When 4K Isn't Enough Anymore | Hacker News Reader

When 4K Isn't Enough Anymore

thomasbandt.com

31 pointsasp_net30 comments

In 2012, I switched away from using Windows all my life and purchased a Macbook Pro Retina (which was expensive considering I had just finished my undergrad). The one factor that prompted the switch? The display.

I've always been a sucker for high quality screens, and even before I saw what a high DPI screen looked like, I knew I couldn't stand the low-res 1680x1050 monitor I was working on.

I'm frustrated that it's almost 2016 and there still aren't any good desktop monitors available for a reasonable price. My MBP is nice, but I like having lots of screen real estate while programming, so I either set the font to 8 px and squint, or I hook my laptop up to an iMac and try to ignore the pixelation.

Neither is a good solution, and 4K displays still look kind of pixely to me, so I'm not going to buy one of those. The 5K options, as mentioned in the article, include the one that Dell sells or the iMac 5K, but the Dell is expensive for just a monitor and the iMac's CPU/etc. will quickly become obsolete.

The problem is the amount of bandwidth current generation display cables are capable of handling (HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.), and if I remember correctly, I think the few 5K displays that exist have to kind of hack together a solution — one cable is not sufficient.

As soon as I can get a nice 27" or 30" 5K IPS display for a reasonable price (preferably OLED with a wide color gamut if I'm dreaming), then I'll be set for years to come.

Just as a side note, DP 1.3 can handle 5k (5120×2880) resolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#1.3

Unless you've got superhuman eyes or sit really close to the screen, 4K @ 27" is "retina". If you were running Linux or Windows, you'd have a completely different set of trade-offs. You wouldn't have the super large elements of pixel-doubled 1080p, nor would you have the scaling problems inherent in choosing a different resolution. Instead you'd have to deal with incredibly tiny elements in those apps that aren't DPI-aware. But for the apps that are DPI-aware, you'd have a nice "retina" screen for substantially less than the $1700 you paid for the UP2715K (plus the money you have to pay for a rig capable of driving that monster).

I do think OSX made the right choice in how it chose to support "retina" displays, but you have to admit there are advantages to how Windows & Linux do it.

No. A 4K display still looks pixelated compared to my Retina MacBook. I know that's not supposed to be true, and I was certainly not expecting it, but my experience is that 4K isn't Retina quality.

It's all relative to viewing distance though. You can get the same HiDPI affect with 4k 27" monitors if they are far enough away from you. If you sit too close then you lose that.

Yeah, I feel this way as well. I've experimented with some 4K displays and I currently use a Dell P2715Q, the 4K 27" in the article. It's a stellar monitor, but at full 2x pixel doubling, it doesn't offer as much space as my 30" Apple Cinema Display years ago. When you disable pixel doubling and opt for a scaled resolution, it's a little blurry but still good. (Tip for people running a scaled resolution with a Mac on a 4K display: disabling pixel smoothing makes text a little less blurry.)

There's been a bit of a gap between <Period of time where we had affordable 27-30" displays> and <Period of time where we had affordable 27-30" Retina-quality displays>. Between those two points in time, tastes among Retina desktop users changed, but 5K display prices still are very high (the pictured UP2715K will set you back $1700).

I think it'll only be a matter of time, I'd say 2 years, before we see affordable 5K displays, though. 4K panels dramatically came down in price in the past few years, and I'm thinking we'll see the same with 5K.

Great setup by the way!

I'm also using a 5K iMac. It's changed the way I work and I literally don't have to alt tab anymore. Four windows almost always open on my screen:

Slack, Chrome, Sublime Text, and my Terminal.

I can't see myself working on a laptop ever again, it's just too cramped.

http://i.imgur.com/wOboyYb.jpg

Every time I hear/see "Sublime Text" my ears perk up because of the many languages one could be using it to accomplish professional work, there are many smarter editors available.

Take your ruby for example: RubyMine is unbelievably smart (https://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/), NetBeans usually has passable scripting language support (https://netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html) and even the old battleship Eclipse claims to have Ruby support.

I do hope this doesn't come across as preachy, but for a fellow anti-command-tab, "there is never too much screen real estate", workflow-optimization person, I thought it might interest you if you haven't already considered it.

SublimeText is very powerful, but very much has the feel of a bad Windows port. TextMate 2 is a better choice if you want an editor that matches the rest of your environment, assuming you're using a Mac.

My university got 5k iMacs in a classroom students can use to study in and they have definitely ruined by Macbook and other computers for me.

Sure, those 5K monitors are really nice. But to tell the truth, when I really need to be productive, I use an old laptop with a 14-inch 1024x768 screen and a full-screen xterm with a nice bitmap font that embraces its pixelated nature. I find it hard to get "in the zone" with a huge monitor in front of me.

I'm using a 27" 5K monitor too -- HP Z27q, on Linux. (I think this is the same panel as the iMac and Dell.)

I think you'd need a larger screen size to get something significant out of the difference between 4K and 5K here. But they're nice displays, for sure.

How did you get the 5K resolution to work?

My setup with new Z27q does not recognize the possibility of 5K, but it sees just two displays, one with 4K and other with some lower resolutions. The display has DP1.2 activated.

> How did you get the 5K resolution to work?

Set both displays to 2560x2880, and make them part of the same "X Screen". Apps tile across them without a border.

Ah, of course, thank you! Now it works as it should and looks absolutely great!

