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I also use a 40" 4K TV. The vast majority of what I do on my computers is text-based, which means that after the text is easily readable, I don't get any real gain from increasing the pixel density of the same shapes, but I get a lot of gain from having more text and types of textual things on the screen at once (as the article author apparently does, as well).

Until recently, I used a 40" 4K monitor. For whatever reason, TVs handle input switching much, much more smoothly than monitors do: If I have two machines hooked up to different inputs of a monitor, and reboot the one I'm working on, the monitor will often spontaneously choose to show me the other input. A TV in the same situation will happily show "no signal" and stay where you told it to stay. I've only tried two brands of monitor (Planar and Philips), admittedly, but they behave identically in ignoring the manually-set input if some other input seems more interesting. :/ I had been using a Philips 40" 4K monitor for a couple years, and the frustration with input switching drove me to the same Spectre TV from the article, which is frankly worse in every picture-quality-related metric than the Philips, but doesn't instantly switch inputs when signal is interrupted, or blank and reblank the screen 2-12 times when it hasn't been on for a while.

Well, that went a bit off track.

I know it is a new/budget brand, but I've now purchased 3 different TCL 43S405's (work, home, wife's work). It is a 43" 4k monitor, with low lag, low motion blur and 60hz refresh rate. I've been extremely happy with them (once you turn on game mode and turn off HDR). $350 before black friday, they're $300 at Target right now.

Also, if you want a fantastic site to compare tvs/monitors apples to apples, you can't beat rtings.com. They grade every device on the same rubric so it is easy to compare and contrast. You can even tell it which qualities you care about most (or what use case) and they rate them accordingly.

http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/s-series-4k-2017-s405

Wow - 15% off of that as well, and 5% with Red Card - picked it up for around $260. Great tip.

If you were good with a 1920x1080 at 24 inches you get then same pixel dentsity with a 4K at 48 inches. I've been looking for a 50" curved TV but might have to settle for a 55" which will be fine for my slightly older eyes. I grew up typing my code on an analog TV so I'm good with any modern monitor. Having said that, 2 24" side by side is nice. Turning one of them into portrait mode is sometimes nice. Having one giant display where I can lay all my stuff out like a real desktop would be awesome.

I got the Samsung 49" 8500. Highly recommend for coding.

That doesn't come in a curve does it? Since I want to layout the desktop similar to a multi-monitor setup I figure the curve will help to angle the sides in. Do you find it awkward to look at windows far off to the side with a flat monitor that size?

8500 has a curved screen. It is definitely an improvement over a flat screen for looking to the side.

I have a 24" FullHD monitor next to a MBP 15". The picture on the former is so poor compared to the latter that I only use it for reading email and web browsing, and do all the code work on the 15" high-DPI screen.

Under Linux, situation is not as bad, since you can persuade xft to optimize font rasterization for readability. OSX makes the choice towards glyph shape fidelity, though, even at lower point sizes, which results in horrible anti-aliasing blur.

Possibly related: some Macs render terribly blurry text when the monitor color profile is not to their liking--look for the "sRBG" toggle, and toggle it.

Especially so when using HDMI, Macbook often thinks it's a TV. You might want to google patch-edid

Wow. I wonder if it's a part of common lore which I was somehow oblivious of.

I use curved 55" UHD from Samsung as a TV/monitor; you need to keep your distance from it as being very close the picture is a bit weird (first you need to turn your whole head as it's too much for eye movement only, second there are wide FOV distortions; like when you put your head close to a normal monitor). The dynamic range is much lower than EIZO/LG pro monitors, colors are washed out; generally, it's fine for SteamBox and playing games and as a real-world preview of how a movie/photo would look like on a real consumer device, but you won't get anywhere near pro quality a proper monitor gives you (even when you enforce 4:4:4 mode instead of default 4:2:2). I have 3x 4k displays (30.5", 28" and 55"), can't go lower than 30" now...

