Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?
michael.stapelberg.ch
michael.stapelberg.ch
Group 1 can tell the difference between the two and strongly prefers 120Hz.
Group 2 can't tell the difference between the two and prefers the more affordable options.
Group 3 has not done a lot of comparisons between the two refresh rates, or has used 120Hz displays that were actually in 60Hz mode, or compared lower resolution 120Hz displays with higher resolution 60Hz displays.
I think a lot of people mistakenly think they are in Group 2 when they are in Group 3.
Its always so much nicer when I leave the Air. Everything is so much smoother.
In most browsers it will go up to whatever refresh rate your monitor runs at, including 144 or 165 hz, probably 240 but I've never owned one of those.
I have a hard time believing that anyone with functional eyesight wouldn't be able to see the difference between 60 and 120, but I can definitely see not caring enough to spend the money just to make scrolling and cursor movement smoother.
So I personally would always prioritize a good pixel density unless one plays a lot of games that require low input latency.
Screen wise I got a pair of Dell S2721DGFs that I’m quite happy with. IPS panel and commonly on sale for $300. Weakest point is backlight inconsistency for dark scenes but it’s a compromise I’m willing to put up with.
Realize >60Hz makes exactly zero difference for video playback, so the only areas for improvement are cursor movement and scrolling smoothness.
I'd be more concerned with the automatic black frame insertion most LCDs do to increase contrast.
>The time between frames is tremendous from the standpoint of a video editor,
This sounds like something I've heard from people with a head full of fun stuff talking about the space between the notes. There have bee times where that absolutely makes sense, but I'm at a loss on your time between frames.
That sounds a lot more like rolling shutter artifacts than 3:2 pulldown. What kind of camera are you using? Are you shooting with a CMOS sensor?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter
> This sounds like something I've heard from people with a head full of fun stuff talking about the space between the notes. There have bee times where that absolutely makes sense, but I'm at a loss on your time between frames.
Haha, fair enough. If you ever feel like diving in yourself, I passionately recommend In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye_(Murc...
Edit to match your edit: "The book suggests editors prioritize emotion over the pure technicalities of editing."
This totally depends on the content and level of production. I've edited content from properly staffed productions with script notes with circle takes and all that stuff. It's always fun to stack up the various takes to see how the director feels about the takes from the day of the shoot and seeing it edited context. It's also fun to see the actor's variations from take to take.
On shoots with barely enough crew so the camera op is also the boom op, it's basically all feel from the editor.
This is what I was hoping someone would chime in about. I have never looked into whether it would be handled differently, but I would not trade a higher resolution display regardless. Maybe it could potentially influence where I cut in certain rare situations, but sounds unlikely.
Note that 1/1000 is glitch every 40 seconds so it's quite visible to an "eagle eye". I'll ask.
Theres a reason why monitors give you both x/1000 and x/1001 framerates.
And you can set it to 59.94, nobody is stopping you.
This entire comment chain started with, essentially, what is the LCM of 60 and 24 (or 59.94 and 23.976), and its 120 (or 119.88).
And even if you did use it, it doesn’t do anything to help with the extra 1000/1001 factor, so what is the point?
At this point, the only great reason is that it's an industry standard, but that alone is more than enough reason to still do it, evidenced by the fact that so many people still do it.
For the stupid North American non-integer frame rates, just change the playback speed by a fraction and get on with life. Or drop 1000/1001 frames for live, people won't notice.
At least everyone tasked with editing 3:2 pulldown footage for 3:2 pulldown distribution, which is most of the video editors in North America the last time I checked.
Edit: also, any editor worth their salt will take the telecined content back to progressive for editing. if they then need to deliver like it's 2005 to an interlaced format, they would export the final edit to 30000/1001 with a continuous 2:3 cadence. only editors unfamiliar with proper techniques would edit the way you suggest.
For people never having to work with this kind of content, it makes sense. I’d equate it to modern programmers not knowing Assembly, but can write apps that perform adequately. There’s plenty of content shot on modern equipment delivered to non-broadcast platforms that will never need to know the hows/whys old timers did what they did
I would like very much to also have an 120 Hz frame rate, but then the price would become much higher.
I use the 32" Odyssey G7 which is 2560x1440@240Hz.
Brightness, pixel density, and contrast/blacks (including glossiness) are what I care about in terms of image quality.
Maybe if I were a gamer it would matter, but I couldn't care less about how smooth scrolling or cursor movement is. It doesn't change my productivity or affect my comfort at all.
Edit: I never got around to my point, which was even though I'm part of the group who doesn't really care about refresh rate, it appears that my body might care.
All I want is a large monitor (currently 43" + 27"), so I can get my work done, then turn off the monitors and collect my paycheck.
Similarly I've used a 1080p monitor for years and I'm fine with it. I don't need tiny pixels for coding and messing around with pixel scaling on Linux seems more trouble than it's worth.
I think many people only remember "30FPS" as a stuttery mess between 15 and 40FPS on low-end hardware, which indeed is a terrible experience. In many games a stable framerate is actually more important than a high framerate, but people associate it the other way around because the only number they see in the corner of the screen is the framerate and those two metrics tend to coincide depending on how performant the hardware is.
And in some games low input latency is very important, which requires high framerates.
30fps might be fine for playing Solitaire, but it is definitely a limiting factor for first-person shooters.
Personally, after a year or two of programming on 30hz, I absolutely want 60hz for office use. Having lag while dragging around windows is not fun. Having a 1080p+ monitor is more about screen real estate than it is about precision: you just can't fit three windows side-by-side on 1080p while still having stuff remain readable.
That makes sense. For programming I use a tiled wm so don't drag windows around at all, I disable all animations so haven't felt any need for high framerates personally.
I’m still annoyed there are no 5K 27” monitors in the ~$500-800 bracket. I’d rather that kind of pixel density with decent quality in that price bracket first, and then let’s talk higher refresh rates.
I own a variety of monitors and can easily tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz. All things being equal, I of course prefer 120hz (or 165hz as some of my gaming monitors support).
I also own monitors at resolutions from 1440p to 4k.
For doing work (programming, where I'm mostly looking at text), resolution makes a huge difference. I only do coding on high DPI screens and I would upgrade to 5k or 6k or 8k displays if I were confident that my hardware and OS would support them well. (TFA was very helpful in that respect.) In these settings, high refresh rate makes only a marginal difference to my experience.
For gaming, refresh rate makes a much bigger difference, and resolution makes a somewhat smaller difference -- my hardware can't reasonably drive many of the games I play at 4k or higher anyway. So I just use cheaper, lower-resolution monitors that operate at high refresh rates for gaming.
Someday I guess I'll just be able to spend $300 for an 8k monitor at 240hz and then I won't have to make this kind of choice. (In fact, in the several years since I last bought gaming hardware I think the options for high-refresh-rate 4k monitors have gotten much better; I might use 4k for gaming if I were buying today.)
But for now, I'll always pick resolution over refresh rate for doing work, and it's not because I can't tell the difference.
It may very well not be worth the price, but that’s different.
Seriously, getting at least a 120Hz monitor makes for a world of difference because it makes everything smoother. Increases in resolution beyond 1920x1080 meanwhile are going to quickly hit the point of diminishing returns, anything beyond 2160p particularly so.
A few years ago e.g. the Simpsons began to use these computer aided 3-d pans which hurt my eyes to watch. Pausing, they are all in normal resolution but when watching them the screen turns into a mush for me and I can just see color blobs.
