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Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

I like this announcement, because it means that there's a manufacturing line for proper HiDPI [1] displays running in some LG factory somewhere that third party manufactures like LG/Dell/Iiyama can hopefully use to give us some fresh good-looking 27" 5K desktop monitors. It boggles my mind how little attention very high pixel density displays have been getting from PC display manufacturers. I would also be first in line for a PC monitor that uses the M1 iMac display, but I suppose nobody sees a market for higher end 24" monitors anymore.

[1]: HiDPI displays that work correctly with macOS' and Linux desktop's naive HiDPI implementation, that requires 2x scaling for good results.

Nobody in 2022 will sell you a monitor that does that, except for Apple's expensive stuff that is hard to use with regular PCs and one over the top Dell display. I wish everyone did what ChromeOS or modern Windows apps do. I need that extremely crisp font rendering in my life.

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Apple have always been the first to push higher resolution devices for as long as I've been alive.

Laptops in the early 2010's were stuck on 1336x768 until Apple kicked up a fuss about having "retina", same with phones which had comically low resolutions until Apple made a fuss about it with the iPhone 4.

Sadly my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so I can't make a lot of use of the extra real-estate, but it always seems as if they're ahead when it comes to resolutions on consumer devices.

The ThinkPad R50p had a QXGA screen (2048x1536) option back in 2003. Granted Windows had zilch support for it which is probably why it died. Even the base model was a 1600x1200 screen. And there was plenty of phones with 200+ ppi before the iPhone 4. I think it has more to do with higher PPI screens getting cheaper and Apple could just get more supply first...

That was an extreme outlier, the r-series is an uncommonly deployed thinkpad line.

Check the t- or x- series which are many many orders of magnitude wider deployed.

You could get a 1600x1200 T60p too...

Which also had higher resolution than macbooks.

Random cheapo laptop: 1366x.. One better: apple Even better: higher priced laptop had 1920x.... Oh, and those had IPS displays unlike apple with (halfway decent) TN panels.

So everybody else pushed, then apple not only caught up but jumped ahead. And now they are again behind with 3k vs 4k and 5k vs 8k and miniled vs oled with the same order: cheap < apple < expensive.

Same for the macbook air/ultrabook form factor: Invented by Sony but only got popular once apple jumped on the train years later.

Apple is really good at "sherlocking" and getting out a polished/well-integrated version of something that has been around for years and making it popular.

Remember that it’s more than just raw resolution.

Of course macOS supports these higher resolutions but there’s also the color calibration and support for wider color gamuts other than sRGB and having that all integrated together.

For example, the iMac had Display P3 (a color space 50% bigger than RGB) support starting in 2015.

And Apple still hasn't shipped a laptop with a higher refresh rate than 120hz when competitors have been shipping 144 or even 240hz for years (A 100% bigger value than 120hz!).

Is there any evidence that such high refresh rates provide any value, or are even detectable by human eyes?

In games with fast motion, 120hz vs 240hz is easily perceptible (outside first person shooters it’s not good to provide much value). I would be fine with 120hz for desktop work, but 60hz displays has been a gripe of mine about Macs for a long time. 120+hz was available on CRTs 25 years ago…

I can see benefits even while scrolling a webpage or moving windows around. It's very confortable.

This been said, I can remember CRTs at 60hz with side scrollers and demos at 60fps with perfect image stability while scrolling. You could read tiny texts scrolling up and down perfectly. This is not the case anymore with LCD panels...

Try to read a webpage while scrolling, impossible.

60hz or 120hz I would pay for a stable image in motion. It would bring tremendous confort.

Yes, blind tests have shown that users are easily able to discern between 60 vs 144hz.

This isn't really contested anywhere.

I know this isn't what you mean.. but I'm imagining someone blindfolded in a research lab testing this out...

Blindfolded person: "I can't see a difference!"

IMAX did tests back in the day with footage of a baseball being pitched directly at the camera. They found that the intensity of emotional response tailed off after 60hz. It's not that the higher frame rate isn't perceptible, but that raising the frame rate doesn't really have any appreciable impact unless people expect higher frame rates.

There's a notable difference between passively consumed content and interactive content.

We're fine with 24FPS for films and tv shows, but try that for an FPS and it's considered nigh unplayable. I remember when the line was "the human eye can't see past 30FPS" now it's at 60. The treadmill keeps going.

Apple doesn't ship stuff just because it's available; there has to be some appreciable value.

Faster refresh doesn't necessarily mean a better display. I suspect Apple's displays are higher quality than most competitors even if they max out at 120Hz.

