I recently switched to a single 6k monitor after using dual monitors for 10+ years. A single high res monitor is so much better ergonomically.
Having a curved ultra wide display is much better than 2 smaller displays. I can put my main windows right in the middle of my field of view, and put my reference windows off to the side.
For the games with HUDs stuck to the sides, I just turn down the horizontal resolution and have black bars on the left and right. But for games like FS2020, using the full display makes the game that much better.
Now if only macOS notifications for important meetings weren't in the top-right corner...
The big advantage over an ultrawide for me is that I have a lot of vertical space, which is great for code. It's basically 4x 1080p displays in a 2x2 grid.
I love it. Particularly excellent for photo editing (it's so huge I have to zoom out sometimes) and programming. There is a slight visual oddity on the very outside 1/2px caused by the viewing angle of the pixels out there, which I think they'd only solve by curving it - personally I only even noticed it because a reviewer mentioned it. I also wish all the HDMI ports were 60Hz (2 are, 2 are 30Hz) but that's just a nitpick.
I play games on it too and it's generally very enjoyable. It has un-advertised FreeSync support, interestingly, which I find works well with my AMD card under Linux, but it does have a very limited range of like 60-70 I think. There's a different setting on my Linux drivers whose name I can't remember that basically means as long as you're over 60FPS you'll never see any screen tearing, which I can attest works for me with it.
The stand is very solid, and the speakers are decent too. I love that it comes with a remote for operating it. It's so much better than using the nubbin under the display.
The input splitting modes are really quite good, surprisingly. Being able to display 4 inputs in a 2x2 grid is awesome, although I use a tiling window manager so I don't really use it much. If you were feeling particularly adventurous you could attach 4 inputs from a single machine and it'll recognise it as 4 separate displays :D
Not defending Apple, it's a pretty clear hardware failing.
27 inch 2K or 43 inch 4K are the sweet spots.
Here's how you can check if your monitor needs scaling:
- Find out the DPI of your existing monitor and your desired monitor. For example, 24" 1080p is 91.79, and 27" 4K is 163.18
- Calculate the ratio: 91.79/163.18 = 0.5625 (this means that on the 27" 4K monitor everything is 56% of the size of the 1080p)
- Now take a screenshot of your monitor (at 100% scaling) and resize it to 1920x1080*0.5625 = 1080x607. View the resized image at 100%. That text will be the same physical size as on a 4K 27" monitor set to 100%.
Without scaling, most people would find text too small on both 27" at 32". You would need a display as big as 40" to get the same density as 1440p on 27" (~110 DPI). For most people, 27" requires 150% scaling and 32" requires 125%.
Also, your DPI calculation are Windows and Linux specific - they assumed 96 dpi at @1X scale. Mac started with 72 dpi for @1X, so @2X is 144dpi. 27" 4K is slightly above that, thus perfectly usable at @2X scale. For Windows and Linux, it is better to use 150-175%.
Thanks for catching that. The rest of the comment still remains.
27" 2K is gross. Compared to 4K, it looks so pixelated that I feel like I'm back in the 90s. 27" 4K at native resolution is far too small for me to read, but it looks great at 150% scaling, or even 200% for some things.
The problem is once you start scaling up you're losing real estate. 4k at 200% scaling gives you same real estate as 1080p. Sure the picture will look better but you're not gaining any improvements in being able to open and see more things at once. That and some apps can't handle scaling properly.
Personally I find 25" 1440p at native scaling to be a good balance of real estate, sharpness and ease of reading anything comfortably (even low contrast status bars).
With that set up you can open 4x 80 char side by side code windows in Vim, VSCode, etc.. You can also grab a really good 25" 1440p IPS panel monitor for around $300. I wrote a huge guide on picking monitors for developers at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo....
Depending on what you're doing, that might be exactly what you want. I use my 27" 4k display to read PDFs zoomed in to fit two pages side-by-side onscreen. That way, the clarity of the rendering is good enough to be an alternative to print.
I agree 100% about the real estate issue. Physically larger monitors with equivalent real-estate don't make much sense for me personally.
I wish there were more 27" screens available since 25" looks too small to me and 32" requires some neck movement which I don't like.
