As soon as someone invents a way to fold or roll up a 40+ inch screen, I'll buy it.
An important thing to keep in mind is there are actual computer monitors out there that match those specs and cost about the same as a comparable TV. If you don't intend to ever use it as an actual TV, that would probably be a slightly better choice as a TV might have unwanted picture optimizations or force you to use a remote to turn it on/switch inputs etc.
The dot pitch is about the same as a 22" 1080p or 27" 1440p monitor, so really it's like having 4 1080p displays but with no bezels and a much smaller desk footprint.
It's great, cheaper than those ultrawide displays but with more resolution at the top of the screen for music players, email, etc. The built in TV speakers are more or less the same as desktop speakers but with no extra space.
Having a large 16:9 format display is also a million times better for games and fullscreen video.
My only complaints are that the refresh rate is limited to 60fps and the display lag is 20ms. I'll probably upgrade when HDMI adaptive sync becomes more commonplace.
If I have to work on my small screen, I'm far less efficient although it depends on the task. When developing, I like to have my app as well as multiple editors all in front of me at once. Can't do that on 13" really.
Ultimately, I found that 55" was too big for me relative to the distance that I was sitting from the screen.
Currently I am back to using a 27" PC monitor with 2560x1440 resolution. I use this same monitor both when I use my desktop computer and when I use my laptop. In the latter case I have the additional monitor of the laptop itself, a 13.3" Retina (2560x1600) MacBook Air 2018 model, but it is sitting at an angle.
There were multiple issues with using a 55" UHD TV for me. A couple of the main issues that I had with using that TV as my main computer monitor were:
1. The pixels were a bit too visible at the distance I was sitting.
2. The upper 1/3 portion of the monitor or so was basically outside of my field of view, and as were the left and right 1/4 portions of the monitor. Turning my head, the fact that the display itself was flat still made it uncomfortable to use these areas of the screen.
3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.
But even with the better experience of going back to my 27" monitor and sometimes additionally using laptop display on the side, I often feel restricted in terms of screen real estate.
Lately I have been feeling a lot like it is an impossible battle.
On top of that I am beginning to feel more and more tired from looking at my monitors, and I also find sitting down in front of my computers both restricting in how I am postured and in the poor quality of the chair that I am sitting on. I am turning 30 years old later this year.
I feel that more and more that for me the joy of computing is becoming overshadowed by tiresomeness and feelings of being restricted, both physically in how I am sitting and moving and in terms of screen real-estate and in interacting with code and data in general.
I feel like I used to be able to marvel at things on the screen when I was much younger and to not be so bothered about the restrictions of posture and of what could be displayed at once and how I could interact with them.
I am left thinking that perhaps my mental capacity is starting to shrink as part of the ageing process of my body, but then I also think that perhaps it is not so much this as it is simply that the things I am working on now requires keeping track of a lot more things at once than the number of things I had to keep track of when I was young and still learning and working on simpler things.
In the beginning of my twenties I was concerned with optimizing my desktop environment for productivity. This was largely a time sink, and not something that I have desired to do anymore for several years now. But at the same time, I feel that I am wearing myself out sitting in front of the computer. And I feel that it shouldn't be this way.
For a while, when VR was new, I was intrigued by the idea of using VR as a working environment. Never went as far as to buy a VR headset but I've since lost a lot of the faith in VR as a magical silver bullet. Perhaps in the future sometime VR will be a solution to some of the problems I am experiencing, but I don't think the tools exist today to really take advantage of VR for coding and for working with data. Furthermore, having those displays on your head for hours on end is sure to be even more physically exhausting than looking at the monitors on my desk which themselves are already wearing me down.
I guess at this point I am basically rambling. But the point that I want to get to is that I believe that the way we work with code and data today is really really far from what would be the best for us. And I don't feel like I have the time nor the energy to tackle that problem either.
I really wish there was a way for me to travel with this setup :/
You wear glasses, don’t you? Changing the settings won’t help that much. An LCD can’t block all the light coming through, and wide gamut backlights are typically much wider on red vs sRGB. Glasses will cause chromatic aberration and exaggerate the difference.