I'm sure group 2 exists. It's just that all its members have an undiagnosed vision disorder.
I just realized that I literally never do this. It is indeed incredibly jarring. even at 60Hz. I think my eyes basically immediately "jump" to where I want to move the cursor, so I don't really "track" it. Do other people track the cursor with their eyes?
FWIW I do spend a lot of time with 120hz and 144hz displays.
For gaming it's awfully hard to go back to 60hz after tasting those high refresh rates. In fact, I've been saying that for 25 years. At the tail end of the CRT era a lot of higher-end CRTs could do like 90 or 100hz at 1280x1024. Most PC games couldn't push that many FPS even at lower resolutions but it really helped reduce flicker and eyestrain, even when staring at text in Windows.
Maybe I have a "vision disorder" but since even modern PS5 games are increasingly going back to 30-40fps (preferring graphical quality over framerate) I think that is actually the majority position. High framerate lovers are the coffee snobs of the computer world.
I think you're missing a Group 4 that realizes no one's actually made a top quality 120hz display yet and isn't about to sacrifice clarity for refresh rate when it comes to productivity. (fwiw, the MBP XDR comes closest but it's not a display)
If you value overall picture quality, then the vast majority of 120hz+ screens are either blotchy messes or have unacceptably low pixel density (or both)
I guess that's another group, people correctly in high refresh rate mode but not consuming content that reaches that refresh rate.
Because twice the refresh rate means half the latency. And in games like shooters any mouse movement causes the entire screen to change, which makes lower latency very noticeable compared to just a moving cursor on the desktop. This is why VR feels really bad on low framerates, the latency between head movements and screen updates is too long.
I recently had the opportunity to try out an ultrawide 144hz VA panel at approximately the same pixel density as my Dell Ultrasharp 30" that came out a great number of years ago, and it was... fine. Used it for a few months and then sold it. Swapped the 30" back in and am back to my old stance that whatever replaces this screen is going to have to have wildly better picture quality than the ultrawide; I haven't even thought about it since. The picture quality on the VA wasn't necessarily bad enough to notice while I was using it, except for the viewing angles, but comparatively it didn't hold up at all.
Having used another 144hz display right at again the same pixel density at 27" next to my MacBook pro being actively used as a second screen, I think the density and quality of the MacBook display sort of nullified anything I got from refresh rate.
For me to replace my current screen, what I'm hoping for is basically for this 6k to either come down to earth in price, or for competition to come in and build an equivalent. If I could get that for ~$1500CAD eventually (only half of what they are right now on sale), refresh rate would still only be a nice to have. More important to me is a good KVM feature, thunderbolt/one-cable connectivity, and better aesthetics I guess above most other features. A nice webcam would be nice too, but I don't really care much about that being built-in unless it's invisible.
It's like having a small ache in your back - not really an issue, no problem to live 100 years with it. But then one day...it's gone. Do you really want to go back now?
We'll have this available for purchase any decade now... any decade. Soon, perhaps as early as the 2030s, 2040s tops!
All joking aside, I'm tempted to create a GoFundMe page for this and see if there's other people out there interested in convincing a panel manufacturer to print some 8K monitor-sized OLEDs...
It's probably a niche market, but most games on the switch run natively at somewhere between 720 and 1080p and look awful scaled up to 4k.
Native 720p does look slightly better than integer scaling to 2x because of subpixel stuff, and generally liking that LCD look. But integer scaling would be enough really.
Sounds like a fun project, you should build one.
Taking in a 720p hdmi signal and pixel doubling to 1440p or tripling to 4k and outputting that as a valid HDMI signal without adding more than a frame or two of lag would require custom chips. Although maybe a software solution involving a gpu might be possible?
Implementation is left an as exercise for the reader.
There must be TVs or scalers out there you can buy that are used by retro gamers and let you runt 1:1 scaling on modern TVs. Or you can emulate the Switch games and run them at natively higher res.
Either way, I'm sure there are solutions for you out there instead of display manufacturers having to go back 20 years in time to serve an outdated gaming console. Just a thought.
Surprisingly, I found that I don’t like the matte screen better!
It’s hard to describe, but somehow the picture seems more “dull”, or less bright (independent of the actual brightness of the monitor), or more toned down. The colors don’t pop as much."
A useful post. Whilst I've not yet had the luxury of owning a 6k or 8k monitor his comment about matte and glossy screens is very useful (also I'm more likely to trust his opinion than many others because his discerning experience is backed by the fact that he's actually using an 8k monitor—and that takes money and commitment).
Over the years I've made many comparisons between matte and glossy screens and I have to agree with him for the same reasons. Despite being more susceptible to reflections, glossy screens always seem brighter and somehow sharper than matte ones of the same resolution and brightness. I've never investigated the reason in depth but I suspect the matte finish disperses the light from the screen and the net visual effect is a 'rounding' of transients resulting in lower contrast somewhat like offset printing which never looks as sharp as letterpress (where the ink dries thicker and looks blacker at the edges of the imprinting, this increases visual contrast even though the resolution may not be much different).
Edit: Incidentally, I'm typing this on my Lenovo ThinkPad which has matte screen but I'm using an external monitor with a glossy screen which I prefer (to be fair, it's also slightly larger). No, it wasn't a mistake at purchase time, it was given to me. :-)
Previous Apple displays have been decent in this category too, though. The 5k 27” iMac’s coating was also pretty good and what they use on MacBook Pro 14/16” is only a little worse than what’s on the Studio Display.
Their main supposed advantage, that they mitigate glare, is just false. With a glossy screen you get a small point of reflection. Matte attenuates it just a tiny bit, but never enough so that is not bothersome. You can usually tilt/angle your screen to fight glare, but matte makes it harder because the glaring spot is bigger/more diffuse. Also, higher brightness is one of the things that fight glare the most and matte reduce it a lot!
Mobile phones, the devices we carry outside the most and should be most susceptible to glare issues never ever come with matte screens! How is matte even still a thing?
>You can usually tilt/angle your screen to fight glare, but matte makes it harder because the glaring spot is bigger/more diffuse.
I would need to be able to switch quickly between a matte monitor and a glossy one to be sure, but IIRC the main advantage of matte is a many-fold reduction in how often I have to swivel my attention to the issue of glare. In other words, it is the need to "tilt/angle the screen" that is the main cost of glossy for me because I cannot do that without taking some of my attention away from the task at hand. In contrast, if I am already constantly holding the screen in my hand a la a smartphone then I can adjust the angle with very little conscious attention, so IIUC I have no preference for matte screens on smartphones, which if my preferences are common, would explain the absence of matte screens in smartphones.
It is very true, contrary to what you claim. The glare on my old trusty Dell U2413 matte display is next to non-existent compared to Apple M1 Air that is hooked to it.
Another issue is the nature of the reflection. In a glossy screen, the reflection often is a mirror effect that, at least for me, is easier to ignore. Reflections in matte shine up the surface's tiny individual indentations and that blocks more of the screen under it.
And what about screen protectors? You can make a glossy screen matte with one, but not the other way around.
Also, screen protectors? Last time I saw one was ~1994.
> Also, screen protectors? Last time I saw one was ~1994.
Ugh, I think you're thinking of those tinted glass things you'd hang on old CRT monitors? Never heard of those being called "screen protectors" though. By screen protector I mean replaceable covers for flat screens:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805177079468.html?spm=a2g...
