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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

Awesome to see them finally putting out almost consumer friendly pricing displays. Few things I'm disappointed about though:

- 60hz. For this price point I'd expect higher.

- Thunderbolt 3. Interesting that they didn't bump to 4, given the Mac Studio is Thunderbolt 4. This means you wont be able to daisy chain the displays.

- Lack of size options. Would love to see more variety here. After moving to an ultrawide format, I can't see myself moving back to standard format monitors from a productivity standpoint.

Overall though excited for this and keen to see how it'll evolve. It'll be a miss for me this cycle but keen to see their future releases of their monitor line.

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The technology to do 5K @ 120hz just doesn't exist yet. 5K @ 60Hz is already maxing out Thunderbolt 4.

DisplayPort 1.2 (or newer) and HDMI 2.1 both support 5K at 120Hz when using DSC.

What’s DSC?

Display Stream Compression, a lossy compression algorithm optimized for the specific use case of device-display transfers (i.e. relatively low compression ratio == very high quality that's claimed to imperceptible even if it can't run lossless, not needing to work on full frames for speed/sub-frame latency, ...)

I didn't know either. DSC is Display Stream Compression, and has been part of the spec since 1.4. According to Wikipedia [0],

> DSC is a compression algorithm that reduces the size of the data stream by up to a 3:1 ratio.... Using DSC with HBR3 transmission rates, DisplayPort 1.4 can support 8K UHD (7680 × 4320) at 60 Hz or 4K UHD (3840 × 2160) at 120 Hz

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#1.4

DisplayPort 1.2 cannot even do 5k at 60Hz at 10 bits per channel. You might be thinking about DisplayPort 2.0, which is not yet widely supported in video cards or monitors, and even then it needs the (essentially non-existent) UHBR 20 data rate to get to 120Hz.

HDMI 2.1 does support 5K@120Hz@10bpc but requires DSC as you say, which is not very commonly found either.

(Note that unlike what a sibling comment states, DSC is lossy. Some argue that the less is not noticeable to the human eye, but not everyone agrees)

> HDMI 2.1 does support 5K@120Hz@10bpc but requires DSC as you say, which is not very commonly found either.

Not very commonly found on what? Nvidia & AMD have been shipping DSC for ~2 generations now (so almost anything within the last 4 years has it)

It's not commonly found on monitors. DSC is included starting with DisplayPort 1.4, and a good portion of monitors even today still ship with DP 1.2

Nvidia and AMD have not been shipping DSC with HDMI simply because HDMI included DSC starting with HDMI 2.1, which only the current generation of graphic cards and very few monitors support.

You’d say if they can drive 3 displays at 60hz they should be able to drive one at 120hz

Maybe, but I don't see anyone going the way of dual-link ports ever again. It was clumsy enough the first time.

Displays using MST to achieve higher resolutions than a single link allowed worked out more or less fine. The problem there is MacOS doesn't support MST.

Funny, I am typing this on a Mac connected to an MST Dell 5k display....MacOS supported this setup since at least 2015, when I bought my display.

Aha! What MacOS doesn't support is MST daisy chaining for some reason, only MST to a single display to overcome bandwidth limitations.

That's a common misunderstanding. DisplayPort MST allows multiple display streams to be multiplexed onto a single DP link. So you are still bound by the bandwidth of a DP connection (25.92 Gbit/s for HBR3).

The 5K Ultrafine (which I presume you are talking about) is connected via two separate DP links which are tunneled over a single cable using TB3.

That sounds like nitpicking, but is a crucial difference. MST provides daisy chaining of displays, but can not help you exceed bandwidth limits. Whereas the two DP links are completely independent and theoretically allow you to double the max bandwidth. (well 2xHBR3 exceeds the max TB3 bandwidth, so the 5K uses 2xHBR2)

And yet somehow the technology to do 8k @ 120hz does exist... ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUnSsx62j8 )

Does that video show the connection used to display that.

If not, I'm guessing that example case is either using a lossy data compression or multiple cables running to multiple displays.

Lossy Data Compression is used on the Pro Display XDR and Apple doesn't seem to lose any sleep over it. DSC is quite good.