Here are the specs for the latest MacBook Pros:

    16.2-inch (diagonal) Liquid Retina XDR display;1 3456-by-2234 native 
    resolution at 254 pixels per inch
 
    XDR (Extreme Dynamic Range)

    1,000,000:1 contrast ratio
    XDR brightness: 1000 nits sustained full-screen, 1600 nits peak2 (HDR content only)
    SDR brightness: 500 nits


    1 billion colors
    Wide color (P3)
    True Tone technology
    Refresh rates

    ProMotion technology for adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz
    Fixed refresh rates: 47.95Hz, 48.00Hz, 50.00Hz, 59.94Hz, 60.00Hz

120hz is slow technology but those MBP displays are around the best you can get when you look the whole picture, notch aside.

Exactly. You can't just look at one aspect.

Dell's 6 year old 8k UP3218 has entered the chat

That sucker costs $3770, just as a data point.

The Apple monitor stand was over a thousand, wasn't it?

Has this monitor's price been announced?

$1599.

Of course the price was announced; the base model is $1599: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio-display

> The Apple monitor stand was over a thousand, wasn't it?

the Pro stand is $999 or VESA Mount Adapter is $199.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr/standard-...

Cheap laptops, maybe. I had a Dell 15" that did 1920x1200 in 2004. (And gawd that was an amazing computer)

Ahh, you nerd swiped me. I was involved in a hi rez phone before the iphone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N80

Hey, we probably worked together.

352 × 416 pixels at 2.1" is about 259 pixels per inch.

When introducing the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said the number of pixels needed for a Retina display is about 300 PPI for a device held 10 to 12 inches from the eye.

So, not far off at all, you're right.

I bought a mac during this period and I have a distinct memory of having to choose between a 1080p laptop or a much lower resolution mac. MBPr has a leap forwards but I mean laptops that WEREN'T Apple's at Apple's price range had already moved on from 1336x768.

> Sadly my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so I can't make a lot of use of the extra real-estate, but it always seems as if they're ahead when it comes to resolutions on consumer devices.

With proper 2x scaling as intended by Apple there is no extra screen real-estate. 5k at 2x scaling gives you the real-estate of a 2560 x 1440 display, just with a doubled pixel density and thus much sharper. This is the actual value of HiDPI display.

They've had the iMac line using these displays forever and it hasn't filtered down to other display makers. Only LG via the ultrafine line has used these densities (also Windows and Linux support is lacking or janky)

Iiyama [1], Dell [2] and LG used a 27" 5K iMac display for a little while, but as production at Apple wound down you can no longer really buy those in most places.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12568/iiyamas-prolite-xb2779q...

[2]: https://www.dell.com/ae/business/p/dell-up2715k-monitor/pd

A portion of that could be related to lack of protocol support. 5k at 60Hz is more bandwidth that HDMI or DisplayPort could provide until very recently. Apple got around it by essentially making it two separate displays bound together in software using a single Thunderbolt cable, but that is only really feasible when you control the entire ecosystem.

Graphics cards that can output 5K60 over a single DisplayPort cable out of the box have been available since mid 2016. If anything, availability of HiDPI PC monitors has gone down since then.

That's only true at 8 bits per channel though, which is not what this monitor is. Otherwise yes, you're right

But would the average consumer care enough for 10bit to disregard 5k resolution?

Looking at the uproar over at Reddit, it seems like people care far more about refresh rate than resolution or color depth. This also seems to be borne out by the current monitor market - most monitors seem to be 1440p high-refresh rate monitors.

Gamers. Reddit is not a good measure for what workers who use computers want. Or need.

The vast majority of people with 120hz+ displays do not play video games. They're standard in mid-range TVs. They're standard in mid to high-end phones. They're standard in high end tablets. Gamers are a minority of the 120hz panel market. They're certainly also a minority of the people discussing this panel on reddit, 5k is too high resolution for gaming and 120hz is too slow, people weren't wanting a 5k120hz panel to play games, they wanted it for productivity and at most to play games on the side.

Low refresh rate is bad for pros for the same reason it's bad for gamers, it makes it harder to quickly and accurately perceive things in motion and it slows down your ability to accurately execute inputs. I feel the effects of the reality distortion field has caused everybody to believe that quite simply no real professionals could dislike working on 60hz LCDs and the disappointment is all caused by all those silly gamers.

The PC market seems to be driven by the gamers and the word on the gamers street is that it's all about latency.

I actually like extra wide displays. There are few interesting options like that but the rest seems to be dominated by low color, low resolution, low latency stuff.