My proposal for the industry: ship screens as glossy and add the matte as an optional screen protector. Note that before around 2010 this was already how they shipped displays: the matte was a plastic layers that you could frequently peel off. Nowadays, most matte displays have the surface finish done right on the polarizer layer.
In my experience matte only has issues when the sun is shining directly onto it, whereas glossy will immediately glare in areas which aren't incredibly light. Got something with black on your screen? Guess what, it's suddenly a mirror! Additionally, glossy is way more susceptible to fingerprints, so you have to religiously keep cleaning them.
> There's a reason macbooks, and almost every TV uses a glossy surface.
I always thought it is just because it looks "premium".
> Mobile phones, the devices we carry outside the most and should be most susceptible to glare issues never ever come with matte screens!
Yes, and I often notice myself tilting the screen away from reflections. That's a lot harder with a desktop.
As I said elsewwhere, I don't think matte is a problem in well-lit office environments as the usual office apps usually don't warrant the extra contrast and sharpness. That said, I used to run an IT operation and the matter arose quite often. What was telling is that some people simply didn't care about glare, they either moved their heads or just tilted the monitor a little whereas others found glare intolerable. I suppose that's why both types are available.
BTW, I'm one of those who doesn't find glare a problem, for some reason I 'tune' it out (I do the same with audio, I can listen to the radio through atrocious noise and static that drives others crazy).
It allows for a more exact color representation with less eye strain, especially in brightly lit conditions. No lamps glare, sunlight doesn't bother you as much, etc.
The difference in crispness between the Dell UP321K (~280ppi at 7680x64280 at 31.5 inches) and this new U3224KBA (~220ppi at 6144 x 3456 at 32") is dramatic.
The new Dell 6K is about the same as the Apple 6K (the XDR Pro Display). I had that 6K Apple and the 8K Dell side-by-side on my desk for a few months (until I could find a buyer for the dramatically inferior Apple). During that time, I asked anybody who happened to stop by to look at the screens and compare them.
Almost everybody could see the difference immediately.
A few people, admittedly, said they looked pretty much the same. I think there's a certain level of eyesight required to discern the difference. Having said that, I got my first prescription glasses 2 years ago, and I can easily see the difference with glasses on or off.
I cannot see pixels on either one. But what I can see is a slight fuzz at the edges of letters on the lower res display. Moreover, I need my glasses to use the 6K for long stretches and I don't even really need to wear them with the 8K. That's what made me so attached to this monitor.
I was therefore bummed to see Dell release this 6K. I want a modern version of the 8K! Two cables sucks, it's quite a compatibility nightmare to get configured properly on Linux if you want to use cheaper monitors alongside it (because the software support for multiple displays at different scaling factors is pretty bad still on most Linux). On Mac it never worked at all, until they released the M2 chip(!).
(It has always worked fine on Windows, just plug it in.)
Having used this for a few years, I don't ever want to go back to 6K, or 5K, or 4K. I just want 8K to get cheaper so that I can rock 3 8K displays, instead of the 4K-8K-4K I suffer today.... also, 120Hz please.
I have compared them with magnifying glasses, and really tried to get into why such a (seemingly, at first) small increase in resolution made such a huge difference.
I've compared standard 27" 4K, the LG and Apple 27" 5K ), the Apple 6K and the Dell 8K. It really is just a lot more pixels. The fuzz is definitely small, but there.
Another good test is open VS Code full screen, divide it up into panes, and make the text as small as you can read it. I mean really small. The text on the 6K just looks awful while the 8K still looks good.
Sometimes I do actually do this and put on my glasses (the text is too small for me to read without assistance, but it is still pretty crisp). It feels like a nerd superpower.
There are actually a bunch of us 8K superfans out here on the internet, but it's been a lonely party, because the Dell UP3218K seems to be still the only 8K computer monitor you can buy. (As in a roughly 32" desktop monitor, not a TV.)
It’s not obvious to me why this would happen. Can you share why this is?
With my glasses on, though, the 6K (or 27" 5K) look less crisp but somehow not fuzzy. Like I can see the antialiasing at the edges, but this doesn't look blurry to me. (It just looks more like a 4K display, where the antialiasing isn't great, you can see the pixels.)
With my glasses off, I cannot make out the antialiasing or pixels the 220ppi screens, but it looks fuzzy/blurry. Like its right at the edge of what my unaided eye can resolve.
After a while (hours), looking at the blurry text has me rubbing my eyes or starting to squint.
The 8K screen doesn't look blurry at the edges of letters. It just looks sharp.
I have wondered if this is something specific to exactly how much my eyesight has deteriorated with age, and maybe when it gets a little bit worse, it won't bother me as much. (?)
I don't think they're in the same class.
Spec shows Apple's Pro XDR is 2.5x brighter and have a much better contrast ratio along with 10bit and P3.
But in that case I'd expect the Dell 6K to fare even worse than the Apple 6K in a head-to-head comparison with the Dell 8K.
Or perhaps you're referring to HDMI 2.1 support?
The only 8K monitor has for years been the Dell UP3218K, which uses DisplayPort -- and requires two DisplayPort cables, actually, to get 7680 × 4320 at 60Hz.
Apple has never supported this on any of their machines -- they just couldn't drive the monitor. (It worked, but only in 4K mode.)
They quietly changed this with the M2 machines. I had a MacBook Pro M1 Max that couldn't drive this monitor at 8K. Then I found this GitHub thread[1] where it was revealed that M2 Pro can drive up to one of these 8K displays over Thunderbolt (to DisplayPort). And the M2 Ultra on a Mac Pro or Mac Studio can drive 3 of them.
I don't think it is scaling, per se, but rather that Apple has never supported the full DisplayPort spec. That 8K monitor apparently needs support for something called "dual SST" and Apple never supported that in their software. More details are in the linked GitHub discussion.
So, I don't know why they didn't make this work on the M1 Ultra, too, but Apple gonna Apple. So I went down to the Apple Store and bought a Mac Studio M2 Ultra the day I read that. Now I can plug my Mac into my KVM switch and use this monitor on Mac just like I always could with Linux and Windows.
[1]: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/discussions/199#d...
4K 120Hz may be noticeable if editing ultra high frame rate video on a video editing workstation, but if you are a video production crew with a camera capable of recording at that framerate, you probably already know that.
Though response times also matter a lot for ghosting and such.
But for desktop productivity? I don't feel I gain anything from it. 60 hz is fine.
Depends on your monitor size.
Might be a waste at 27", but if you want to use a 48" display, I can assure you that you'd notice the move from 4k -> 8k.
8K in a game will use tremendous amounts of power, but it's not pointless. It's like having antialiasing turned on. And high frame rates are important for motion because normal rendering only gives you a single point in time.
Additionally much of the demand for >60Hz is for gaming purposes, and there is nowhere near a powerful enough GPU anyone can afford that would be able to render games in high quality or extreme detail level at 8K above 60 FPS. Right now a GPU that costs $1500 USD can maybe render a 4K game with extreme detail level at framerates that vary between 55 to 75 fps.
I am not sure with that dot pitch of 0.25mm it was worth it.
[1] https://www.backoffice.be/prod_uk/ViewSonic/p225f_viewsonic_...
I'm struggling to remember how much they did cost, but with $2000 price tag for the top of the notch machine the monitors on the low end tended (well, AFAIR, don't take my word for it) to be less than $150, and hi-end were like $700 for not the ultra-uber-special cases.
And Moore's Law. LCDs are semiconductors so their price goes down by a factor of 2 every 18 months.