But I would want to sit twice as far away from the 48" screen, so that much pixel density isn't so necessary. (Actually, I have trouble actually picturing working on a 48" screen, the distance would be awkward...)

48 inches is a far off distance from the screen, I think you'd typically be in the 20"-30" range

He wasn't referring to the distance away from the screen, but rather the size of the screen -- if you quadruple the area of the screen from 24 inches to 48 inches and also quadruple the number of pixels then there are the same number of pixels per unit area, which means if you get a larger screen and it is too large, just use a subset of it and you can emulate any smaller-sized screen without having larger pixels.

Ah, gotcha. I misinterpreted there.

Exactly. It should be like having multiple monitors. I would never run an app at full screen on that.

I tried 24"/1200p, 27"/1440p, 27"/4K/150% scaling, 32"/4K/125% scaling, and now settled on 43"/4K/0 scaling.

The DPI looks like 1080 on a 21" years ago again, but the real estate is enomorous and I certainly don't mind it. Sure pictures/movies on 40" is not as pixel rich as a 32" 4K or 27" 4K, but you'd have to mount multiple to match the real estate of a 43" monitor.

It's true though the scaling makes text larger but not reducing DPI as the picture looks much better on a 27"/32" than the 43". But without scaling, my aging eyes can handle anything greater than 110 PPI. https://www.sven.de/dpi/

Just put the TV further away, it has a similar effect to increasing the DPI, but also it reduces the amount of optical accommodation your eyes need to do (ie eye muscles stretching your lens flatter), which reduces eye strain and must surely reduce progression of myopia. 14 hour days with no eye cramp. I think 4k is starting to approach the upper useful limit of detail you would want on a rectangular monitor that you look at without moving your head, it's a nice bump over 1080p. 1080p upscaled to 4k also looks better than 'raw' 1080p.

That would work well if you can always use the TV/monitor at a farther distance.

This wouldn't be an option for me. Although I do usually work at my home office, I also need to be able to use a laptop on its own when I'm traveling or just want to get out for a while. So that determines the 20" focus distance I need.

With single vision prescription glasses tuned for that distance, my eyes don't have to do any of the optical accommodation you mention. My glasses are set up to let my eyes be relaxed at 20"; there's no strain of my eye muscles trying to adjust to a different distance.

Yes, you need the space.

There was a site I was reading some time ago that mentioned with glasses, the geometry of your eyes converging on point nearby (ie slightly 'cross-eyed') doesn't correspond with the eye muscles relaxed, for focusing at 'infinity'. The 'control systems' are likely coupled. I've used glasses with smaller screens, and I've noticed my eyes behaving a bit strange (perhaps seemed harder to focus) when alternating between glasses/no glasses. No idea if there are any other consequences. Maybe it's fine.

I use a 28" 4K and have used a 40" 4K TV for programming in the past.

The 40" had total crap quality but still had some advantages in terms of usable screen real estate.

There are a bunch of 40+ real monitors now though: Dell P4317Q, AOC C4008VU8, LG 43UD79-B, Philips BDM4037UW - they are all using the same panels as TVs I assume, but hopefully the higher quality ones, and their electronics will be designed for computer use.

I wish my vision was so good. I can’t see any difference so I’ll take the low dpi option.

I thought the same as my vision isn't exactly great, but you can tell the difference and I wouldn't go back. At least between my old ThinkPad T440 (1440x900) and my 15" rMBP that is.

I don't want to repeat the same comment too many times in this thread, so I'll just mention it one more time here. If you can't see the difference between a low DPI and high DPI display, it's time for a vision check and a good pair of prescription single vision computer glasses.

This is like a reading prescription, but adjusted for a farther distance. Reading glasses are typically adjusted for a 16" focal distance. That's much closer than you would use a computer. If you use a laptop on its own without an external monitor, that's usually about 20".

I took my ThinkPad to my optometrist the first time I did this, so we could be sure of the correct distance. When I saw how crisp and clear my screen was with the prescription, compared to the blurry mess I'd been suffering with... if I may indulge in a pun, it brought tears to my eyes.

