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Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why anyone would buy this goofy monitor, the LG 27GN950-B has a gorgeous 4K@144Hz HDR screen, works great for gaming and for reading text / coding, and is cheaper too. You could get this monitor, a pair of great AudioEngine A2 speakers and a webcam, and still have money left over

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A 5K display offers about 1,000 extra horizontal and 700 extra vertical pixels.

When you're working with 4K images and video, that’s enough space for video editing tools on the side and timelines at the bottom, all while viewing "UltraHD" in its full, unscaled beauty.

Until you've experienced what it's like to use a 5K (or even 6K, which will really spoil you), it's hard to appreciate why 4K is insufficient for many professionals.

Since you're talking about video editing, the lack of HDR is very nearly a deal breaker for that professional market. Also this is an 8bit + FRC panel if you care about that sort of thing.

Regardless multi-monitor setups exist and are well supported, so it's not hard to get both a 4k preview at 1:1 scaling and have plenty of room for controls by just running 2 displays.

It'd be nice to have it all - 5k, >60hz, and a decent HDR support. Even just 90hz would be a good improvement, but 120hz gets you zero pulldown for 24fps video! But alas that display doesn't exist. This display doesn't seem to really strike a good balance of what's achievable, it feels like a stop gap placeholder for the now canceled 27" iMac

Which is why Apple make the XDR for the professional market.

It's not >60 Hz though

You don't really ever need >60Hz for editing though. You're working with 60fps, at most, but even more likely 30fps or 24fps.

I'm not much into video editing, but is it not useful that 120 hz is a multiple of 24, while 60 hz is not?

Remember all those 120hz and 240hz plasma TVs back in the day that couldn't take any >60hz input signal? Yeah that wasn't just pointless marketing. It was so they could show 24fps and 48fps video content smoothly, without 3:2 pulldown artifacts.

If you're working in a professional video studio, chances are you're probably going to encounter 24fps video. So yeah, still matters beyond gaming.

72Hz, 96Hz, 120Hz, 240Hz, all fix pulldown and will all look exactly the same side by side. 72Hz (75Hz is normally what's tested) is noticeably smoother than 60Hz. Most 60Hz monitors support 75Hz, but since we're talking about niche products here chances are they have a different set of hidden features than usual (perhaps higher perhaps lower).

for that resolution, I'd want a ~40 inch or more.

Pixels are nothing without the corresponding physical real estate imo

Reading text is far more pleasant at high DPI, especially with proper scaling which you don't get at 27" 4k.

This is why I have a comically large 43” 4k which I operate at 1x. It’s roughly the same density as a 27” at 1440. High DPI is nice and all, but I’ll take more space to work over pixel density any day.

I just have a 42in LG TV that I use as my main work monitor. It was around $220 a few years ago. After working out the kinks with using it (because a TV is not a monitor), it's been pretty good. I also position it further away from me than I would a normal monitor. In part, that is because I would otherwise see some dimming around the edges due to the viewing angle. And also because focusing further away works better (getting old can sometimes be inconvenient).

It is just 60Hz, so you might not want to use it for gaming, though there are higher refresh TVs out there these days. Of course you have to dig through the marketing fluff to see if they are a true 120Hz panel or not.

Yeah mine is actually an IPS panel. Also 60Hz, but the viewing angles are great. I do have mine set back a bit more than my previous 27", but the more important adjustment I needed to make was to set it 6-8" lower. Before that, I only felt comfortable working on the bottom half of the screen.

While I also prefer small UI and more real estate with more pixels, even without real estate change a high DPI "retina" 2x and a regular DPI has a difference of night and day for me.

But yes when I have the option I tend to choose the smaller UI settings too.

Personally I'm entirely uninterested in having enough real estate to have 100 different things on screen at once. I'm very interested in razor sharp, highly-detailed typography and image display. Image quality over quantity. That's the appeal. 4k is almost there, but not quite. 5k is perfect.

I've had the 5K LG 27" monitor for about 5 years now and 4K monitors just look blurry now. Feels like you can count the pixels even though you can't.

Reading VSCode off this monitor feels like reading analog text on paper. It's amazing for eye strain. Really doesn't feel like you're staring at a screen all day.

I experienced the same thing, even more abruptly, when I switched away from a 32 inch 4K monitor to a Samsung CRG9 49-inch monitor. Feels like I can count the pixels on the 49 inch monitor. I love the wider real estate, but now I want something with at least the vertical pixel density of the 4K monitor, but the same height as a 32 inch, and the same width as a 49 inch. Whatever that comes out to be.

Or one can use 2 4K monitors side-by-side and can arguably be more productive. It's even cheaper than buying the Studio Display.

Don't forget that the Apple Studio Display has a hard-wired power cord. Seriously. The last monitor I owned with a non-removable power cord was a CRT.

Surely a removable power cord would ruin the whole aesthetic!?

This is not true. [1] It is non-standard power cord, but it is removable

[1] https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1504473080348884992

With a lot of force anything is removable

A direct reply to that tweet shows the Apple documentation stating that they consider it non removable by the end user

https://twitter.com/aaron_bukovsky/status/150500134118950502...

Let's an image with it re-attached; without a visit to the Geek Bar, at least.

Linus from LTT YouTube channel tested it and it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mtGjDRRI&t=1502s

It required significant force to disconnect it first time but then it goes out and in as expected.

He happened to get it out without the connector cracking. Though it got pretty chewed up. This will no doubt void your warranty as Apple specifically says it isn't removable.