However, even size would be enough. CRTs were ridiculously heavy. My GDM-FW900 was almost 100 pounds. And I used two side by side. I had to shop specifically for a desk that wouldn't collapse when I put them on it.
2048x1536 19" (135ppi) at up to 72Hz was common at reasonable prices in the late 90s if my memory is correct. Although OS scaling sucked and text looked weird due to the shadow mask at that size. 1600x1200 (105ppi) was the sweet spot for me. And actually in my first job in 2004 I had two 20" 1600x1200 (100ppi) LCDs that I recall were reasonably priced and they were nicer overall. This was around the time LCDs became the default choice. Then "HD" became a thing a couple of years later and you are right, for the next ten years virtually all monitors were "widescreen HD", which was 1280x720 if you fell for marketing of the lower-priced units or or 1920x1080 at best. Anything higher was very expensive.
In 2012 the retina macbooks came out and I got a 13(.3)" with 2560x1600 resolution (227ppi). This was the first time for me that LCDs were finally great. But you couldn't get a resolution like that in an external display. So at that time I mostly just didn't use external monitors until 2016 when suddenly 4K 27" (163ppi) became reasonably priced. So I used 2 of those for years and they were good enough but still left me wanting.
Now still to this day, 4K is the max for external monitors at reasonable prices at any size. About 2 years ago I got an M1 macbook and realized it only supported 1 external monitor. I felt like I needed to keep the real estate I was used to and anyway, with the pandemic and WFH, managing multiple monitors with multiple (work and personal) machines sucked. All I could really find at a reasonable price was 32"/4K and 49" ultrawide. I begrudgingly downgraded to a 49" 5120x1440 monitor (109ppi). I will admit that going from 60Hz to 120Hz was nicer than I expected.
So in 2023 my laptop screen is great and has been great for 10+ years but this was my story about how I am still using the same pixel density as I did 25 years ago.
I imagine that in the future, people will look back at much of the media from recent decades and think that it looks a lot worse than we remember because it was produced on bad screens or made to look good on all of our crappy screens.
As a personal anecdote: when I was choosing components for my first desktop computer (instead of using dad's work laptops), I selected components which are affordable. Also, as a coincidence a local IT magazine had a big test of desktop CRT monitors. So I've chosen some inexpensive one which wasn't terrible and as every kid asked parents for money. My mum who was already working on computers on her job had a look through that magazine and said that she'll pay for the whole computer only on the condition we buy the best monitor on that test. So we did (it was a trinitron Nokia @ 100Hz which was a lot), and I think with that move she saved my eyes long term, as I'm in my early 40ties and the only healthy thing I still have are my eyes. In any case, I've soon realized when I got that monitor is that I'll never save money when buying stuff which I use all day long.
Back to the topic. CRT monitors also were space heaters, and had a large volume which was only fine when being permanently placed on a geek's desk.
When LCDs arrived they actually were considerably better than average CRTs. The picture was rock solid without flicker or refresh rate artifacts, perfectly rectangular (a big problem with an average CRT as a matter of fact) and very sharp and crisp. All for a little bit more money. After two or three years they were actually even cheaper than CRTs. And I forgot to mention, they took much less space so you could place it on a POS counter or wherever. It took much more time to replace the top end CRTs, but I guess this is always the case when talking about some tech product.
Why? Is that an OS problem?
You have to trade off distortions for bluriness and you can't avoid both of those artifacts at the same time. The higher your pixel ppi, the less noticeable any scaling artifacts will be though.
Do we have lots of scalable UI elements that expect to line up with raster images a certain way on most operating systems?
It's a shame (for me, who can't afford HiDPI displays to replace his current ones, and would have difficulty pushing all those pixels even if he could) that Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing. :(
Manufacturers can also justify making pretty big screens with that many pixels. Samsung's 8k TVs are 80-something inches. Since it's that big, you can sit further back, making up for any loss in pixel density, and still have a huge picture.
But with OLED.
It's useful for smoother scrolling amongst other things.
I'd like a display that has parity to my laptop but is just bigger so I can fit more on it.
Previously, I actually often felt motion sickness when scrolling through code on small 60hz laptop screens. Had no problems with larger (> 23") desktop screens, though.
I try not to be overly sapien-centric when making assumptions about my fellow HN readers.
Marshall now thinks that the mantis shrimp sees colors in a unique way. Rather than discriminating between millions of subtle shades, its eye actually does the opposite, collapsing all the varied hues of the spectrum into just 12.
From Science: "A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp"
The mantis shrimps (stomatopods) can have up to 12 photoreceptors, far more than needed for even extreme color acuity. Thoen et al. conducted paired color discrimination tests with stomatopods and found that their ability to discriminate among colors was surprisingly low. Instead, stomatopods appear to use a color identification approach that results from a temporal scan of an object across the 12 photoreceptor sensitivities. This entirely unique form of vision would allow for extremely rapid color recognition without the need to discriminate between wavelengths within a spectrum.
The 120 Hz i don’t understand however i am not a gamer.
Try setting your refresh rate to 30hz for an hour.
What people mostly notice is latency not refresh rate.
If you don’t mind me asking how old are your friends?
What blind test did you use?
I added mouse trails to verify people were actually noticing the FPS not just artifacts from the rendering pipeline.
It's noticeable for me on every single mouse movement— no special effort is required to move the cursor 'quickly'.
You can show multiple mouse images at 60 fps which shouldn’t trick people if they can actually see 90 vs 60 vs 120 fps.
I'm constantly switching between my M1 Air and work M2 16 Pro and refresh rate has never bothered me.
8K is the point in which at the monitor size I use, individual pixels would be too hard to see. They're already a bit hard to see at 4K, but at 8K it'd be perfect.
It took us a long time to go from 1080p to 4K. It has taken even longer for 4K at 120-144Hz to be practical.
It’s more likely that you’ll end up with intermediate steps to 5K, 6K, than getting 8K 120Hz.
The other limitation is lack of demand. You need a gigantic monitor for 8K to be worth it, and you need a powerful video card to drive it. The number of people who would buy such a monitor is very, very small.
I have a 4k 24" monitor that I can still see aliasing on with AA disabled.
8K 32" would give me more real estate and should, in theory, completely eliminate the need for AA.
For me 40 inch is the sweet spot for coding: any larger and it gets too pixelated at 4K (you can make out the pixels, but that's OK for coding), the UI scale can be set at 100% so all is well proportioned. Entire classes/methods fit on a screen without scrolling.
I own two Philips 4K 40 inch monitors, they only cost ~$600 at the time, and I dread the day they stop working. I would be first in line for 6K or 8K, or any ≥4K really, at 40 inch.
I can definitely live with 60Hz on desktop if I have to, and I can't game at 6K anyway, so doing 2K@120Hz gaming and 6K@60Hz or 8K@60Hz desktop work would be ideal, and wouldn't get into the silly bandwidths of 8K@120.
The technical aspects of this review are interesting, especially the wide range of machines tested. I finished writing a review of my own[0] a few days ago, which is less technical but goes into some other aspects of the monitor.
[0]: https://www.wells.dev/dell-ultrasharp-u3224kb-squandered-pot...
Wouldn't be the first time. My previous Dell monitor, the U3818DW, had a bug with its USB-C implementation that only affected Macs (somebody proved via protocol inspection that they were actually implementing part of the protocol wrong; it just didn't manifest on Windows). Their support forums for the issue are full of a single Dell representative whose sole response was to remind all of the Apple users that _technically_, Dell never qualified this monitor for macOS, and it's their fault for not carefully reading the technical documentation before purchasing. (Naturally, many of the reviews on Amazon are of people plugging it into a MacBook Pro.)