Also, I long for the day when humanity will retire the imperial measurements system.
Planing to use them forever.
CCFL is infinitely better than LED.
How so?
At 43", I keep the monitor a few inches farther back than my old setup. But I also got a great idea from my eye doctor - he helped me refine a prescription specifically for the distance between my chair and monitor. With these glasses, the screen is impeccably sharp. And I have a different set of glasses for when I walk away from the desk.
Nreal "light" AR glasses (dev kit) provide a usb3 50-degree (5 fists) 1080p stereo screen at 2 m (so like 36"). Head tracking permits making that a viewport into a larger desktop. Display is very crisp. Ubuntu desktop looked quite usable.
Before CoV, the $1.2k dev kit was available outside US (long FCC delay) with claimed 1 mo lead. Issues with 6DOF tracking, nose fit, and maybe warmth. But I'd buy it if I could. Several competitors were aiming for similar designs this year. Now? But I think people are underestimating how rapid this transition might be, at least for some of our use cases.
Regarding ergonomics, here are some obvious improvements:
1. A motorized sit/stand desk. Stand up every hour, or whenever you feel like stretching.
2. A decent chair: Leap and Embody are the best (I tried many).
3. High refresh rate monitors. If you're looking at moving text often (e.g. while scrolling) it's much easier on the eyes. Personally I'm getting two Asus XG27UQ as soon as they appear on Amazon. Also anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap. 5k looks even better, but there are currently no high refresh rate offerings. Hard to say which one more important for eye comfort - resolution or refresh rate, both are, so spend a bit more and get both.
4. Good headphones, or speakers if you work alone (speakers aren't as tiring for my ears as headphones with prolonged use). When there are other people around I use HD600 or QC35II depending on noise level, otherwise I enjoy my Edifier S360DB. Working in silence is great too sometimes.
Finally, try to get out to a park or a beach and let your eyes and mind rest a little. Leave your phone in the car. Or better yet bike/run there.
p.s. I'm 42, got my PhD in machine learning last year, currently keep track of my new R&D job projects, and an exciting personal side project, and two kids at home. Never felt sharper.
> anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap I run closer to 1.5K of native definition on a 30" monitor. I find this is very good and doesn't require any fancy tuning in applications or the OS's. I have the panel mounted as low as possible so that I don't have to tip my head back too much to look at the top.
I don't listen to music or podcasts while I work, I found I concentrate better in silence. I also have a door I can close when people are talking BS in the hallway, so my stomach doesn't scrunch up at the falsehoods. The speakers that play the mail alert were bought as cheap as possible at BestBuy.
I have the privilege of being able to carry out all this largely at employer's expense and I don't waste it.
This phrasing makes me think you’re much older than I am :)
which would explain you being fine with “1.5k” resolution on a 30” screen.
On certain types of LCD TVs, the sub-pixels are not equal amounts of Red, Green, and Blue. As you've found out, some TVs have more Red sub-pixels than the other colours. This is because TVs are optimised for video viewing, and the manufacturers worked out that more Red in a scene results in a richer picture.
There's some videos out there that show the differences in close up (I don't have the URLs to hand), but in the worse cases, text can end up being unreadable due to the missing sub-pixel colours.
The bottom line is, a cheap 43" TV panel is not the same panel as you get in a 43" monitor.
No you didn’t. If you switched from 2x 24” 4Ks to a single 43” 4K, you have half the real estate you used to, you’re just zoomed in on it.
To avoid confusing inches as a useful metric for how much information can be shown on screens at once, monitors should be measured in megapixels.
Problem’s even worse with “ultrawides” that are generally significantly lower dpi than their 4K siblings, so 1/2 to 1/4 the megapixels compared to dual 4Ks.
And no, I use dual 24” plus the Macbook Pro 16” native screen, and I run the 24s at native pixels (dual 4K @ 60Hz). I do, however, scale fonts up to 120% - 150% text size (depends on app).
This reduces the % of screen used for UI elements, while retaining “retina” text legible at arms length (same distance you’d read an iPad or magazine).