Going to try this! Thanks for the tip.

I can think of another possibility, which is that in order to compare a 1080p display and a 4k display properly, you need to ensure that both displays are reasonably calibrated for quality. TVs out of the box are tuned in a mode I think of as "claw your eyes out" mode, with horrid preprocessing and sharpening and all kinds of other things designed to make the TV pop out in the display room, with no regard what it does to the underlying video signal or your eyes over time. Two displays in different resolutions, both left in this mode, may look roughly equally crappy when you're sitting at home feeding it a normal video signal, rather than a crafted demo. The article alludes to this when it mentions turning down the sharpening, but typically the "mode" the TV ships in initially will do other things too, like pop the saturation up and such.

The first thing you'll want to do with a new TV is to take it out of that mode. The "correct" mode depends on the TV and some internet searching can help you out, but putting it in the cinema/movie mode is at least a first good guess.

Finally, of course, you need to feed the 4K monitor a good 4K signal, or the 4K monitor isn't going to look any better. And as the article mentions, that's sometimes easier said than done, because HDMI can't always handle it.

If after all that, you can't tell the difference at all between 4K and 1080P at point blank range on a monitor setup like that, you may have eye issues, yes, absolutely. And you may still find that you don't much care about 4K. I've got 4K on my laptop, which is nice in a couple of ways, but in general I'm really rather "meh" on it for development work. I've got two 1080P monitors at work and prefer that to a 4K setup. But I also don't care about pixelization very much compared to a lot of people, and never have. I used to read books on my 160x160 monochrome Palm Pilot, and I guess everything looks good after spending my formative years on a Commodore 64 with a 1980s vintage television. But I do at least see the difference and can easily understand why others have other opinions.

Reading books on a Palm Pilot... that brings back memories! The Sony Clie was a great little gadget.

I can certainly see the difference between low- and hi-DPI, but thanks to subpixel rendering (which unfortunately is going out of style because of hi-DPI displays), it doesn't really bother me - call me old-fashioned, but I'm more bothered by the waste of pixels. 2560x1440 is a pretty good resolution for a monitor, and nowadays it's crammed into the 5" display of a phone, just so that it looks pretty. Ok, unless you use it for VR, then even more DPI would be nice...

I went with Acer’s xr382cqk

Enough screen real estate that you don’t feel pressured to add another monitor, high enough DPI to look good, low enough to not need scaling, connects to USB C MBP with one wire for video, charging, and a USB 3.0 hub.

IMO the perfect monitor.

Why would you be against adding another monitor. When I have two monitors I benefit from angling them so that each one is perpendicular to my face as I turn it to look. The larger the screen, the lower percentage of that screen is perpendicular.

A quick DDG for "xr382cqk" says that's a 34 inch, 21:9 aspect ratio curved display.

It’s a 38” 21:9

I had a 34 inch with a second 27” monitor, but a single 38” hits the sweet spot of not needing another monitor

Ah, it seems the copy on https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/UM.TX2AA.001 is incorrect - the specs below do say 37.5", I didn't notice the discrepancy before.

I mentioned this in a comment below:

>It’s a 38” 21:9

>I had a 34 inch with a second 27”, but a single 38” hits the sweet spot of not needing another monitor.

For a short while I had the second screen with the 38” screen but it was just overkill (the 38” alone is enough to cover a large portion off the usable area of my desk, so the 27” mostly just sat out of view)

This is why curved computer monitors make sense, and curved TVs don't (multiple viewers in most?/many cases).

Yep got one too - refurb (buydig via ebay) for $799.

Plays nice with my PC and 2015 macbook pro.

Very happy.

Funny because for coding, I'm almost happier running turbo pascal UIs ..

Turbo Pascal was an outstanding product.

yes, despite being vga and much pixelated

I still haven't found anything that can render code as nicely as a good bitmapped font on a non-HiDPI display can look. I do sometimes code on a retina MacBook Pro, and it's OK, but it's nowhere near as nice to look at as a good non-smoothed coding font on my 110 ppi desktop display.