Really soured me on the idea of buying a Dell monitor for anything Apple related after that.
The other issue is its cost. Expectations raise alongside price, and at an MSRP of $3200 they’re pretty high, and this monitor in my opinion doesn’t meet the bar… with its build quality, problems, and lack of polish it’d maybe make sense at half that price, but even then that antiglare coating would make it a hard sell. They’d need to at least change the coating to make it resemble that of a more traditional matte monitor (which has no grain or sparkle effect).
And you’re right, there isn’t really an alternative except the Pro Display XDR, which is priced far beyond what many of us would find reasonable, uses increasingly dated local dimming tech, and has no extra functions beyond the hub on its back. That’s part of why I was disappointed: everything was lined up for Dell to have been able to knock this one out of the park — it would’ve been easy — but they didn’t.
My 165Hz 1440p 32" (31.5") LG with 8 bit color and two external speakers consumes ~20W, measured at the wall.
My 14" laptop screen is about 19.8% of the area of that display. I have loosely measured it from ranges of ~<1W at min brightness to ~8W at max brightness. It is 1440p, 60Hz, 14", HDR (DV). I usually run it at ~20% brightness, which seems to be around 3W.
My office has the usual LED lighting at night or a large window + sliding glass door during the day. Not a dark cave by any means!
Also, it just seems strange that anyone is asking for a 1080p monitor in 2023 outside of Esports. Are you sure you want 1080p (2K) and not 1440p (2.5K)? It bothers me when people use 2K to refer to 1440p. 1080p is 2K[1].
[0]: this chart has a few recent monitors and gives a general idea of how much power monitors consume: https://youtu.be/Wik4DhEaj_8?t=527
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution is very clear on this subject, and I agree completely. 1080p is much closer to 2000 horizontal pixels than 1440p.
Certainly, one of the most impressive things about the M1 laptops when they came out was that they woke instantly from sleep, including the screen.
... But then the table just below states the MacBook does it at 8gbps without DSC. What's going on here?
> I honestly don’t know. Maybe this is a bug in the monitor’s firmware and it does use some version of DSC after all? Or you’re right regarding lack of DSC support and it uses more than 8 Gbps but displays it incorrectly? Not sure. But something is definitely different about the monitor’s link when a MacBook is connected…
Then I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36581855, which points out 24 bit colors vs. 30 bit colors. The MacBook links up with 24-bit colors indeed. Maybe that’s the difference?
I don't see the benefit of going higher than 1440p or 1600p though, any higher res just means I need to increase scaling otherwise things are too small to read comfortably for me.
It depends much on the type of work one is doing. I don't have 8k but I'd surely love to have one when I'm editing high resolution 48-bit TIFF files (≥1GB) which I do quite often.
Normally for other work 1920x1080 is more an adequate.
The article mentions that "it (the Dell UP3218K) needs two (!) DisplayPort cables on a GPU with MST support, meaning that in practice, it only works with nVidia graphics cards."
I would like to tell people here that this is not true in my experience (which might be related to advances in amdgpu and/or linux in general): I'm running one Dell on a Vega (64) Frontier Edition and one on a 6900XT, both on Linux 6.3 with the amdgpu driver. It sets up correctly, using DP TILE extension, so both cables used, 7680x4320@60hz.
Also I would like to add (subjectively) that nothing beats the display quality of these screens. It's literally life/eye-changing.. insanely nice, sharp. I could never go back to sub ~200ish DPI displays.
I most recently tried the AMD GPU that came with my ThinkStation P620, and it could not drive the monitor at native resolution :(
Maybe I should try a 6900XT. Which particular model do you have?
How much power does it use when driving the 8K monitor?
Do you have PCIe ASPM enabled in the UEFI setup for your PEG slot, and does that run reliably? I was running into problems with ASPM with my nVidia: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/pcie-errors-after-enab...
This is nonsense, of course AMD graphics cards support MST. https://www.reddit.com/user/hubsdocks/comments/rcf6vz/dell_w... Perhaps some weird Linux driver limitation...?
As for DisplayPort, the only semi-modern customer grade video card with four DisplayPorts is the AMD Radeon™ RX 5700 XT Taichi X 8G OC+ RX5700XT TCX 8GP.
With Intel ARC cards, the 8K monitor works neither on Windows nor on Linux :(
You have to either use the HDMI port from the Mac (if you have an M2 one) or use a usbc to HDMI converter which for some reason triggers the DSC.
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dell-6k-u3224kb-monitor...
The main issue is that users reported that text does not look very nice when the monitor runs in 24-bit color and full resolution, which is a bit concerning when considering the asking price.
And yes I have it pegged at 60hz, unlike the "solution" says, removing the variable rate does not solve the problem.
Buyers beware of Dell screens with macOS on Apple Silicon.
And yes I've tried many different cables... :)
I like it enough I'm considering a second. Only downside is no usb-c.
I believe this is why it's not a problem for you:
[...] both and connect through a CalDigit TS4I found that if change the color profile I can mitigate the issue, but then it doesn’t look quite as nice.
On the LG, not only is there flickering but a transient burn-in which still appears when the TB cable is disconnected! It fades after a few hours.
Many owners have the same issue with their M1 devices so I assume it’s not something that is fixable.
I won’t turn down a higher peak framerate if it comes without cost to the rest of the monitor’s functionality of course, but it’s not worth trading anything away for.
The products exist but they're not as numerous as I'd expect (certainly not outside of the Apple ecosystem), and it's an eye-watering leap as far as prices go, hundreds of dollars at one end and multiple thousands at the other with very little in between.
Most PC's are targeting windows, and stuff would be unreasonably small if you plugged in a midrange monitor from the early 2000's. So, monitor manufacturers stopped offering monitors with reasonable DPI.
(Why? Yields. A 6" phone screen is like 12 square inches. A 27" desktop monitor is over 300 square inches. If you have a 98% yield of phone screens without defects, that implies only one defect per ~600 square inches, which means that at a handwave level, you'd have a 50% yield of desktop monitors with that same tech. "We have to throw away half the screens we make as junk" is a lot worse than "we have to throw away 2% of them.")
And smaller defects are better when you do sell off the imperfect panels.
I'm on a 4K 27" monitor. That's a PPI of 163. I don't feel it's dismal, and I sit relatively close to my monitor.
Either way gives me a greater range of suitable monitors, and they are all cheaper than going for unicorn displays.
Before them I was using regular 2k monitors, and would get headaches staring at a monitor for a full workday 8-10 hours and my eyes were so strained I usually ended up just going to bed right afterwards. I've never used an ultrawide, but I'd be really interested in trying one out IF I can get a similar PPI (~192 or higher)
If I scale it to 50%, it looks phenomenal, but who wants to work on a screen with the equivalent real estate of 1920x720?
I now spend most of my time on the built in display of my 16" M1 MBP. The text sizing is fine for me.
What would really make a dent in experience is OLED + HDR. In the TV world, the combination with HDR is relatively new as OLED displays struggled with brightness. This particular combination working well is a sight to behold. It makes you consider what absolute crap image you were looking at before.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-32-6k-monito...
Using a tv as a monitor has downsides (Only HDMI, doesn't detect inputs automatically etc) but having 55" of retina screen real estate is such a great experience that I'm sticking with it. The same panel sold as a PC monitor with proper inputs (and maybe a matte screen) would be ideal.
