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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

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Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#941

Post by diroussel »

gonehome wrote: post #106
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 really wanted the new Apple display, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay $14k for a pair of them. I ended up going with Dell U2720Qs, and after some tedious initial work to get them running natively at 60hz, they're fine. I would have bought the Apple displays in a second though if they had been priced up to maybe even 3k each.

I have just got a U2720Q, it worked at 60Hz right away. But I am connecting over USB-C, with the provided cable.

What it did find off-putting is that Dell say they don't test with Macs, and thus can't support them, but they just assume that Appl follow the same specification they do. A bit weak, but the monitor does work fine.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#942

Post by g-b-r »

the_af wrote: post #936
g-b-r wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe it's because it's worse :D

Definitely. To be honest I've never seen a quality 1366x768 laptop screen, because the low res [1] usually goes hand in hand with cheap laptops. [1] it's hilarious that 1366x768 is called "HD", because marketing . It wasn't high definition even on the day it was introduced.

The whole "HD ready" thing was an utterly sad part of the story of cinema/television that let's hope will never repeat.

As for the 1366x768, for some reason for many, many years the wide majority of monitors stopped there, with "Full HD" coming to the masses (but not all) only a few years ago.

"1366x768" meant "half baked HD" from the day it was introduced, so it's understanding that few quality monitors (and especially laptop screens) were made with that resolution.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#943

Post by wtetzner »

the_af wrote: post #181
akersten wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wouldn't say having a mechanical keyboard makes your code any higher quality - that'd be pretty silly. I think in general the thought is, if you care enough about your craft that you seek out refined tools, that care will be reflected in higher-quality development. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I'm inclined to believe there's a correlation. I mean, it would be weird to visit a professional car…

Thanks for the reply. I think there is little to no correlation, but like the opposite opinion, I've no proof other than the anecdotal: the best hackers I've known didn't care about these things. Other bizarre opinions I've read from Atwood and his followers: that you should be an excellent typist (this is also related to owning a mechanical keyboard). No. Just no. Typing speed is not the bottleneck when writing soft…

> that you should be an excellent typist

I think it's valuable to be able to type effortlessly without having to think about it too hard. Typing is a distraction that takes brain power away from the important things.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#944

Post by the_af »

atq2119 wrote: post #881
the_af wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I think there is little to no correlation, but like the opposite opinion, I've no proof other than the anecdotal: the best hackers I've known didn't care about these things. Other bizarre opinions I've read from Atwood and his followers: that you should be an excellent typist (this is also related to owning a mechanical keyboard). No. Just no. Typing speed is not the bottleneck when writing soft…

Typing speed is not the bottleneck when writing software. The bottleneck is my brain. I see typing like the ability to do mental arithmetic: being able to do it well isn't the thing that's directly valuable, but it removes distraction from the activity that is valuable, and that ends up making it valuable as well. Another way to look at it: the faster you think, the faster you need to type in order for it not to beco…

I understand what you're saying, but that's simply not my experience (either with myself or observing others).

Note Atwood claims you must be an excellent typist, training yourself to become one. I find this fetishization of a mechanical skill bizarre. I'm not advocating clumsily struggling with the keyboard like an elderly person, but past the point of "I'm a decent typist", I find that's enough.

I find there's no correlation between the problem-solving ability needed to be a great software developer and being a fast typist of the sort Atwood et al advocate.

I file this under "weird things some programmers believe without evidence" ;)

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#945

Post by g-b-r »

winkeltripel wrote: post #853
art0rz wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm on Windows and can confirm 1. is an issue. Windows lets users scale UIs to be readable at high DPI on small screens. Doesn't work on all UIs (e.g. QGIS). So maybe not all OS's, but two important ones. Haven't seen any scaling issues on Windows in years. Last time was Inkscape but they fixed that.

I see these issues all the time, with enterprise desktop apps. The scaling is only really a problem because it is enabled by default when you plug in certain displays. If the user made a conscious choice (which they would easily remember if they had trouble), it would be fine.

For many, many years there were at the very most 120 dpi monitors, with almost all being 96, and I imagine a lot of enterprise applications have those two values (maybe 72 as well) hard-coded and don't behave properly with anything else.

I know my company's ones do.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#946

Post by elfchief »

From the article:

> Why is it 119.88 Herz, not 120 Herz? No idea.

The short version of this is that TVs generally have framerates that are a multiple of 59.94, because NTSC is actually 59.94Hz (rather than 60), for various historical reasons -- basically, for color TV to become a thing, without obsoleting every single B&W TV in existence at the time, they needed to slow the framerate down by 0.06Hz[1]

There's still plenty of TV-targeted panels out there that only do 59.94Hz, and not 60Hz. Some of them are even in computer monitors! I imagine likewise that there are a lot of panels that do 119.88Hz (59.94Hz * 2) and not 120Hz.

And just to be confusing, a number of things (both hardware and software) tell you that you have a 60Hz signal when you actually have a 59.94Hz signal! A really good example is windows -- refresh rate settings in the OS get quite interesting, showing 59.94 in some places, and 60 in other places![2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Color_encoding

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2006076/screen-refr...

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#948

Post by chrismorgan »

diroussel wrote: post #939
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…

Maybe this was done to emulate font bleed that happens in the printing process. It's a common problem that latex PDFs look too light, because the build int fonts where copied from mechanical type, which assumed the ink would bleed on the page.

Eh, I think everyone serious about typography agrees that Computer Modern is just unreasonably thin. This is easily enough for me to consider it a lousy font that should literally never be used on screen, and I’m dubious about usage on paper. Unfortunately stockholm syndrome applies.

If you’re interested about the general topic, though, give https://mbtype.com/pdf/equity-type-specimen.pdf#page=5 a read!

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#949

Post by phkahler »

johncalvinyoung wrote: post #547
phkahler wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My personal requirement though is 4:4:4 color. Too many TVs will only accept 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 chroma, and colored text on black will look horrid.

It's a samsung tv and supports 4k at 4:4:4 60hz if I recall correctly.
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