Obviously, different people will have different tastes here.

http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

Exactly! So glad to see the HighDPI fans gaining acceptance. 110PPI looks like garbage and needs to be relegated to the dust bin.

:) we might have different vision. I can’t resolve individual pixels with this setup unless I put my face near the screen.

Everyone has different vision, of course! If you don't mind my asking, what is your viewing distance to the screen?

One big consideration for me: I'm 65, so my eyes are not able to focus back and forth to different distances like a younger person.

My solution is a pair of single vision prescription lenses, adjusted to the distance to my monitor(s). I need to be able to use the laptop all on its own, so that determines the focus distance: about 20".

Because of that, I also place any secondary monitor at about the same distance from my eyes, otherwise it would be out of focus. I can't go changing glasses to look at a different monitor. :-)

A 24" 4K display works nicely for this, and as I mentioned it's small enough to work really well in portrait mode.

So I have two recommendations for any programmer. If you haven't used a portrait mode monitor, try it out alongside your laptop display. It's a very practical setup.

But more importantly, if you find yourself gravitating toward lower-DPI monitors, it may be time for a vision check and a good pair of single vision prescription glasses adjusted for your monitor distance (again, about 20" if you ever need to use a laptop by itself). I put off doing this for years - I always thought of myself as the kind of person who "didn't need glasses."

When I finally got the prescription lenses, it was a real eye-opener - pun intended!

Wait until you're a bit older. 110PPI and retina display will both look equally good (or bad) to you.

Is 65 old enough? ;-)

Of course if I take off my glasses, then every monitor looks the same. But with proper correction, my vision is better than 20/20.

With my prescription computer glasses, the difference between low DPI and high DPI is like night and day. I can see every pixel on a low DPI monitor, while high DPI monitors look beautiful to me.

Please, everyone: do yourself a huge favor and get your vision checked and get some single vision prescription glasses if they are called for. It's hard to overstate the difference this will make in your quality of life.

Edit: Not sure why you were downvoted for a reasonable comment. It's true that your vision will get worse as you get older. Even if nothing else goes wrong, you lose your ability to focus your eyes dynamically. The lenses harden up and lock into a specific focal distance.

However, many of these vision changes are correctable. Progressive lenses are a great solution for "out and about" use. You can look up and down to see far and near things. They aren't very good for computer use, and that's where the single vision lenses come in.

It is a minor nuisance to switch back and forth between the computer glasses and the progressives, but being able to see clearly makes it all worth it.

Yes, not quite sure who's ire I raised, but I'm in the older quadrant myself and I do need my computer glasses to work.

This sort of long-sightedness is usually correctable.

Though I’m dreading the day I have to get varifocals.

I tried varifocals once, gave up on them immediately. They just didn't work for me, I was always trying to see something through the wrong part of the glasses. Now I have two pairs, one for normal distance and one for computer work.

No, this is a huge myth. I’m getting older (42) and my eye sight is getting worse, and I can still tell the difference between 110 and 220. Heck, I could easily tell the difference between 150 PPI and 220 (a hitachi 28” 4K vs. a iMac retina 5K).

Coding without seeing pixels in font rendering is just bliss, it is too hard to go back.

Yes, for me 1920x1080 on say a 20-inch is the absolute minimum with these LED monitors that are all the rage now. Even the old CRTs looked better with a lower pixel density; I wonder why

The CRTs looked better because there was more "bleed" from pixel to pixel. A great example I found to describe it was if you were in the iOS ecosystem when the iPhone 4 came out, every outdated iOS app looked terrible. The 4 had the same screen size but double the PPI of the previous generations. An outdated app looked better on a <4 than it did on a 4 because the bigger pixels of the earlier phones bled into each other more while the 4 created crisper edges that were incredibly jarring.

Why do you want to throw out other people's monitors when they're working fine for them? (Source: I also have a 40" 4K monitor at home, both for coding/reading and gaming.)