That's a fair point but I don't think it applies at these scales. Even a 8K 32" has a very low pixel density compared to a cellphone screen for example.
Acer has a 16" portable 4K screen for around 600 USD which they presumably sell at a nice profit, 4 of them would make a 8K 32".
Anyway, pricing aside the main problem is that the products don't exist in the first place. A monitor that's simply 4x 27" 4k screens (available from 300 usd) combined would be perfect for a programmer, data analyst etc even if it isn't strictly "retina".
The manufacturers don't make monitors like this for one reason or another. I think it's a marketing/economic strategy more than anything else.
My pessimistic take is that LG and Samsung etc have tons of investments in old tech and want to keep selling old tech to consumers for as long as they can because that's where they get the highest margins.
A slightly less pessimistic take is that monitor makers don't believe that there is a market for really large screens because when you do a survey most people think 32" is "big" and anything larger is absurd.
But it's wonderful! :)
1) The scaling on macOS. Everything was way too big. There were not enough options for fractional scaling.
2) The matte finish. I came from another matte Dell monitor, but the whole screen looked slightly fuzzy, like a permanent oil stain all over the monitor.
3) The contrast sucks. They call it 'IPS Black' but I was not impressed. The colors look different depending on the angle. This is probably an issue with the size of the monitor as well, as when you look at the left size, the angle to the right size is pretty big.
Lastly I did not like the size either, but I will have that with every 31.5 inch monitor.
It was $300, the color isn't perfect, it has a little glare, it can be choosy when it comes to ports and cables, but having such a large desktop is great. It's a large enough screen to run at native resolution.
I'm interested in things like Apples 6K monitor but the cost and the fact that it's only really work with my Mac, as well as not giving me that much usable space, make it an easy decision to not buy.
I’m at 16:9 (nearly impossible to get 16:10 today :/) 4k 32” and honestly this is freaking small. What’s the point of all the space if it all looks really good without zooming at maybe 2500-ish pixels wide. I’d gladly get a good 42” display at 4k, would be perfect.
You don't want an OLED PC monitor because it will very quickly suffer from burn-in at the typical locations of taskbar and window controls.
As for burn-in, this doesn't seem to be an issue in smartphones for many years now, and monitors are also not normally used with damaging high brightness HDR content like OLED TVs. My guess would rather be that OLED monitors are too expensive, maybe because they have much higher PPI values than TVs. (A 55" 4k TV has only 80 PPI.)
I kept the 360, but am currently using the Advantage 2 again. I never got used to the 360 palm pads.
Re Kinesis: I have mixed feelings as well but in the meantime I got used to the 360 model. With the old palm pads, it feels more like the Advantage 2. I'm a bit sad that I didn't order the pro model. I really liked my Advantage 2 as well, but I can't go back to it as some electronic part seems to be damaged. It just seems to send random characters without touching the keyboard.
Also, check out the MoErgo Glove80 keyboard.
I can imagine that a lot of personal computing is going to transform into some kind of "screen+lens+eyeball" as COGs for these kinds of headset displays are going to be lower than traditional monitor (or possibly even smartphone) displays.
I stopped reading after this lol
I do not understand the complaints about pixel density. The display is 223 ppi, which is the same or slightly higher than Apple displays. I am using them in a dual display configuration with an M1 Macbook Pro via TB4 and a Windows PC with an RTX 4090 via DisplayPort. The KVM feature makes switching back and forth a breeze. I am using 175% scaling (in Windows) and I don't think 8K with 1:2 scaling would give suitably sized OS components for me, so it would be fractional scaling either way.
The startup time doesn't matter in practice because they still wake up from sleep instantaneously.
The mini-DP IN port would be inconvenient but Club3D makes a bi-directional adapter that makes it regular DisplayPort for about $20.
I am fine with the camera defaulting to ON for Windows Hello to work in my 2 computer setup.
My only serious complaint is the piss poor speakers and the fabric covering them.
I would also prefer a glossy display, but in practice I just don't find it makes any difference. I arrange my office for no reflections anyhow, which results in an equivalent experience. Additionally, the Dell 6K has excellent blacks. It has much better blacks than any IPS panel I have used.
4K TVs only seem to become usably readable with Chroma 4:4:4 at 38" or above, ideally curved, to get 4 usable 1920x1080 quadrants.
When the screen sizes go smaller, absolutely detail and quality increases, but for software development or text centric work is concerned, am I missing something when it comes to 6K or 8K Monitors?
24 definitely can be a bit tight, but realistic for 3 monitor setup.
If I was going with only 2 monitors for software development, or mainly text work, there are nice 2K monitors that are about 25" that are perfect.
I have two older 27" 2K monitors as well and they tend to be too big in the long run, and 3 were untenable.
4k 27" with 2x scaling is effectively the same size as 1080p 27". But one looks like absolute crap, the other is reasonably sharp and detailed. Text is much better with higher PPI. And 4k27" is just 160 PPI, the 6k 32" monitors are 220 PPI so text is very crisp.
I don't know about other OSs, but fractional scaling "just works" on KDE Linux. The size of displayed content has nothing to do with the pixels you have. You control the physical screen size (inches) and scale factor to get the content size you want, and you buy as many pixels as you can afford to get good quality at that size. There's a parent comment on this submission talking about how his 8k 32" monitor is visibly better than 6k 32" for text sharpness; TFA says the same thing. You really want as many pixels as you can afford to buy.
Of course, the minimum (densest) content size you can use is constrained by PPI, low PPI won't be able to display very small content.
27" 4K just won't cut it. And I don't want a monitor that big anyway.
I have had my eye on an LG[1] out there at 24" 4k (currently about 300usd) -- as that size/resolution has been the sweet spot for me for the last few years. I'm planning to pick one of these up and stick it in a closet just to have on hand in case the Dell dies on me.
For context, my MacBook from 2015 had a PPI of 220, so this comment is extremely accurate.
The Dell 8k has 288 pixels per inch, which is 4x the detail of the original Mac.
Macintosh 128k was released with a 72 ppi display, so every pixel was the size of a "point", a unit used in more traditional, paper-based graphic design.
https://webplatform.github.io/docs/tutorials/understanding-c...
It's as if the Windows spec were retconned into being the historical norm all along, but I need to dig around to find the origin story here... Why 96 dpi?
My simple guess is that 96 is also divisible by 12, and thus easy to split up into 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 18, 24 parts... you also have eight pieces in 72 for every nine pieces in 96.
72 = 8 x 9 = 2^3 * 3^2
96 = 32 x 3 = 2^5 * 3
In 1996, it was adopted by W3C for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) where it was later related at a fixed 3:4 ratio to the pixel due to a general (but wrong) assumption of 96 pixel-per-inch screens
I actually never really questioned this.
It looks mighty nice, just 4 ppi short of exactly 2x pixels per linear inch of these new Macs. I have no idea why.
For context, 20/20 vision is the ability to perceive 1 arcminute of angular resolution. Beyond that point there are diminishing returns.
To see what this looks like for different viewing distances: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/dtrszipgmd (black line is mm, red line in freedom units, green is 220PPI reference).
There is a difference between your ability to resolve, and whether you can tell _any_ difference. The usual measure of sight is visual acuity, which is your ability to discern details of a certain size at a certain distance. Specifically, in most exams, it's the ability to tell strokes from blobs.
However, even when the pixel density is beyond your ability to discern details, they can still affect your perception in other ways. For example, misalignment of borders can be detected far beyond what your visual acuity is.