There's also the fact that nearly all content has compression as part of its path to display anyway. Video & images are obvious examples, but also GPUs almost always render to a lossy compressed framebuffer as well. It just saves way too much memory bandwidth not to do.

So as long as 'transcoding' from GPU framebuffer compression to DSC is itself a mostly lossless process, there's realistically not even a quality hit from it anyway

Samsung has 5120x1440 @ 240hz today. That is literally half of a 5K panel at double the speed. It amazes me how many people I've seen say this exact same thing about how 5k120hz is impossible.

To shed some light:

DisplayPort 2.0 supports up to 77.37 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Wikipedia's DisplayPort article has excellent tables about bandwidths of display formats: HDR 5K@120hz (57 Gbit/s) is totally possible with DP 2.0.

One could use DisplayPort 2.0 alt-mode to carry that signal over a USB-C cable. With the main disadvantage that the USB ports on the monitor would drop to USB 2.0 speeds [1]. And alt-mode 2.0 is only available on the most recent hosts with USB4 ports.

[1] Native USB4 tunneling only supports DisplayPort 1.4a (for now). That's a huge flaw imo, cause falling back to alt-mode takes over the cable and blocks USB3/PCIe tunneling from working. In fact, that flaw is even present on this monitor:

> When connected to iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad Pro 11-inch (1st and 2nd generation), or iPad Air (5th generation), Studio Display USB-C ports deliver USB 2 data transfer speeds.

Those models don't support TB3 or USB4 on their USB-C port, so they have to use alt-mode with either compression or without HDR.

TB4 has the same bandwidth as TB3 so you wouldn't be able to daisy chain 5k monitors anyway. Also as the other commentator mentioned, TB doesn't have enough bandwidth for 120hz (53Gbps vs 40Gbps)

> TB4 has the same bandwidth as TB3 so you wouldn't be able to daisy chain 5k monitors anyway.

So this each Studio Display will require a direct connection to the laptop/desktop in order to work?

That's definitely not great.

Yep. The LG 5Ks are the same way too. Moreover, if you have an Intel MacBook Pro you have to use ports on opposite sides of the laptop if you have 2 displays. You can’t plug them in on the same side.

Try doing your same math with the Pro Display XDR or the Samsung Odyssey G9 and your calculations will come up with the monitors being impossible especially accounting for overhead. 5k120hz is very possible with today's tech, you just need to use DSC or 2 links.

That is why people were hoping for it.

Yeah I don’t know what it is with everyone prioritizing pixels over refresh rate.. once you start using 100+hz 60hz starts to feel like a slide show. You can see mouse trails and scrolling is jerky and uncoordinated, it’s painful and insanely distracting.

I mainly just look at text all day, so the "slow" transitions between different bits of text just don't matter all that much to me. Resolution helps that text look nice and crisp though, which I really do appreciate.

That's why I will be sticking to my 4k 144hz monitor. Yes, it's less than 5k but I get crisp fonts and smooth transitions.

If you look at text specifically all day than high refresh rate is especially useful since you will be scrolling a lot.

I don't think I'm reading the text while it's scrolling... But maybe I am more than I realize? I actually think I'm more looking at the shape of the text when it's scrolling rather than the actual text itself.

Although I agree that 100+ Hz matters and the difference is huge, pixels density is very important also, and for some (myself included), it matters more.

To this day, 27" 1440p, 144hz IPS gaming monitors are still my favorite daily driver for any desktop productivity. And when I say favorite, I mean by an extremely large margin.

The amount of real estate you get with 2560x1440 is fantastic, and you can actually game on it at native resolution on older gen graphics. The pixel density of 27" @ 1440p is the epitome of goldilocks. Every single pixel is just the right amount of useful.

I use one, but it’s still not sharp enough for design work. You can see aliasing everywhere.

24” @ 4K would be perfect but is hard to come by.

I switched from 27in 1440p to 27in 4K recently, and I am enjoying it. I previously used 100% scaling, but now I'm using 200%. I have less screen real estate, but everything is more crisp, and I find myself leaning forward at my monitor less and with less eye strain.

Remember 60hz CRTs? That was unbearable for me.

For a while I went down the rabbit hole of getting high end CRTs for retro games. I’m in a PAL region though, and the first time I booted up a 50Hz game I wondered how the hell I didn’t spend my entire childhood with a migraine. 60 I’m fine with but 50 I can literally see flickering.