I would love a 5K 27" screen at a reasonable price. :(
It does, but is hidden behind dconf key; except maybe Ubuntu 20.10. It works nice for Wayland applications, but X11 ones are blurred (as in upscaled from @1X). X11 includes Chrome and all the Electron apps, so I it would not be a popular choice... hence it is hidden by default.
If you want to try it, it is `gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"`
I don't know, that sounds a little embellished at first read. Either you sit way closer than ergonomic norms or you have irregular vision.
Should you be able to notice a difference? Yeah that's plausible. To see pixelation at 1440p doesn't sound right however. Claiming it is like the 90s borders on absurd.
My next monitor probably will be 40" 4K but sitting a bit further away.
I've got a hacked version of rectangle.app giving me 3x2 tiled windows. Some stuff will be in 6ths, some will be in full height 3rds. And occasionally, I'll get a spreadsheet that needs full screen.
Web browsers tend to run at normal res, terminal and emacs are using Anonymous Pro 14pt. At that size, terminal is 157x122 when running in a full height third. Works pretty well for my aging eyes.
These wide monitors are really not very good for watching logs, or other status displays. Rotating a second monitor and dedicating it to showing lots of logs or several rectangular monitoring screens tiled vertically hugely reduced the amount of window management I had to do.
In fact I kind of wonder why all my monitors are horizontal again. Probably because horizontal works better for personal computing, or I have my monitors arranged wrong, or both.
Even now, my laptop defaults my 4k display to 1080p Retina mode. So I get 5 more lines of terminal on my old display, but the text is not as easy to read. I get the same number of lines on the new display if I go down one font point, and it's still more legible. But I'd really love to be able to scroll logs in an 180x160 terminal window, instead of 200x75.
I use Moom to create three screen regions (there's an undocumented command-line switch to allow a 36-based zone, which I broke up 11-13-11), and it resets everything when I plug in or out. I do have to juke the text magnification for that, which I have on macro keys on my Ergodox.
Now if only I could get focus-follows-mouse, everything would be perfect... I've only been complaining about that for fifteen years though, so I'm sure it'll happen one of these days.
You can buy 20 full-hd gaming screens for the same amont of money. Or 12 4K screens. And while they may not look as nice, they have a much better frequency. 60Hz feels laggy.
What _does_ "refresh" is the backlight in the sense that the brightness is controlled by PWM. However, there are many monitors that use PWM frequencies in the several hundred Hz range, or don't use PWM at all.
I do agree that a single monitor is more comfortable.
1440p monitor has like a fifth of the pixels a 6k monitor has.
- The parent-parent comment suggests that a single high resolution monitor is a good solution for people in general. I am suggesting that a 1440p monitor at 27-inch is a better choice than a 6k monitor, for people in general, taking cost into account.
- You could get five 1440p monitors for 1/6 the price of this 6k.
- As resolution increases you get diminishing returns.
- 1440p, 27-inch is a sweet spot, imo.
Your information is 2-3 years out of date.
In what way? If it's just discomfort using it for long periods of time, there's a 95% chance, you need to turn on the lights in your room or turn down your monitor brightness.
> Can you please recommend a VA panel that is good for text sharpness, too?
Some subpixel arrangements might require you to change the font smoothing (Windows ClearType), but any monitor with high pixel density will do, really. I'm not an expert on specific models so I won't recommend one.
I do not face the same eye fatigue after hours of sitting in front of a VA panel compared to sitting in front of an IPS one.
27" 1440p, IPS panel with wide viewing angles, 165 hz and FreeSync 2, DCI-P3 color gamut. RTINGS describes it as "excellent response time" and "outstanding low input lag."
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/s2721dgf
You get the typical IPS tradeoffs: it doesn't win any prizes for contrast, HDR, or black uniformity. I'm very happy with mine.
Also, installed an app to allow for more resolution flexibility and 120 hz “feels” so nice but at least my setup only supports 120 hz at max 4K iirc.
I switched from a larger monitor to a smaller one with the same resolution and not having to turn my neck any more was rather pleasant.
If you like tiling window managers, you can get a very similar experience (in terms of using the whole screen and being able to flexibly throw things all over the place) with this kind of setup.
What you can't have is focus follows mouse, however. Moom gets me everything else I want.