I went more or less with option 2 (a pair of 4K monitors) and "drive" them with a hackintosh I bought/built for that purpose. At the time I had a 2012 rMBP, which didn't offer MiniDP 1.2/Thunderbolt 2, and driving just one of these monitors is more than a little resource-intensive. It was relatively expensive compared to not buying anything more than the monitors, but cheaper than buying a whole new laptop to drive all those pixels.

It's also nice to be able to upgrade that desktop relatively easily, tap into a more performant computer when my laptop's not up to snuff (but the problem's not quite big enough to justify spinning up EC2 instances or using some university resources), and plug in/unplug essentially with an ethernet cable (to mitigate the latency issues of on-campus wifi) rather than deal with a mess of cables.

I actually have 3 monitors (2x4K and a 1080p display), so all of the MiniDP ports and the HDMI port would've gotten taken up, leaving me just with USB, which would've been somewhat frustrating (yes, a shortcoming of the laptop, but one I accept). This way I still have my HDMI port and a Thunderbolt port available (and I have ethernet, arguably somewhat faster than the available wifi, as a nice side effect).

It's not necessarily perfectly ideal - perfect might be something like monitors that connect wirelessly, certainly without a second machine running in the background - but having a pair of 4K monitors in portrait/vertical orientation is so pleasant that it totally overwhelms any lingering misgivings or doubts about whether it's worth it. I can put myself in Bandt's shoes where he says that he didn't really like having 2 or 3 monitors, but for me that awkwardness was only temporary.

I wanted BIG so I got a 40" Samsung (over-functional) "Smart" LED TV, and run it (thanks to SwitchResX) at its native 3840x2160, HiDPI scaled to 1080P.

(My (late 2013 MBP 15" Retina) system won't drive it in native resolution at anything other than the scaled 1080P or the full 3840x2160, which is way too small.)

1920x1080 might not seem like enough logical real estate compared to the 5K monitors, but what I figured out is that, with Retina scaling operational, I can scale down the contents of various apps like browsers, text editors, terminals, etc., and get just the right font size for my tired old eyes at still very high DPI.

Yes, the UI elements are pretty big, but they don't take up much real estate.

And, yes, I'd rather that I have the OS give me the option of running at virtual resolutions other than 1920 or 3840 (there's something wrong with the drivers or the way the Samsung is talking to the OS--the latter thinks the native resolution is 7K somehow), but if you need BIG, this is a great solution.

And here I thought he was talking about an sf apartment!

You think you were confused? I was staring at the last picture trying to figure out how he took the pic without being in the reflection. Maybe he's on the floor and reaching up? Nah... monitor stands are not wide enough... then about a minute later I realized there wasn't a mirror behind the monitor at all because the macbook wasn't being reflected.

Sorry, just living in Munich (most expensive city in Germany, though) ;-)

OP makes me wonder what resolution _is_ enough for most people. Sure, I dig quality screens -- as an undergrad in 2003 I dropped almost all my savings on a Dell 19" 1280x1024 panel with zero regrets, and would always opt for the highest-res laptop LCD if I had a choice. But after 24" 1080p form factor I kind of stopped thirsting for improvement. Currently I have a 27" 1400p panel that's more than enough for my needs -- and I have lots of windows, terminals, editor buffers, etc. Is there an end in sight to the pixel arms race?

> what resolution _is_ enough for most people?

The one at which you don't see pixels.

The good news for Mac people who need 5K monitors is that Skylake is almost-nearly-sortof here, which will bring us Thunderbolt 3, which has enough bandwidth to drive a 5K monitor through a single cable.

This should also mean that Apple is able to release a 5K refresh of the Thunderbolt display, and some/many/most Macs will be able to drive them.

Prepare your wallets for extreme sadness, and your eyes for extreme joy! :D

I'm running a P2715Q in 1440p HiDPI (pixel doubled) mode. Works pretty well on a 15" Macbook Pro, and it looks a lot better than my old 27" 1440p screen running at native resolution.

Plus, the nice thing relative to the 5K display is that it will work at 60hz with a single Displayport.

I'm surprised these 5K panels are working as external displays now. I remember reading that the Retina iMac needed a special internal connector because no regular bus had the capacity, and this being used as the explanation for why there was no 5K Thunderbolt display.

I was too until reading about multicord setups to make 5k work.

> If you bought Dell’s 5K monitor, which has the same 5120x2880 resolution, and connected it to your Mac Pro, you’d need two DisplayPort connections for its two TCONs. If this iMac were just a display, you’d only need one connection—but of course it’s a whole computer, so you need zero.

Additionally, Apple's support page mentions this.

The PC versions of the panel require two displayport inputs to run at 5K -- they appear to the OS as two totally independent panels, and you tell the OS to tile across them.

I'm still running 3 23" 1920x_1200_ Apple monitors from 2006-7, and they've well outlasted upgrades from everything else. I'm only going to run into problems when dual-DVI graphics cards cycle out.

It still feels wrong when I'm using a 16:9 display.

It seems like the OP doesn't want to run the display in a scaled mode because of the quality drop but it's nearly indiscernible to my eyes.

I enjoy running my Macbook Pro Retina at 2880 x 1800) for the screen real-estate and it seems less taxing on the GPU.

I've been running a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with a Dell Ultrawide u3415w at 3440x1440 for the past week (got a Newegg deal for $650 down from $800 on Amazon), and I have never been happier. I don't know what I would do with more real estate.

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