Slightly off topic but I can’t wait until there’s a 120 Hz 8K monitor. It’s the only thing holding me back from upgrading from 4K. I wonder if the current limitation is on the panels, cable bandwidth or absurd price tag…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
But with OLED.
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.
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.
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.
I'm constantly switching between my M1 Air and work M2 16 Pro and refresh rate has never bothered me.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.