On computer screens, particularly, pixel density also affects how things are rendered, think diagonal lines, curves, hollow spaces, etc. Take an extreme example, a box rendered on a 4x4 screen is going to look better than on a 2x2 screen even if the former is twice the distance away.
First world problem, but I hate when companies choose a one-size-fits-all value that is allegedly supposed to reach the limits of human perception, but that value still turns out not to be enough for me because (surprise) some people are naturally slightly better than average.
For example, the new Apple VR headset, despite having a resolution of around 4k*4k pixels per eye, would probably still have to make up for it in other ways, because I can still see significantly more pixels than that.
Apple actually seems to know this, and they know it so well that their entire marketing push is based on augmented reality and immersion. Blending things with the environment, moving around and interacting- basically things that can never really be disappointed by the screen resolution being insufficiently high.
Step aside 8 bit color, 16 bit color displays are here: 65536 colors! Nobody can perceive more than that! Then 32 bit color came along: 1+MILLION colors!! How can it get better than that? Humans can't perceive more! 30FPS gaming as the gold standard for what the eye can behold, then it became 60FPS, now it's 120FPS! The PPI arms race is the same thing.
The phones are assumed to be held close to your eye and have a 460ppi.
The MacBooks are assumed to be seen from a medium distance and use around 225ppi.
The Studio display and Prod Display distance is a little longer and use 218ppi.
Retina is a property based on subtended angle from the viewer's perspective, not on a physical property of the device.
I always joke that if it gets much more worse my arms won't be long enough to hold my phone :-)
Does VR work for you?
Absolute preach right here. I would say I laugh when someone says it's not perceptually possible for me to differentiate the pixels of my 4K display from a typical viewing distance, but that's actually become such a common assertion that I'm dying to know if my vision is just that much better or theirs is just that much worse. :/
I'm not really sure what you're refuting, if anything. Either I personally find 220ppi now rather unimpressive, or I found the 2015 MacBook display to have been especially impressive, but I am not sure which; all I was really saying is that they do indeed have quite similar pixel densities.
While PPI has stayed mostly static (which is a good engineering choice), plenty of other display parameters have improved: better contrast, faster response times, deeper colour, larger continuous surfaces. The 2015 MacBook display was impressive. Modern panels are too!
Apple's always been pretty impressive with their color reproduction. Which makes sense, since they are really, really pushing hard for designers and content creators (that's one of the big central themes of nearly all Mac-related advertising). Their newer, more premium machines are mostly sporting HDR & WCG displays, and macOS has had incredibly good software support for many years.
The MacBook was a premium product for its time, so even 5 years later, there were brand new higher-resolution (and higher-PPI) panels that performed much worse! My 2020 ASUS laptop is a great example of that. The display was 4K, Adobe RGB, and had a higher PPI, so it sounds like it should have been better, but it only supported 24 bpp and had awful ghosting (around 6 frames to change a pixel).
But at least then I won't screenshot something and have the file saved to disk in Adobe-RGB-interpreted-as-sRGB (which is literally what would happen when the dedicated GPU did the color space conversion, but that was then taken as an input to the Intel APU and interpreted as sRGB, even though it was rendered for an Adobe RGB display) which even if converted back still loses a ton of precision due to Adobe RGB being squeezed into 24 bits in the middle. I care about that a lot. Something that annoys only me is possibly tolerable, but something that affects the content I share with others is like life and death (in terms of importance to me).
They also connected that display to the Intel APU so Windows could not properly do the color space conversion in hardware, resulting in artifacts that were so terrible I had to turn off the conversion entirely and just deal with viewing everything in sRGB-interpreted-as-Adobe-RGB. (yes I know "switchable graphics" is a near-universal configuration in laptops, but it's incredibly cursed and causes so many fucking problems in a completely irreparable fashion. Why not just connect the display input to the display output as it was intended, ASUS turds.)
They market it as "Pantone validated", so I guess that means that they added negative value for the sake of a marketing sticker. (Honestly, put that way, it definitely sounds like something that they couldn't possibly not do. Companies just can't help themselves when it comes to this stuff.)
When I switched to a desktop, I grabbed a random 15" 4K monitor from China for $70. It's sRGB, but it's proudly sRGB, and didn't half-ass itself into something that is hopelessly broken like ASUS did.
When I have a spare $400 I'll dish out for one of the 10-bit DCI-P3 displays on AliExpress and then be happy.
Yes. There is one upstream USB-C port on each display that is used for this purpose.
> The monitors are daisy chained?
Daisy chaining with Thunderbolt 4 (not Thunderbolt 3) is supported, but when daisy chaining the second display will only do 4K@60Hz or 6K@30Hz. For this reason, I plug both Thunderbolt 4 cables directly into my Macbook Pro M1, both on the left side of the laptop so it's a clean setup. Thankfully, the included Thunderbolt 4 cables are plenty long enough to reach across to the laptop positioned on either side. Apple's displays include such short TB cables that you'd have to buy another longer one to do this.
In addition, you may want to know that HDR mode is great but only supported with HDMI for some reason and I haven't found any DP->HDMI adapters that support it which rules out dual HDR displays with an RTX 4090 which only has 1 HDMI port. I think this is due to HDR needing HDMI 2.1. But I can have 1 monitor connected with HDMI for HDR when I need it. I just haven't bought a long HDMI cable for that yet. The KVM switching could support that setup just the same.
Other than that, I'm quite happy with my screen real-estate. So, I would indeed love it to have a higher resolution. I could probably use a somewhat bigger screen, a bit further away, that would do a better job as a TV the rare times I use it as such (don't have an actual TV). But all in all, I just want smaller pixels.
Others are talking about higher refresh rates, but for my use case it wouldn't be as useful since I rarely drag things around (I use a TWM) and don't use smooth scrolling in apps.
Are you talking about subpixel rendering?
Leveraging individual R G and B dots needs knowledge of the layout to achieve increased resolution, and the algorithm should be adjusting (best effort) to compensate for human colour perception with knowledge of the subpixel layout + subpixel size.
But usually it might be that the screen has a different layout than the OS picked, e.g RGB vs BGR, vertical vs horizontal, or it has a peculiar layout like RGBG. See down the page for an example when it doesn't match, which usually gives the perceptual effect you described https://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm
At some point though I found with increasing DPI there's diminishing returns to go subpixel and it's simply easier and just as good to go grayscale AA and be done with it.
I agree that at some point grayscale AA is good enough. But I've found that that point is at a higher DPI than I get on a 4k 32" screen. On my 24" 4k screen grayscale is good enough, so the limit is somewhere in between for me.
Some of this comes down to visual acuity, viewing distance, and what one is used to as feeling normal. Things like changing font sizes are just another way at upping the scaling factor though.
I guess it's popular because 32" 4k TVs make the panels cheaper?
At 2x things don't look too big, just comfortably big, and the PPI is still Retina-like.
Aesthetically, no. I am grateful that there aren't any gamer aesthetics involved, but my desk is not a showroom; it's a workspace. However, the cloth that wraps the speaker cluster seems cheap, like it could rip or get pilly over time. That is the only aspect that bothers me. I like that the cameras are attached because they are very nice cameras and support Windows Hello and I prefer not having a corded camera balancing on my displays.
