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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, a 4K 32" monitor is quite crappy...4K works at 24" or so, but above that you begin to see pixels if you use it as a standard monitor (arms length) rather than a TV (a few feet away). 8K is fairly reasonable for 32", putting it in 200+ PPI area (279.73 to be precise), meaning it could be used as a real monitor...but...it's a bit big for me (27" is kind of a stretch already).

I would like to see OLED's at this size/resolution, which would accomplish something similar.

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I recently traded away a 4K monitor for a 1080p that was better in other respects because Windows 7's handling of high resolution is still, seemingly, no better than it ever has been in recent versions of Windows. I have yet to find a way to get sufficiently large text for readability without breaking all sorts of GUIs, including built-in Windows apps. Typically I find these problems show up when a level or two deep in a menu or config window.

For me the resolution of the hardware doesn't matter a bit until the OS can handle it properly. I don't know what you're using but I would guess that it's not Windows 7.

Agree, Windows is optimized for multiple smaller monitors; 3x24" works great for me. Not sure I'd be able to use a 32" single monitor setup as well.

(Being able to snap windows to half of the screen was one of the biggest UI quality of life improvements I can remember in a long time. MacOS is lagging on this one, as they are optimizing the experience for one screen.)

Magnet is a little menubar utility app for the Mac that does this.

Didn't know about that one. How does it compare to spectacle?

I'm not sure if spectacle has a menubar icon, but I mostly use that as opposed to keyboard shortcuts. Downside, I guess, is that Magnet isn't free but often seems to be "on sale" for 99 cents.

You can do split screen in macOS, too: Keep the window’s expand button pressed until a split screen appears, drag the window to the right or left side, select a window that should fill the other half of the screen.

Yeah, they added this a couple versions ago (i use MacOS primarily so I use this feature a lot), but the keyboard shortcuts on windows make it really snappy to use.

As far as I know, the Mac version of the feature requires two windows to be selected to share the screen, which is less flexible than the Windows implementation where I can temporarily pop a window into half-screen mode to peek at another window that's beneath it.

Do you mean Windows 7? Thats an OS which has been out of mainstream support for two years now. I wouldn't hold your breath for much to change.

I haven't used Windows 10 on a high DPI external monitor, but it certainly works well on the Surface Pro 3/4's high DPI screens.

Windows 10 has been spectacular on my 4k monitor; some of the software isn't (old games), but the windows experience itself seems to be nice.

Have you figured out how to stop Desktop icons from moving all over the place?

Newest updates (creators) aim to fix it.

Unfortunately, I've never noticed that, because I hide my desktop icons. ;)

Windows 10 does just as bad a job as Windows 7 at handling high-dpi displays. Especially with multiple displays, and especially where it comes to application support (not sure how much of this is on the application side, but my impression from Retina UI-designing colleagues is that Apple made it really easy for applications to migrate/support both high- and standard- DPI displays).

I've heard the Creators Update has some improvements to display handling, so we'll see how that goes.

"just as bad a job as Windows 7 " is not true, its much better in this respect but sill not perfect. The Creators update improves it even more as now MMC panels render fonts correctly.

That's fair. I'll admit I haven't spent much time using Win7 with 4K+ displays. I just assumed it was bad based on how bad Win10 has been.

Could you elaborate on what 10 does better than 7 on this?

A couple of great resources on the improvements in the latest Windows 10 release are this blog post: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/10/24/high-dpi-s... and this Channel 9 video: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Windows/Windows-Developer-D...

As someone that develops Windows desktop software, I can understand why application support is so terrible. It's not easy, especially when you have a multi-monitor system where one screen is 4k and another is a 1080. Dealing with dynamic DPI changes as the application is dragged from one monitor to the other is something I still haven't fixed.

This. I only bothered with fixing for single DPI value, even that was hard enough

This is on Microsoft, no question. Apple handled the transition much better with the hard coded 2x scaling factor. Windows is more flexible with dpi in theory, but a PITA to code against in practice.

Yes, Windows 7. I have heard that newer version are no better in this regard but can't speak for them directly as I am still on 7.

I use Windows 10 on a 1440p display and it works fine. Windows actually has better scaling options than a Mac, which just resorts to bilinear scaling and totally disables the option on low DPI displays where the blurring would be too obvious.

  Frankly, a 4K 32" monitor is quite crappy..

The Apple Cinema display is 2560×1440 (1440p) at 27" and plenty of people use that. That was a pretty standard resolution for 27-30" screens before 4K became popular. Most people would find 2160p (i.e. 4k) at this screen size to be really nice.

You mean the Thunderbolt monitor, right? Apple didn't make a 27" Cinema.

The 27" was a non-Thunderbolt Cinema Display for about a year.

Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the correction!

Apple no longer makes or sales that, it is outdated tech. I'm so used to 200+ PPI now that when I had a 4K 28" monitor at work, I thought it was just not that good.

I just bought a P2715Q (27", 163ppi) and I really haven't noticed the difference from my 220ppi 15" MacBook Pro. I'm sure if I put them side by side and shoved my face into them I would notice, but practically speaking, 163ppi is pretty great.

If you are using Mac OS, font smoothing makes it really hard to tell. If you are using Windows, the difference is more apparent given a more sharp font rendering.

This makes sense. I've also had a P2715Q for more than a year and it looks retina to me, but I'm mostly looking at the (anti-aliased) text when determining that.

Most Mac people might, but professionals doing real work want at least UHD 4K

I use one and while the text is pretty clear, it's not as good as a Retina-type display. The pixels are visible.

This matters mostly with tiny type. The difference there is astounding.

All's relative.

I recently argued that 1080p is no good at anything larger than 24" for a monitor, but that it was just right for 24".

Some people like large pixels - mainly because HiDef displays with pixel-doubling have spotty coverage.

Personally I like larger pixels, larger display at a longer distance (maybe it's my vision - gettin old?)

"4K 32" monitor is quite crappy."

You must have really good eyes. When I sit a normal distance away from my 32" I really have to make an effort to see the pixels. Unless you are a graphics professional I would say it's more than enough. I also work on a 40" 4K and there you can really see it's pixelated, but if you use your computer for coding/mail/browsing, it's still fine.

You must have incorrectly positioned monitor. At arm's length distance, the difference is immediately visible with only 27" - where you need 5K (see iMac) to loose visible pixels. You need to SEE it, not theorize.

Low dpi screen is "fine", sure - until you get used to better ones.

We have a nice range of different sizes and resolutions at our office, so I have seen it. That's subjective of course, but if you can see the difference between 4K and 5K at 27" you have much better vision than me.

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