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Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

This. I've been using multiple 1440p displays since 2010, and actually had a 2560x1600 LED back in 2004.

I'd do anything for 5K, 120Hz, Mini-LED or Micro-LED displays with 10-bit color and HDR. I don't want 4K: 5K has over 77% more logical area.

They don't have to be cheap. I'll pay well. I just want them to exist. I've been waiting over a decade at this point!

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my favourite thing about 5K is that you can do 2x scaling and still have plenty of space on your screen to display multiple windows (effectively 2560x1440)

but with a 4K screen, you have three options: 1. no scaling and tiny fonts (ugh), 2. fractional scaling (ugh), or 3. 2x scaling and settle for 1080p real estate (ugh)

IMO 5K > 1440p > 4K > 1080p

Can someone explain why scaling a 4K screen by 200% is better than a monitor with 1080p native resolution? Or in general why is it better to use a scaled-up high res screen instead of a natively lower res screen? Doesn't the scaling get rid of any gains of being higher res? I just can't find an answer to this simple question online.

Assuming your entire software stack supports it, the advantage is that stuff can get displayed with twice the resolution but at the same physical size. Your operating system probably already does this with fonts and vector graphics. It can also be done with faster images too if they are provided at 2x resolution.

With 2x scaling, fonts are really crisp. Regular 1080p gets there most of the way, but with 2x scaling on a super high res display, the difference is noticeable and it's hard to go back.

Have you ever switched from a high refresh rate screens to a 60 Hz screen and noticed a difference? I find this to be similar.

I've been waiting for basically the same thing in 3:2 or 16:10 although I'd settle for 4K, given real-world constraints. For what it's worth, that's a tremendous amount of bandwidth that even _new_ protocols such as HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.0 don't support, except DP2.0 in it's maximum bandwidth mode that hasn't been implemented anywhere as far as I know. If you take your requirements down to 4K, then both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0 at UHBR10 can do it.

There’s the LG Ultrafine 5k monitor, but I suppose it doesn’t have HDR or 10-bit color?

It’s fantastic, though. And it’s hard to live with less than 500 nits once you’ve used it. 5k is where it’s at.

Neither. It came out in 2014, with some revisions since. 8 years later, there's just not much else out there in 5K-land.

The products basically don't exist.

I can get some rather fantastic 1440p displays -- HDR, 165Hz, DCI-P3 color gamut, and excellent color reproduction (especially when calibrated) for as cheap as $260 on sale. Best thing imaginable? No, but amazing for the price, and objectively better in every measure than the 1440p displays that were $1000+ in 2010.

I'd pay $2000 -- perhaps even $2500 -- each (and I'd buy THREE), for a 5K display that met my requirements.

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Hardware Unboxed recently made a video complaining that the display market is too heavily driven by gamers wanting a specific, narrow feature set for a rock bottom price.

Display makers have delivered that. However they don't really make much of anything else as a result.

It's a nasty, difficult, low-margin business where almost no one is making money, hence why it's huge volumes of largely the same thing with no major shifts forward.

Seems like there have been advances, just not in pixel density beyond 160 PPI.

The bigger issue than low margins is the "4k" marketing and lack of large buyers other than Apple for 5k displays. I think early on in the 4k hype train, there was a bandwidth issue with Display port that required MST for 5k.

So basically the Apple Pro Monitor but with 120Hz?

Unfortunately 200+PPI are extremely expensive. So 5K panel at 27"+ are partially speaking an Apple only SKUs.

> I don't want 4K: 5K has over 77% more logical area.

Can you elaborate?

5/4 = 1.25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5K_resolution

4k is 4096 x 2160, 5k is 5120 x 2880

There's also a really helpful diagram on that page

It's cinematic 4k. 4k monitor is 3840 x 2160.

5:4 is only one dimension, but 5k screens have greater resolution in both dimensions. I make it roughly 66% more area:

(5120 × 2880) / (4096 × 2160) = 1.6666

It comes out to 77% if you use the SMPTE UHDTV standard of 4k, which is (2 * 1920) × (2 * 1080) = 3840 × 2160

Ah. I just checked, and that is indeed the resolution of the 4k monitor I'm currently using. So I would guess that standard is pretty common!

That’s also why 5K monitors are more than 2X the price of 4K ones at similar sizes. I have a 4K with those dimensions that I bought for $400, an LG 5K would cost at least $1200.

I think the price is more about where on the adoption curve those technologies are. 4k is pretty mainstream these days, older tech and produced in high volumes: ergo cheaper. 5k is still pretty new, mainly constrained to higher end products, and sales volumes are lower: ergo more expensive.

5K 27" monitors predate 4K 28" ones, but the supply was basically monopolized by Apple from day one. I can get an affordable 5K monitor, but unfortunately I have to get an iMac CPU unit to go with it.

And they took away target mode so your only compute option is the processor that came with it. That still annoys me, I’d like to drive my perfectly great 5K display with an M1 Mac mini.

(5120 * 2880) / (3840 * 2160) = 1.77

Since they are both the same aspect ratio (16:9) you can also take the ratio of one linear dimension and square it to get the area ratio.

So:

(5120/3840)^2 = (2880/2160)^2 = 1.777

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