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Comment by FrancoDiaz | Hacker News Reader

I've had a couple 27" 1440p monitors since those cheap Korean (QNX and the like) came on the market a few years ago.

The natural upgrade path for me would be to ditch those and get a big-ass 5k monitor eventually, but I don't see the market really moving in that direction in an affordable way.

One 4k isn't going to cut it and I'm worried two 4k monitors is going to be to much from a field of vision perspective....maybe I'm wrong there.

Has anybody upgraded from a couple 1440p monitors to a couple 4k monitors, and what's your experience been?

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I went from 2 1440p to one 32" 4K and 1 1440p.

It's been one of the biggest productivity improvements since moving from 640x480 to 1024x768.

The 1440p is now only used for minor stuff like email and not really necessary anymore.

I soon moved to a 32" 4K at home as well, because I just couldn't stand just 1440 anymore.

One of the interesting parts is that I don't use 4K fully: it's too much surface are and your head tilts too much to see everything at once. But what's great is that I can put a background process as full screen in the background and have a 3500x1800 window in front in which I do my real work. So I can observe the proceedings of the background talks without having to toggle windows all the time.

Agreed, I think 32" 4K is the sweet spot for Linux & Windows. The PPI is 140, which is "marginally retina" -- you can see pixels if you get close. Higher PPI is sharper even once you get past "retina", but it's definitely a case of diminishing returns. But the nice thing about 140 PPI is that you can run without scaling if you absolutely need to. You have to squint and you wouldn't want to do it too often, but it does work for those rare apps that don't scale well.

And the 32" size is about perfect too, IMO. The height is about the maximum you can view without head movement.

I'm starting to agree with you and Bryanlarsen that 32" 4k seems to be a sweet spot.

One 40" 4K has been perfect for me. Roughly the same DPI as my old QNIX (~110).

I got the Samsung UN40KU6290 (does 4k@60 with 4:4:4 chroma) for under $300. The PC mode is crisp and responsive. Calibrates well enough. Only complaint is slow GTG time can look blurry when scrolling text.

Seconded. I have the same monitor and it's a perfect upgrade from my old 3 27"-24" monitors. 40" seems perfect to not have turn your head too much, two would be too much for me.

I've got a UN40JU6500 (40" 4K Samsung) on my MBP (15" late 2013) but it doesn't do @60, as far as I know.

Are you driving this from a Mac or from a PC? What kind of cable are you using exactly?

Both. For my mid-2014 15" MBP I had to get an active MiniDP-HDMI adapter. Looks like your MBP is limited to 30Hz...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587

Interesting! So it's not the monitor (TV), it's the MBP.

Oh well, will have to wait for the next MBP 15" refresh--don't see any real reason to upgrade yet to the latest TB MBP.

Plus, the @30 doesn't normally bother me, unless there's a solid large gray-ish color, which definitely shimmies.

These 40" Samsungs 4Ks really hit the sweet spot for Retina displays, at least for my old eyes. "Only" 1080P logically, but oh, so large and sharp!

Also, did you have to do any SwitchResX hackery? That's the only way I could get macOS to recognize the monitor as a Retina display.

Nope, but I run it at 100% scaling. I did notice that if the source on the TV is not labeled "PC" then the Mac uses YCbCr 4:2:0 and looks like garbage. Setting the input label to PC must send a different EDID because it seems to use RGB... On my Windows machine I can just override that in the nvidia control panel.

Oh, you run it at the full 4K (3840x2160) resolution? Must have good eyes.

Right, nothing works unless you label the relevant HDMI input "PC".

I bought this monitor the other week after hearing things like this but I couldn't get over two things:

1) It doesn't power off or on automatically. I need the remote 2) The viewing angle made seeing the corners difficult on my admittedly shallower then probably needed desk with no scaling, (40" seemed like the sweet spot for PPI without scaling).

How do you cope with (1)? I'm amazed that Intel, Nvidia and AMD haven't thrown a HDMI-CEC IP code into their GPUs and made it trivially to turn on and off displays over HDMI.

I just leave the remote on my desk and turn the eco auto-off to 8hrs so it doesn't turn off in the middle of my day. The TV controls the on/off of my receiver via CEC.

If you have 2 27" with 1440p and go to 2 27" with 4k which do you think the field of vision changes? It should be exactly the same. The potential differences would be that you can have either more screen estate (but with tiny rendering) or a much better image quality if scaling is used. I would at the moment always go for 4k due to better image quality - and not for anything else.

I run two 2560p QNX monitors. They're wonderful, would highly recommend; I think two of them will set you back around $400, a bargain compared to 4k monitors.

The trick is to put some of your monitors in portrait orientation. It's a game changer for reading text and for writing code (aka 95% of my computer use).

Especially if you can get a new main monitor that is exactly as tall as the old screen was wide. I've seen a couple people pull that off and it works really really well, better still if you do a color calibration.

Have you thought about the 40" 4K displays from Philips and Iiyama? I believe they are around $600.

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