Oh yeah no I could see the flickering at 60. Worse the higher the resolution got.

I don't know what it is with everyone claiming a 60 HZ panel is unusable. Movies are in 24Hz and people panic if you make them 60Hz because it's too smooth for them, but somehow 60Hz isn't enough to browse the web?

Being able to see my screen's pixels annoys me a lot more than moving my mouse at 60 Hz.

Meaningless comparison. You also can't run most VR games at anything less than 90-120fps without introducing motion sickness in the user. So what does that say about "usability" of 60fps on a monitor? Nothing. You can't compare two visual mediums directly by the number of "frames per second".

Camera lenses introduce blur through the use of the shudder, which acts as a form of "interpolation" and smooths out the image. Displays do no such thing; image strobing is extremely noticeable at different framerates. The difference in Destiny 2 between 60FPS and 100FPS is quite literally shocking to the point I can't go back.

TVs have techniques to deal with this, either motion smoothing[1] or black frame insertion. PC displays can't do the first for latency reasons but I think BFI is just down to expense, or because we don't have OLED/mini-LED displays yet.

[1] it's not as bad as you think

All the tv frame interpolation I've seen is so bad. The Smooth Video Project gives such better results in my experience.

There's two kinds on LG OLEDs, 24->60 and 60->120. The second one doesn't have the objectionable artifacts.

The first one people say you shouldn't turn on to respect the artist's vision, but I sure hope they don't mean it, because that'd mean they're respecting Harvey Weinstein. Clearly leaving it on is the moral option.

Yea. Sad about the lack of ultrawide option, too. Once you get used to it, there's no way back.

Two 27'' displays is not an option since you can't center anything, so... three Studio displays side-to-side?

I've been running an LG non-curved 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor as my main work monitor for several years now. It's a great form factor, but the resolution is really sad. It's essentially a wider version of the Dell 1440p monitor that I had ten years ago. My ideal monitor now would be a pixel-doubled version of this ultrawide monitor, but I'm still tempted to lose the extra width and upgrade to this 5k display.

Same. I have a 32" 1440p display and am considering grabbing one of these when I get back to the states in a few months. I could live without the speakers, but honestly if they're "good enough" they might kick my powered studio monitors off of my desk. I like my powered speakers but I don't use them anywhere near the volume they thrive at so it might be worth it to re-examine my workflow as a hobbyist.

The Dell U4021QW is probably the best monitor I've ever used. I, too, got sad with 1440 vertical pixels on previous ultrawides, so I was pretty excited when they announced this one. 5120 x 2160 is really a dream. It's limited to 60hz, which bothers some folks, but I haven't noticed. I don't game or anything on it, though.

I actually forgot that that monitor configuration existed. It looks nice, although I assume you would still be running at the same UI scaling as a 1440p monitor, and the higher pixel density compared to a 34" ultrawide 1440p display (around 25% higher) means you put the monitor closer to your eyes. So unless you're doing non-integer scaling (which I want to avoid if at all possible), you get a lot more real estate than the 1440p display, but not 2x density. Or you could do 2x scaling, but then you've just got the real estate of an ultrawide 1080p display. Personally I have plenty of real estate with 3440x1440, and what I'm really interested in is jumping to 2x scaling.

I would really love an ultrawide for the extra space and immersive gaming option. But Retina display has spoiled me a lot. I regret getting used to a 4K configuration scaled to 150% which is effectively 2560x1440 display with higher PPI.

Yeap. Same dilema here, splitting in two or three when coding doesn't look good in my LG 27" 4k monitor. Is either full screen or nothing. For the case, instead of buying 2 32" apple pro monitors buying 3 of the 27 would make it better.

I think I'll buy one and maybe buy two more later if it proves to be good, almost $5k though, ouch... Wish they made a simpler version with no ports, no camera, no speakers, etc - why would I need 3 cameras and 3 sets of speakers?..

No HDR, no ProMotion (bad naming for googleability), no Face ID and it's priced as if they're all there.

This is some alpha state product which only people who are high are going to buy.

1800€ is consumer friendly for a 27"? I would pay that for a 34" not a 27.

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