucks; Firefox is a bit better. There was definitely a time, around when I switched to Windows 6.x from 5.x, when I was passionate about this, and dislike for the Windows 6 font rendering was one of the reasons I stuck with XP as long as I did. Maybe 4K would help with that, but by this point I've adjusted. And even so, spending $900 on the monitor the author suggests is not the most appealing option. That's a lot of GPU upgrade you could get relative to the $300 I spent on my current monitor in 2011. Or I could double the RAM in all my personal systems and get a nice microphone (which would have more of an impact on my working from home experience). Or I could built an entire Ryzen 7 3700 desktop for that price. There are just a lot of things I'd rather prioritize.

I'm also find the proposed productivity benefits dubious. As long as the fonts are acceptable enough that I don't find them actively distracting (and as mentioned, with bad enough font rendering that can be the case, so perhaps the author is simply more sensitive to that than I am), how much I can focus is going to have a lot more impact on my productivity.

I do somewhat fear that this might re-ignite my former font pickiness, though...

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#798

Post by lifty »

dont__panic wrote: post #72
mastercheif wrote: post #12

It's frustrating that consumer Hi-DPI display development has completely stalled in the last five years. As mentioned in the article, macOS works best using true 2x integer scaling. Using 2x scaling, a 4k monitor will result in an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development. A superior option is iMac/LG 5k display results which nets an equivalent workspace of 1440p. The only opti…

On the other side of things, running dual 4k displays for anything remotely intensive (a browser, IDE, instant messaging, mail client, and terminal in my case) can bring some machines to a crawl or run the fans at high speeds indefinitely. I think graphics technology has to catch up to hiDPI before I'd go past 4k. And let's not even get into the fact that 4k 60hz is a struggle and a half -- you need HDMI 2.0 or displ…

If you use a Mac, a 5k monitor with integer scaling (2x) will take fewer GPU resources to run than a 4K with fractional scaling (1.5x). This why I refuse to switch to a 4K monitor for now. Will do the leap to a 5k monitor but the options are very slim now.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#799

Post by dingaling »

phkahler wrote: post #246
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…

I use a 55" curved 4k TV as my monitor. It's not pixel density that's important for reading text, but contrast. The best thing for coding is a high contrast bitmapped font with no smoothing. My monitor is still available at Walmart for $500. It's like an actual desktop when you can spread out all your stuff.

> It's like an actual desktop when you can spread out all your stuff.

But you can't spread out your stuff any more than you'd do on a 24" 4k monitor...

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#800

Post by dingaling »

Humphrey wrote: post #722
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…

For me it all comes down to display size and density, and therefore out of all the monitors I've tried, I'd go 27" at either 5k or 2.5k resolution. For me 27" is the perfect display size: - Any bigger and I find I have to move my head to much to be comfortable in the long term and I get a stiff neck. - Any smaller and I can't fit enough on the screen at once and my productive decreases. 2.5k (1440x2560) on a 27" moni…

> Any smaller and I can't fit enough on the screen at once and my productive decreases.

But that's nothing to do with physical size and everything to do with resolution.

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