I use a USB switch connected to both displays for my input devices so I can switch between screens/computers: https://a.co/d/ckNXGpt
If you only need 4K, there is this extremely badass TESmart KVM switch that I have used before and would highly recommend. It also has a cycle mode. It's $700 but the thing supports 3 4K monitors and 4 computers and works exactly as described. https://www.tesmart.com/products/4-port-triple-monitor-hdmi-...
I wonder if I’ll ever find a way to drive 4k@144Hz and switch inputs without the current cable replugging ritual.
There's software to help do this automatically (https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch)
And that sometimes it’ll get confused and won’t switch the USB peripherals correctly, but that’s not too common (hasn’t happened in a long while in fact, maybe there was a firmware update I didn’t notice which fixed it).
Personally, I rarely adjust brightness on my desktop displays and my ZMK keyboard volume buttons work reliably cross-platform.
I wish my personal was a mac as well, but I had to abandon macs when they abandoned me by not upgrading the mac pro for like a decade then kept me away by later ending support for eGPUs.
I checked this on https://db.lunar.fyi using the following query:
select control, name from displays where name like '%U3224K%'
What do you do with the monitors? Do you work with images, videos, code, etc.?
I don't even understand all this ppi hype, nor even dual displays anymore. I always used dual-triple displays in the past but nowaways I just bought a single table-size (49-inch or something like that) 4k display and put it right in front of my desk just to use it in a plain old 100% mode (no "hi-dpi" scaling, just tweaked some font sizes in editors' configs). This way it effectively replaces 4 displays with a single seamless space - no additional frames, no constraints, almost no head turning, beautiful tiling (when on Windows - PowerToys' FancyZones are great).
By the way, I once noticed that vertical stacking of 2 monitors feels much better for me that when I place them side by side horizontally. This is why a single big (big in both ways, also vertically) display works much better than fancy ultra-wide monitors for me.
What is DCC?
I genuinely have zero idea what you are talking about. Typing this from my macbook connected to a 5k LG ultrawide monitor, and it is as crystal sharp as it can get. As opposed to my windows 10 desktop (connected to the same monitor) having some occasional application windows render fairly blurry and inconsistently (one of the main offenders of this is, ironically, task manager). And don't even get me started on font rendering in general.
Most people (and companies) aren't willing to spend $1600 on Apple's 5K monitor, so they get a good 27" UHD monitor instead, and they soon realize macOS either gives you pixel perfect rendering at a 2x scale factor which corresponds to a ridiculously small 1920x1080 viewport, or a blurry 2560x1440 equivalent.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing Window’s terrible font rendering with sharpness?
Windows does a Much better job with non-integer scaling because hairlines are 1px no matter what the scaling and text is rendered with pixel-hinting instead of macOS's new, lame strategy of super sampling.
For me, I only closed the book on the issue after finding BetterDisplay [0]. Basically a 3rd party program that gives you complete control over resolution, display density, and a ton of other options on MacOS. It has a trial mode but it is well well worth the money. With that + the CLI tweak to set font smoothing to 0, the 4K experience on MacOS looks decent. You can even decrease the effective scale of the native screen past "More Space", so those of us with good eyes can actually take advantage of the screen real estate.
Also, if you're curious to explore this issue beyond my subjective thoughts here, these [1] [2] blog posts do a great job diving into what is so bad about MacOS scaling, why 4K 27" or 32" screens end up looking bad, and why 5K 27" look okay.
[0] https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
This is particularly frustrating since I've been using high DPI displays since the CRT days. Everything horribly regressed about a decade ago, and still isn't back to 1999 standards.
Where things go haywire is mixed resolution. It's best avoided :-\ Hence now I have a 28" 4k external screen which is exactly like four 14" FHD screens of my laptop, so the DPI stays strictly the same.
I did the same and just bought monitors that all have the same DPI, so I can easily use scaling that matches on all of them.
Basically go read rtings.com for whatever size/resolution/price class you are looking for, and look at the in depth reviews for the things that matter to you.
In my case I have a bright office, so glare/reflection and backlight brightness are extremely important.
A good monitor can last you 2-3x as long as the compute you hook up to it, and your eyes are important.. I think its not the place to skimp on cost in the total home office setup.
Just an absolute clown show of warranty service.
The ROI on the replacement was negative, I'd have been better off throwing it in the trash.
If you are happy with it in practice, and not just on specs, and are not banking on warranty being fulfilled - enjoy.
Hours in iMessage chat with offshore reps, having to record videos of various diagnostics before they'd issue an RMA. Just to be sent another broken monitor. Clown show.
Honestly, make me pay to ship it to you and if I lied about it being broken, send it back. I do not have time for multi-hour 200 message iMessage conversations over a $400 monitor.
Eizo warranty service could not have been simpler. And the product they sent back worked!
I understand things like fonts render smoother on a 4-6-8K monitor but it also draws more power usually to power all those pixels.
The use of a Chroma 4:4:4 capable 4K tv is also often really helpful because one 4K screen at large enough size gives four 1920x1080 working surfaces. 4K seems to become useful at 38" Or so in a TV.
Is there something I'm missing out on in terms of option that are superior to 2K for external monitors in terms of usability?
Many of the ultrawide monitors sometimes have worse or close to the same resolution as a single 2K monitor.
Confused, not conflated.
Same comment and question about 1440p then, please :)
By whom? The only reference to 1440p being called "2K" I can find are cheap rebranded monitor sellers that defraud their customers with all other specs anyway.
“2K” monitors are widths that fall around the 2000 pixel range. It’s a resolution category, not a specification.
2K monitor categorization emerged when 4K started to be used as a rough mid point.
2560x1440 is often shortened to 1440p, but 2K is often easier to remember. Still, officially it’s called Quad HD (QHD) or even WQHD. With slight variations beyond it.
Since we’re trying to be precise the category for this res can also be called 2.5K.
But like you said, we won’t always be able to search for that.
Finding the spot between FHD and 4K has this fuzzy category. Every retailer Amy display it different depending on how and when their sites were built and evolved.
The newer ultra wide monitors can do a lot of sleight of hand to stretch a lot more pixels horizontally to make the screen seem bigger.
“5K” monitors might give as many pixels as four 2560x1440, but it won’t be 4 monitors worth of work space.
All I know is my wife won’t give me back my QHD screens since she started using them because she can fit more on 2 monitors.
That's where you're wrong, 2K as a term (just like 4K) originated in the cinema industry, and it's absolutely a specification.
DCI Digital Cinema System Specification v1.4.2, Section 4.3.1.
A 2K distribution – the resolution of the DCDM[3] container is 2048x1080
A 4K distribution – the resolution of the DCDM[3] container is 4096x2160
UHD was already stretching it with "4K", but 1440p is absolutely not a spec-compliant 2K resolution.
Benq lists their monitors as 2k. They’re wrong too.
https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/professional/bl2420pt.htm...
You’re absolutely right about clarity - if I was running two screens I’d probably get what you’re referring to. But having a workable third monitor at QHD proves priceless quite regularly for my work and most of it can be text specific.
The U3224KB featured in this review has a GtG response time of 5ms in fast mode, which is considered average but not great. Most high-end monitors manage GtG response times of around 1ms. With OLED it's closer to 0.5ms.
58.4ms is unacceptably bad.
OLED would be great if we could finally get 27” 5K. Currently all the gaming screens sit at around 1440p pixel density and are often coupled with non RGB pixel layout that causes color fringing on text: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...
Resolution and color accuracy are subject to diminishing returns.
I could be wearing my glasses right now. They're not a strong correction, but I could see slightly better. In fact, they're within arm's reach. Meh.