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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

One thing I noticed about my 46" LG 4K monitor, which was "cheap" at $600-ish (edit: looked it up: $720) 3-4 years ago, is that it really isn't designed for viewing at desk distances. On my desk, as far back as it'll go, the viewing angle puts the backlight not exactly behind the pixels, so the left/right have 4-6 pixels and the bottom has ~10-15 pixels that are unlit.

I use it for a bunch of terminals, so part of the left column of text and the entire bottom line, or my status bar, were unreadable. Thankfully my window manager had an unsupported feature that let me "pretend" that those areas didn't exist.

So what I learned is that TV-oriented panels aren't just directly usable on the desktop.

However, I was more recently able to pick up a couple 32" Dell 4K displays for $300-ish each, and they are glorious! That was on a big year-end sale.

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I think that is mainly due to being direct-lit backlight. I'm currently using a 43" Sony X800H, which is edge-lit, and the pixels are fully lit at my 2 1/2 - 3 foot viewing distance.

For 32", wouldn't you need an 6-8k display to get Retina-quality text? I believe that's why 32" 4k displays aren't usable for coding, unless you're ok with low resolution text.

>"32" 4k displays aren't usable for coding"

I use my 32" 4K for just that at 100% scaling and totally happy. Fonts looks fine to me. Do not feel low res at all.

I have Dell displays with those specs and at that price point. Probably the same display. They are fine for coding if you are not acclimated to "retina" smoothness for fonts. Since they are so cheap, I bought a second one so my wife. A giant screen is just as useful for legal work as for coding, it turns out.

There are downsides. The colors aren't great. The blacks are just dreadfully light. Sometimes there are artifacts when I use the screen after it has been idle for a time, but the artifacts disappear quickly.

The model on mine is S3221QS, I had looked earlier but couldn't find the order, but I remembered I have them plugged into the Dell support site. Looks like I paid $360 landed each for them.

>"if you are not acclimated to "retina" smoothness for fonts"

I am not using magnifying glass so for my eyes smoothness is just fine without "retina" prefix.

>"The colors aren't great. The blacks are just dreadfully light"

If you care so much about colors get real pro display. Just be prepared to second mortgage your house for that.

For mere mortals (I mostly use 32" BenQ monitors) colors on are reasonably fine and so are blacks. No artifacts. I do not see Apple as superior in this department.

Once again, if for some reason you need perfect colors / blacks / uniformity / whatnot Apple with its "retina" is not the one to go with. Try Eizo for example

Do you use S3221QS with Mac?

Some of us get a larger monitor to see more text, others get a larger monitor to put further away and look at the same amount of text.

Once your eyes turn forty, see which group you're in!

I still have a month to go before 40; I'll see which group I belong to then.

However, right now, I can't tolerate screens with lower PPI than Retina.

So what monitor do you use then?

A 24" 4k Dell monitor. Not perfect, because it has a moire pattern on white backgrounds because of the anti reflection coating.

Ah interesting, thanks! On which "virtual resolution" do you set it? Or simply at 2X?

2x, anything else is too blurry.

That monitor has not been for sale for some time, I looked it up. IMHO you are lucky to have one.

So this part is pure trigonometry: how much further does a monitor like this have to sit on your desk, to have the same pixels-per-steradian as a 4k 27"?

Yeah. That's what I mean. Just a little further away, same pixel density. It's nice.

On the other hand, brightness decreases 1/distance^2. You would need a brighter panel to achieve the same brightness at a farther distance.

I dunno about Retina Quality text, that moniker isn't important to me. What is important to me is that I get the amount of text on the screen without it being all blocky. My previous Dell U3011 32" 2500x1600 display was a bit blocky. The 4K 32" is quite nice for my use.

I will say that the difficulties I had getting dual 4K working in my setup make me glad I didn't try for something like 8K. In my case, I have a recent Dell XPS 15, but not quite recent enough. My docking station can't do 4K output. The next newer XPS 15 can. In the end I found that using two USB-C to HDMI cables, directly connected to the laptop, will do it, so that's good enough for me. Went from the 1-cable docking to 3, but I'm ok with that. I don't tend to move my laptop much these days.

The Retina moniker isn't important. Text becomes non-blocky at about 200 PPI. A 32" 4k monitor has 138 PPI, which is extremely blocky unless you're using 400% zoom.

I recently bought 4 32" monitors (2 for work, 2 for home), and I wasn't remotely interested in 4k. QHD is perfect, and if you get monitors where that's the max, pretty cheap. (Every 4k monitor I've had I always downscaled it)

Outside of laptop monitors, there are only a handful of monitors that are "Retina-quality" (>220 ppi). It is very doubtful that programming is difficult or impossible on all other monitors. Most computers cannot also drive a 32" 220 ppi monitor.

That's true. It was really hard to find a 24" 4k monitor for my desktop. It's insane that people can tolerate lower PPIs after seeing a Retina-like screen. You can't go back.

32 inch 4K is perfectly fine. I recently switched to a Samsung CRG9 (I can only have one external display on this computer) and the resolution is pretty crappy compared to the 32 inch. But either one of them is perfectly fine for coding.

I don't trust people who say "it's fine" anymore. After a lot of tests with people I know, many young(!) acquaintances are not able to distinguish between 2k and 4k. People of my age can't sometimes distinguish the difference between HD and 4k on a monitor. And that's for static images. No one I know is able to notice the difference between motion interpolation on/off on a TV.

This is going to sound dismissive and entitled, but I've learned that people's eyesight and visual processing is extremely bad in general.

If someone can't distinguish 4k and 2k on a 32" display then the image they're looking at has horrible quality.

Its instantly visible as soon as you see any sharp edges / letters.

2k 32" is 80 dpi, that puts it at the same pixel density as fullhd on 24". That's perfectly usable but not particularly sharp at normal viewing distances

I won't try to convince you if you don't want to be convinced, and from your perspective I'm just a rando on the 'net. I get that.

But I have my 32in monitor above my CRG9 (I use the 4K screen for my work computer) and I somewhat regularly end up with the same text displayed on both at the same time. The CRG9 resolution is noticeably inferior to my 48 year old eyes. Which I have to tell you, don't have the acuity they once had. 20/20 the last time I tested, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's falling below that now. Getting old blows.

The difference isn't too bothersome unless I'm bouncing back and forth between them. I get used to the lower resolution of the CRG9 pretty quickly and forget about it. And of course it's totally fine for coding.

It helps if you use bitmap fonts. They look crisp and clean at small sizes and lower resolutions. They make other fonts look blurry by comparison. The trend of scaling seems to largely be because of people using those blurry fonts. I'd rather have crisp fonts and more screen real estate than have to deal with scaling and end up with as much space as before.

Do you have any suggestions for bitmap fonts?

Terminus is a classic. I think it's a few decades old. I typically use it at 9pt on low DPI displays, but have gone up to 14 or 16 on large displays viewed from far away like a TV. tewi (8pt?) is another nice one. Scientifica is decent. If you need big font sizes, one of the only options is spleen. It gets rather large. I think OpenBSD uses spleen.

I also use a 40-something inch desktop monitor and I see slight viewing angle problems on the sides. For my use it would actually be better if it were slightly curved.

IPS panels are much better than VA panels for that, but unfortunately have worse blacks.

OLED is the way to go, but it's a bit spendy at the moment.

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