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Comment by novaleaf | Hacker News Reader

Cheap 4k TV's are great. Here's my layout

  ┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  └────┴────┘└────┴────┘└────┴────┘

I have 3x 39" 4K TV's as my monitors. As Shown in the above, I use them as the equivlant of 6x ultra-talls.

I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.

Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.

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You have to be fussy about the TVs. There are two main issues.

1) Input lag. A mouse 200+ms behind is frustrating to work with.

2) Color space. I forget the terms off hand, but basically if the panel has poor colour space / bit depth / whatever, fonts start looking really bad.

Maybe you lucked out or just don't notice/care about these, but that's one of the core reasons people don't use TVs.

I'm quite tempted to get a large good one though.

Most TVs have some weird effect where it just puts white dots in the middle of the strokes of a charater glyph. However, I've seen several Samsung TVs which doesn't suffer from this phenomena and can be used as proper monitors.

For coding purposes I don't think color accuracy matters much, but I see why latency might annoy some people, though it doesn't bother me.

on my seiki tv's you can remove that by setting "sharpening" to zero.

probably could do that on the samsungs too, burried in the menus somewhere.

I use a 43" 4k TV as a monitor and it's great. It's on the outside range of size due to the 100 ppi pitch.

You're referring to chroma subsampling. Rtings does a review of 4k TVs that support 4:4:4 chroma.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/by-usage/pc-monitor

This page also has a link to their subsampling article.

Please pardon my comment with limited background knowledge but are you sure that TVs, with their hardware designed to make you look from far are a good idea to keep close to your eyes?

Also, where do you get 39" 4K for $300!?

What would be different about a close up LCD panel vs a distance LCD panel?

BestBuy has them. Probably Costco too.

TVs have moved on a lot in the past 3-4 years. The most difficult part about 39" TVs is finding something that small.

I have 1x 43" 4K monitor (Dell P4317Q), and together with a tiling WM it's pretty awesome as you say. It's more expensive (I think $800), not sure if it's sufficiently better as to be worth it.

I have the same (single) monitor and love it. $699 at MicroCenter.

I like to sum up this debate like this:

With multiple monitors, you're confined into smaller, "hard-coded" boxes that can't be changed. With a single large screen you have much more flexibility.

You need extra functions in your window manager for moving between screens with multiple monitors. Depending on their placement the shortcuts might be non-intuitive. Different screen resolutions lead to unnatural movement of the mouse cursor between screens.

I've also found that such extra complexity impacts productivity negatively. It's an unnecessary distraction trying to communicate such complicated layouts.

Yes! I have the same and despite spending thousands of dollars trying to find a better monitor it's still best solution I've found. I can keep 4x80 column files open in vscode or 8 if I split them vertically. And with a single monitor I can still easily use a KVM switch.

I'm just using a 27" 5K iMac, BUT sometimes I change its resolution from the default, virtually 2560x1440 one to the highest DPI, which I guess is the native 5120x2880 and I just pull it closer and/or lean closer to it.

I think for programming the 2560/1600 = 1920/1200 = 1.6 or the 3000/2000 = 1.5 ratio is a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately it's not a common ratio among big but cheap monitors...

The extra head movement required to look into the corners of a 27" or even a 25" vertical monitor definitely puts a little strain on my neck compared to a 25" horizontal one, but with frequent posture changes and breaks, while a bit tiring, I don't feel it caused any permanent damage.

At least I hope it's not the reason why the middle of my upper back feels like falling apart any minute... Maybe that thai massage, when a lady was walking on my back for half an hour was a bit too much? :D

How far away are they? That's a lot of physical space to cover.

I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.

But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.

they sit about 2' to 3' from me, just like a normal monitor.

it's only about 2' of vertical space, but 8' of horizontal, so I have them laid out in a semi-circle.

I have 39" seiki TV's, all about 4 years old now. As one of the other posters mentioned, it actually seems rare to find any 4K TV that small any more. But a brief search on amazon shows you can still get stuff in that price range, but Seiki seems to be gone :(

Sorry, I did mean horizontal.

At three foot, you have a circumference of 18foot. The idea of almost 180° of monitors still unsettles me. That's beyond neck work, that's practically into separate workspaces. If you're looking at the left side of Monitor 1, Monitor 3 is physically out of —even peripheral— eyeline.

I don't know why I'm flapping on about it. If it works for you, that's great.

you are right that 3 monitors is excessive. I find myself only really using 2 of them.

Using the 3rd requires me to twist my upper body a bit uncomfortably. as a result I find that I tend to keep it dedicated to little used apps, like email and sourcetree (a git gui)

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