> it's all about latency.

Not just latency, but framerate too.

I wanted to build a gaming PC that would double as a Windows dev machine, so I wanted more pixels than 1080p.

Even with my 3090, I can only reasonably do 1440p @ 240Hz, and even then I lose some frames on Fortnite with graphics settings turned down. 4k was out. Thankfully Alienware makes a very nice 1440p 240Hz monitor.

Do you mean the AW2721D from 2020? If so, I was looking to purchase one myself.

How color accurate is the screen? How well does it handle HDR? Does it ever get blurry? If you've ever tried run Linux, either bare or VM, did it handle dpi correctly?

That's the correct model.

I haven't tested for color accuracy or HDR. No Linux. Does not get "blurry" while I'm gaming.

My only recent comparisons are my new 16" M1 MBP and my 1440p Dell U2719 monitor (provided by work). Colors are wildly better than the Dell (of course) and it seems close to the MBP, although the MBP looks better out of the box of course.

At time of purchase, the only viable 240Hz 1440p options were this Alienware or the Samsung Odyssey G7. The Alienware offered better latency, and it was 40% off on the Dell website for some reason, so that's the one I went with.

TFTCentral does pretty thorough reviews, they seem to like the Alienware. https://tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_alienware_aw2721d

Once you get used to low-latency or high-refresh-rate displays, you can't not notice the subtle mouse cursor drag of a "early days" 4K display (had one at work), or the teeny delay of (most) Dell monitors. Honestly considered at asome point just asking work to get me a high-Hz display.

I have a 24"(61cm) 4k Dell monitor with Ubuntu... it is a bit unique these days, don't think there are many others around. Mostly happy with it, but...

I'd rather have higher density like the laptop it is connected to, with 4k. Perhaps 200dpi 3:2 or 16:10 around ~22"(56cm) diagonal that can do portrait would be my preferred monitor. Haven't seen that around unfortunately.

I've been searching for those, but they're unobtanium even second hand. I suppose no-one wants to get rid of these monitors once they have them, because there's no replacements you can buy.

Yeah, I used to have 3 of them, really miss them. Got 2x5k now but really prefer the 21.5” DCI-4k.

I would love have a 24" 4K rather than a 28" 4K, but sunk costs. The 24" imac is 4K, and has a similar DPI to the 27" 5K imac.

There was an LG Ultrafine 21.5" 4k display which was the same DPI as the MacBook's screen, but it's been long discontinued (along with that model of the iMac, which was what the display was originally destined for)

I made this comment elsewhere, but all I really want is a 96x2 PPI monitor because I'm mainly on Windows and that's what widgets look their best at. 24", 3840x2560 (for 96 x 2 PPI, 3:2 aspect ratio), 120Hz, 10 bits per color, topping out bandwidth at exactly two lanes of UHBR 20 (or four lanes of UHBR10) of DisplayPort 2.0 would be my holy grail.

I could deal it being around 22" for higher density for Mac users.

It seems there's a few people in our same camp, but we haven't been heard by manufacturers yet.

> It boggles my mind how little attention very high pixel density displays have been getting from PC display manufacturers.

Didn't Apple corner the market on these displays by buying up all available capacity for retinas?

They cornered the market on TSMC's highest node, also. This means AMD still gets to benefit from the process improvements, offset by one gen.

Yes. My desktop is using a janky 5k display with dozens of dead subpixels, and still it was the best option available at the time (and it now seems to be discontinued). It's impressive how the supposedly diverse PC ecosystem completely fails to deliver in certain areas; see also reasonably sized Android phones.

This is likely a mini-LED screen that Apple has been putting into the iPad Pro and MBPs, which is not a technology LG possesses. This is likely manufactured in Taiwan or China or Germany, using the licensed technology from Taiwan's Epistar.

There is no evidence for that. It is more than likely an LG display, as Apple has been rumored to work be working with LG on Apple branded displays, and they are the only producer (so far) of 27 inch 5K displays.

> I like this announcement, because it means that there's a manufacturing line for proper HiDPI [1] displays running in some LG factory somewhere that third party manufactures like LG/Dell/Iiyama can hopefully use to give us some fresh good-looking 27" 5K desktop monitors.

LG, Dell, and Iiyama all made such monitors; the only survivor is the LG one. They didn't sell well, apparently.

Personally it's still too much of a hassle dealing with HiDPI on Windows, especially if you mix with regular DPI displays. They also seem like overkill. I don't know about you but 1440p at 27" is the perfect DPI for me

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