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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The bottleneck is usually your eyes, not the monitor. On 1080p you can use small bitmap fonts that are legible even at low resolutions. 4K mostly gives you more flexible typography aesthetics, which doesn't improve programming productivity.

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1080p outright looks blurry after using 4k, so its pretty hard to even contemplate going back

The whole point of bitmap fonts is that they're designed to be used without anti-aliasing. There's no blur.

Examples:

https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts

If you're on 4K you can simulate how they look on 1080p with 2x integer nearest neighbor scaling.

Too bad I can't bitmap-font UI elements. Being able to scale those freely (my DE allows it by a float value that is currently around 1,65) without too noticeable blur is my most important reason for a high resolution screen.

The by current standards normal sharpness is nice too (1080 screens aren't really blurry, they're pixely).

But getting vscode or chrome to render fast at 4k is nontrivial.

I basically went back to 1080p because of this.

> The bottleneck is usually your eyes

Eye resolution is ridiculously high. There's a reason companies started marketing 'retina' displays.

Small fonts will not always fall into discrete pixels which is especially true if the resolution is not very high. Which requires you to do antialiasing or mangle the characters.

Higher resolution displays allows you to render them more faithfully.

2k equivalent on a 4k screen feels very good on my eyes. Reducing fatigue is productivity.

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