Is it phsyical possible to remove it yes. But it was not designed for it to be removed, it's non standard, it requires a significant amount of force to do so, and apples own support documentation says that it is not removable so you'd likely void the warranty by doing so. https://support.apple.com/guide/studio-display/important-saf...

OTOH, the last time I had any reason to care about a removable power cord was ... never. I've never had an AC power cable fail.

I've never had an AC power cable fail either, but I have had a pet chew on one and ruin it, or made it unsafe to use (Thankfully no injuries resulted).

Unfortunate but, frankly, not something that I care about at all. Yes, it might have been nice to be able to use a standard cable connector for some things, but that has very little material impact on use of the monitor.

This seems more like a moral panic than a true compromise of the functionality of the monitor.

I mean, pets chew on cables. Office chair wheels run over cables. Desk feet end up on a cable. Corners of things wear down cables. There's a reason all other monitors have removable cables. And not all are standard. Some have power bricks outside of them. But all are user replaceable. Having to service a $1,500-$2,000 monitor because the cable isn't easily replaceable is just stupid.

Sure it's inconvenient but if you have a damaged cable ring your local electrician. They will just cut it and put a little inline junction box on it. Won't be as elegant but will also probably cost $100. Or just repair it yourself.

That would void your warranty. And $100 is more a rural fee. In a major city, it's gonna run you more than that. Or, get any other monitor and replacing the cable is about 6 bucks.

5K resolution is perfect since it can drive retina level at 1440p, the best pixel density at 27 inches. (Personal preference obv)

IMHO 4k was the worst thing to ever happen to monitors. Now we have screens ranging from 24" to 43+" all using the same physical resoluton. This means that at all the most popular screen sizes you need to use some weird 1.5 or 1.25 scaling factor which results in all sorts of weird rendering quirks, like 1px gaps when rendering engines try to fit elements to pixel boundaries. Plus SVGs often rasterize to a blurry mess since there is no rendering magic that could make a 1px line rasterize nicely over one and a half pixel.

1080p was the same way. 1440p was almost exclusively an Apple thing. Monitor manufacturers want to sell size, not resolution.

I'm starting to wonder if vector formats and layout engines need pixel hinting capabilities, like font formats already do. As far as I'm aware browser engines already have to hack in these sorts of layout tweaks to avoid, say, float-based layouts collapsing into multiple lines at odd zoom percentages. Apple's insistence on integer scaling ratios is noble, but it also renders the display part of their hardware ecosystem an island.

Windows does fractional display scaling just fine. Most software these days supports it and renders perfectly. Yes, occasionally you run into some legacy pixel-based UI and get a blurry window. This will almost always be some utility software, not a program you interact with for long periods of time.

A 4K display at the same pixel density as this would be a 21” diagonal. MacOS does a relatively ok job of displaying a logical resolution of 1440p on a 4K display but windows just completely shits the bed with high dpi modes. Pixel-perfect logical 1440p on physical 5k looks better than the alternatives by a wide margin.

This used to be true, and I think is why we STILL don't see very many high resolution monitors targeting the PC market, but Windows 10 is actually quite good at resolution scaling now. It typically picks the right default and everything scales great IME

I'm using a 4k display at 1440p logical resolution as my secondary display, and there's a bunch of apps I won't run on it because they look like pants.

4k on a Mac without non-integer scaling makes the UI too large (essentially running at 1080p).

That monitor only has 163dpi, which isn't "retina" or particularly tight to my eyes, whereas the Studio Display has 218dpi, which looks great at pixel-doubled (200%) rendering. Huge differentiation in my book

You'd need a monitor, speakers, and a webcam. Each with their own connection cables to the computer and everything but the webcam needing wall warts for power. There's a value is reducing desk clutter. It may not be the main reason to pick one monitor over another but it definitely has a value to some people.

Do you have a recommendation for a 32" monitor?

Also, would that monitor you linked be good for office use?

M32U

I have the same monitor. But I wouldn't advise it for color work(only 90% P3)

I don't do color work thankfully. How is it for e.g. text editing in a darker room?

I have strong overhead light so I haven't tested it in those conditions.

For a darker room it's actually perfect. For a bright room it does get...a bit annoying. However honestly it's still really good.

If you're looking for specifics, I recommend: https://www.rtings.com/

The one really nice thing about this monitor is the built in KVM switch. That's so bloody useful I ignored a lot of other things.

I thought the Studio Display was supposed to have a really good webcam? But I see it mentioned as being "terrible" here, several times. What gives?

This might help: https://daringfireball.net/2022/03/the_apple_studio_display

Sounds like it shipped with some last-minute firmware bug that degraded the image quality way below what it's capable of. Should be fixed by a firmware (iOS?) update.

OOF! Thanks.

It’s 240ppi. No PC monitors match that.

It's actually 217dpi. But it's still a noticable jump from the 160dpi that 4k @ 27" offers.

Why do people believe anything that Apple says these days? LG has a spec-for-spec monitor that's over 3 years old.[1]

[1]: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27MD5KA-B-5k-uhd-led-monit...

That's the monitor that Apple sold for the past years in their stores (and has now replaced with this new monitor).

It's still a monitor that has the same PPI.

I recommended against the 27MD5KA; it has hardware RFI defects that break nearby Bluetooth.

When it was released, the 27MD5KB wouldn’t boot reliably as the Mac Mini’s only monitor on whatever macOS was out at the time, so I couldn’t consider it a valid display for a Mac. No doubt it’s fine for PCs though.

That monitor looks like the ugly run-of-the-mill gaming accessory, and the AudioEngine A2 are terrible speakers (I've owned them). Gaming gear has good specs in general, but aesthetically pleasing it is not.

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