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The state of external retina displays

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Re: The state of external retina displays

#81

Post by querulous »

urthor wrote: post #73

> Ridiculous Option: Apple Pro Display XDR I'll admit, a monitor that costs more than my first car is beyond affordable for 99% of the population. But saying that, many of the people reading this are pulling truly exotic salaries right now. After devoting untold hours to reaching the top of their profession. Let's say you're a professional earning $300k plus in software. You're often working 100% remote, using your m…

the problem with the apple xdr display isn't just the price though. it's not a good monitor for a lot of users. it's limited to 60hz, it's response time is really poor, it suffers from really obvious blooming and bleed at high brightness and it has bad off axis color accuracy and brightness. sure, if you care deeply about color accuracy and 6k resolution it's pretty good. these aren't the only metrics on which monitors are judged though

apple does a really poor job of supporting external displays. there's virtually no good options if you want something with high refresh, good latency and reasonable pixel density and color reproduction

Re: The state of external retina displays

#82

Post by bartq »

A bit of offtopic: Mini LED screens honestly are disappointing for me to some degree. The blooming is a real thing and I can see it every time there is bright content on dark background. I do accept it because there is no other better option really. I can see this blooming both on MacBook Pro 16 M1 Max and on iPad Pro 12.9. It looks especially bad when bright contents moves slowly, you can see those backlight zones edges and you can observe one zone gets turned off and other on. Awful.

I also own Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED laptop and I must admit I prefer this screen over Apple's. White text on black looks amazing and to be honest feels a bit magical, like a thing floating in the air, especially if I look on this screen in a dark room. Code, terminal content looks amazing. It's only 60Hz though, but for mostly static coding 60Hz is enough. Ubuntu works really well, so I don't have to deal with Windows for programming work if I don't have to.

I'm tempted to buy LG OLED 27EP950, it's expensive, but honestly I'd pay those money to reproduce Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED experience on 27 screen. But I know it won't happen, because LG screen will have worse pixel density, it's only 4K. It should be 5K at least, or even 5.5K or even 6K.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#83

Post by mundial86 »

I am hanging on to dear life with a slowly dying Dell UP2715K in the hope that 2022 will be the year someone finally makes a decent replacement for the glossy 5k displays that came out years ago.

The fact that the pro xdr only has one port makes it a non starter for me. I need to connect more than one device to my monitors.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#84

Post by urthor »

never_a-pickle wrote: post #13

The computer monitor market is at the mercy of gamers who want 1080p-1440p if it means getting 600fps in a game rather than 150fps at higher resolutions. It's why since 2015 there has been an arms race of refresh rates rather than of resolution. We had 4-5k panels at retina in 2015, market conditions could have had us with much higher quality panels if the entire thing wasn't catered to young, cash-strapped gamers wh…

Whilst true, it's more accurate to say the monitor market is hostage to the economics of LED panel manufacturing.

LEDs are normally produced as very large panels on production lines where every panel is made to a given PPI (and upper bound on the refresh rate).

Of course the technology mix is the technology mix, but the industry is built around reasonably large investments in these production lines, amortized across the entire screen industry.

A 27 inch 1080p monitor and a 24 inc 1080p monitor are produced on distinctly different production lines as it were, as they have a different PPI. But a tiny screen with the same PPI as said 27 inch 1080p likely came from the same factory in Korea.

Apple's panels are actually produced under contract by LG in Apple specific production lines, hence they can obtain exotic PPIs. Because they promise to use the line's capacity for multiple years.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#85

Post by brandonmenc »

distantsounds wrote: post #14

Dell P2415Q. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/dell-24-ultra-hd-4k... you can still find it in stock on Amazon despite Dell not carrying it anymore. I have one, it's a glorious IPS panel for photo editing.

I have a couple of these and I used to be a fan, but they just shit the bed constantly with macOS over a Thunderbolt dock for some reason. Needs constant power cycling, almost every time the laptop is plugged in.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#86

Post by flexin »

minimaul wrote: post #75
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #71

LG 27GN950 seems like it hits a a lot of the criteria others are discussing. It is not 220 PPI though. 4K IPS at 144Hz (or 120Hz depending on video card) HDR 400 nits It also rotates to portrait mode, has a built in backlight for eyestrain, is essentially borderless- and it's $800-900. Have had it over a year with no issues.

Is it actually HDR, or is it 'HDR'? I have another LG monitor that claims HDR support but really it just squishes the SDR content to make space for HDR - so it makes everything look awful .

It's HDR600 so I suppose 'HDR' in quotes.

It's also matte which I like more than the LG 5k's glossy screen.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#87

Post by minimaul »

urthor wrote: post #73

> Ridiculous Option: Apple Pro Display XDR I'll admit, a monitor that costs more than my first car is beyond affordable for 99% of the population. But saying that, many of the people reading this are pulling truly exotic salaries right now. After devoting untold hours to reaching the top of their profession. Let's say you're a professional earning $300k plus in software. You're often working 100% remote, using your m…

I find it's just too much to justify. A bit more than $1k on the Ultrafine 5K was justifiable for me, and I've seriously considered buying another.

If it was $2k or so for the Apple Pro Display XDR, or if they did a middle-man option that provided the 6K resolution but wasn't as bright etc, I'd snap one up in an instant - but I want it mostly for text & software development. I don't need perfect colour accuracy (although, I do like it).

Re: The state of external retina displays

#88

Post by yih35 »

I have the lg ultrafine 4K. Picture quality is obviously a lot better than the matte and lower resolution displays available for windows. It adjusts brightness for the room which is also nice. It has quite an annoying bug though in that whenever there is a power outage, it never wakes up. I have to get another monitor, plug only that monitor in, plug the lg back in after restart, unplug other monitor just to get it working again.

Resolution is not quite retina but good enough. Sound quality is not as good as iMacs on built in speakers. It has no web cam but not sure I care.

I used to be content with windows and low resolution monitors. I think the eyes just adjust and make up for anything that is lost. I am not even sure resolution even matters. 4K video would be nice, but very little content is in 4k.

Re: The state of external retina displays

#89

Post by urthor »

querulous wrote: post #81
urthor wrote: post #73

> Ridiculous Option: Apple Pro Display XDR I'll admit, a monitor that costs more than my first car is beyond affordable for 99% of the population. But saying that, many of the people reading this are pulling truly exotic salaries right now. After devoting untold hours to reaching the top of their profession. Let's say you're a professional earning $300k plus in software. You're often working 100% remote, using your m…

the problem with the apple xdr display isn't just the price though. it's not a good monitor for a lot of users. it's limited to 60hz, it's response time is really poor, it suffers from really obvious blooming and bleed at high brightness and it has bad off axis color accuracy and brightness. sure, if you care deeply about color accuracy and 6k resolution it's pretty good. these aren't the only metrics on which monito…

Fair enough, I wrote the above knowing absolutely nothing about the Apple's specs. I'm just speaking in generalities.
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