Happy user of 34WK95U 5k 34" monitor here. "Turn OFF “Font smoothing” in System Preferences → General:" is the best advice I have heard in a year.
Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#862Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... too opinionated for my liking. Put yourself in the mindset of a typography geek. Then, by default, you will care about almost all of these things. I'm not saying you should care about all of these things all or most of the time, but that's the correct mindset to put you in sync with the author's conclusions (mostly -- I don't really think 120Hz is that big a deal).
120 Hz is a huge deal. It makes every mouse move better, and that alone is worth it. It reduces the pain of using poorly designed software that adds extra frames of latency to everything. It makes it easier to track and read moving/scrolling content, and it reduces judder when playing low frame rate content (e.g. 24 Hz Hollywood movies).
I'm surprised the author doesn't mention backlight strobing, which is another huge upgrade. Kind of hard to describe to people who have never seen it though, as is the case with most of these improvements.
The second and third monitor recommended in the article have 4ms latency, so there's essentially no reason to buy them.
There are good 4k 120hz monitors with strobing for way less than the $2000 mentioned. E.g. the zisworks kit for Samsung U28H750 (first available already in 2017): http://www.zisworks.com/shop.html
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#863Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're on Windows, consider the fancyzones power toy. Break up your screens into an arbitrary set of maximizable zones. Highly recommend if the normal 4 corners isn't enough for you. https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/master/src/modul...
I'm on MacOS. I basically never maximize anything. I just resize the floating windows and put them where they make sense at the time. The dream would be doing this with the keyboard using something like i3. I have been tinkering with that on weekends but M-F I focus on paying work.
I use Rectangle. I’ve configured it with a few keyboard shortcuts that let me move a window into specific regions on the display. I use it to quickly have multiple non-overlapping windows.
I cannot imagine using a large display without it!
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#864Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you manage multiple monitors with MacOS? I was doing this until recently and every single login involved rearranging my windows because MacOS moves them all to whatever display woke up first. In my experience MacOS multi-monitor support is effectively non-existent. Recently I picked up a 49” ultra-ultra wide monitor (basically 2x27” panels). It is one monitor but MacOS can’t drive it. They just don’t detect th…
I was able to use a 5120x1440 resolution on my MacBook Pro using SwitchResX. No idea why Mac OS doesn’t let you select that resolution.
To clarify: I mean I have no idea why Mac OS doesn't let ME select that resolution while SwitchResX does.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#865Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the trackpad I agree, but definitely not for the keyboard. And apple was late(!) to hires screens and to hidpi and now has lower res and density than the competition (e.g. 16:10 better 4k on dell xps or 3:2 screens with MS and others). Also, apple had TN screens forever when the similarly priced competition had higher res IPS screens.
>And apple was late(!) to hires screens and to hidpi Are you sure about that? It doesn't seem to mesh with my recollection.
Apple's marketing is a powerful machine.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#866Earlier 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…
I have a 49" curved monitor. It is effectively two 27" 1440p monitors stapled together (5120x1440). It is the best monitor I have ever had. 1440p has a very decent [higher than typical] pixel density but is not "retina". Fonts look pretty smooth, but you can still see pixels if you try really hard. Overall, I do think high density screens look amazing, but the software has not quite caught up to them. The benefits ar…
I couldn’t agree more with this. A 49” 5120x1440 curved monitor is brilliant for productivity. It’s better than two or three separate monitors. I do miss high DPI but I wouldn’t trade this type of monitor for the current batch of smaller high DPI ones.
There’s only two or three things that would make this better. A high DPI variant, more vertical space and a greater refresh rate. Given those two things, I think that’s the endgame for monitors (in a productivity context).
(I think that’s 8x the bandwidth so it’s a while away!)
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#867The 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…
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…
> I genuinely think 4k provides no real benefit to me
Could you clarify when in your life you've had a 4k screen with good OS support, so that we know what experience you are speaking from when you say that?
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#868My current setup consists of three 24" 16x10 monitors.
Don't know why i should switch.
That is a total resolution of 5760*1200 plenty enough. With the added benefit that ide, browser, terminal, mail, slack and whatever neatly snap into position and can be reached with the press of a button.
I don't see any reason to trade sharper text rendering for a worse aspect ratio.
16x9 just feels wrong to me; i am working and not at a cinema.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#869The 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…
Had this debate when we bought monitors for the firm. Some in management said high DPI, good color etc. are not worth the money (which you clarify is what your really mean). But after splurging, the effect on productivity was measurable. If you pay someone to stare at a box for 8h, a nicer box pays for itself pretty quickly.
Personally I don’t mind a small UI so I currently just run (macOS) on 3840 × 2160 on two 24” LGs. With size 11 Fira this gives me 8 80char columns.
Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
#870The article is deliberately opinionated but I basically agree: the experience of editing text on a 4k/Retina screen is vastly superior to what it was like previously and I'd never want to go back.
It's clear that many of the people who think they disagree are Linux users who have (for good reasons) not yet had a period of time to try it out with good OS support. At least, not on their laptop screens. I really hope good Linux support for laptops with high DPI displays emerges, if it has not already (I've read mixed reports).