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Comment by 111111IIIIIII | Hacker News Reader

I just purchased 2 of the 6Ks and I am keeping both. AMA.

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.

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> 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

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).

If I were just using text editors, I would do something similar. However, many people do other things with computers besides edit text. DCC applications are obnoxious on displays larger than 32" and reducing the window size just leaves you with little border areas for multitasking. It's just sloppy. So 2x 32" is a pretty obvious choice here.

I don't edit much text in the way people here would mostly imagine (like when your job predominantly is coding/terminal), I'm a GUI lover. What I hate the most, however, is switching windows (and turning head to look at another monitor feels just slightly better), also scrolling - I want everything I currently work with (+ a player window for a background vibe + two messengers) to be open side by side shown fully. Because as soon as I switch the context (like hiding a window to see another one full-screen) I often immediately forget what I was doing/thinking, like when you exit a room [1], this harms my productivity tremendously.

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect

> The display is 223 ppi, which is the same or slightly higher than Apple displays.

For context, my MacBook from 2015 had a PPI of 220, so this comment is extremely accurate.

Forget 4K, 6K, or 8K. Pixel density is the spec when considering any display. It doesn't matter if it's a wearable, phone, laptop, monitor, TV, or stadium wrapping LED surface, the only important factors for resolution are the distance to the viewer's eyes and the distance between the pixels.

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).

20/20 vision is a low bar though. I’m bothered by how much my vision has deteriorated since I was a teenager. The difference is obvious, as I now need to walk up to things I used to read from a distance. I’ve tested 20/20 a few weeks ago.

> 20/20 vision is a low bar though.

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. :/

That's a good point to highlight: 20/20 is not perfect vision. It's simply a benchmark for "good enough" vision. IIRC there are physical limits around 0.4 arcmin. People with good eyesight sit somewhere between the two.

It's the opposite for me; I have to move small things away in order to focus on them.

I always joke that if it gets much more worse my arms won't be long enough to hold my phone :-)

So too close and they're out of focus / blurry?

Does VR work for you?

This happens naturally with age, usually starting sometime between age 45-50, as your eyes shift from variable focus to fixed focus (at distance). Google presbyopia.

Have not tried.

So viewing from 40cm away is about the point where 220PPI crosses the point where you can tell any difference? That makes me think 220 is quite a well picked number, as that's about how far away someone might typically be viewing.

There's no sudden switch. All perception is a little squishy and dependant on the individual. For most people though, once you're creating an image that's 220PPI and viewed from 400mm or so it's probably better to dedicate bandwidth to better temporal resolution, colour depth, or lessening the compression/compute/power/cost needed to balance those three.

> So viewing from 40cm away is about the point where 220PPI crosses the point where you can tell any difference?

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.

> Forget 4K, 6K, or 8K. Pixel density is the spec when considering any display.

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.

Nothing to refute - I was simply continuing from your highlight of 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!

> 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.

So, if 25 cm is an optimal viewing distance, 350 ppi is maximum phone screen density required?

Generally apple picks the optimal ppi and they don’t market the ppi value, only that it’s “retina”. They will prefer odd resolutions over suboptimal ppi. For example, the m2 macbook air is 2560 by 1664 at 224 ppi. The maximum ppi you can get on an iphone is 460 ppi, so I assume in their testing they found that even people with perfect vision holding it really close had no use for sharper screens than that.

> Generally apple picks the optimal ppi and they don’t market the ppi value, only that it’s “retina”.

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.

The "human perception" crap is always marketing. Everything is supposedly at the limit of human perception, until the next generation of technology comes out, and then this time it's for real at the limit of human perception! I think the last 20 years of tech products I've bought were always marketed as at the limits of human perception.

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.

Apple does not use a one-size-fits-all in ppi.

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.

And none of those devices have a PPI that you can customize when you purchase the device, in contrast to many PC laptops that generally offer multiple options (say, either 1080p or 4K on the same device), meaning each device indeed has a one-size-fits-all PPI. I never said Apple uses the same PPI for all their devices.

iPhone uses a pentile arrangement that requires higher densities to appear the same.

The iPhone is still pretty much the same ~330PPi as before, only the OLED number are inflated. If you only count the smallest PPI within the sub pixel of OLED they are still, magical ~330 ppl on newer iPhone.

25cm is pretty bad viewing distance, a good way to mess up your eyes long term

Good to know. I meant that's where humans can discern smallest details.

I will leave this here for those looking for detail on what PPI they need at what size for a Retina display like sharpness. https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

Also, the current Apple Studio Display and Apple XDR Pro Display are both 218 ppi.

218 ppi matches the native displays on current Macs.

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.

The history of the point [1] is equally interesting and messy. Back in school, my old teachers (mostly old printing machine operators, and typesetters) preferred Apple over anything else especially because of the native 72ppi vs windows normal 96ppi.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)

And these days, 96 ppi is the de facto standard, via the CSS specification:

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

Huh. Never really realized that...

The wiki has this paragraph:

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.

Some Macbooks don't match 218 ppi. MacBook Pro 14" and 16" have 254 ppi. I don't know why Apple decided to have such a high ppi for them.

So close... The display with the smallest pixels in my collection has been the quirky Essential PH-1; its display is a silly 504 ppi. I loved that thing, but the device is no longer supported by official updates.

It looks mighty nice, just 4 ppi short of exactly 2x pixels per linear inch of these new Macs. I have no idea why.

32" is an extremely common size for 4k at 100% scaling so I can see the desire for 8k using 200% scaling at the resolution. 225-250% would probably be more "proper" densities for such a display but many like to go a bit under standard scale.

I have a 32" monitor with 4k resolution. With macOS, it's unusable at 100% scaling. It's far too dense. Sure, you can change fonts in many applications, but not all.

Many would disagree with you is the the point I was making, not that everyone should agree. Some don't think 32" 4k at 200% scaling is large enough while others don't think running a ~4k 16" MacBook at 100% scaling is too small to use. What's relevant is that 4k 32" at 100% scaling remains popular and should not be surprising to read about as a use case, despite whatever one's personal preference is.

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.

It's quite popular, but I personally don't get it. It's too low density for text to look good on it, 24-27" is around the maximum. It's too small to be a single monitor, while being too big to comfortably fit in multi-monitor setups.

I guess it's popular because 32" 4k TVs make the panels cheaper?

I've found 28" 4k is the sweet spot if you are of the age that requires you to use reader glasses.

At 2x things don't look too big, just comfortably big, and the PPI is still Retina-like.

What would be more proper in this case is to make it 64" display. Otherwise it is just a waste of resources. But one can not sit in front of 64" monitor at a normal viewing distance. I would guess except some very limited niches 8K PC monitor makes little sense

I don't think so. From where I'm sitting, I can see the rainbow effects of antialiasing on my 4k 32" monitor. The easiest way to observe this is some skinny light text on a dark background.

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.

> I can see the rainbow effects of antialiasing on my 4k 32" monitor

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'm familiar with the subpixel arrangement issues. My display is RGB, according to its specs and to some review I've seen before buying it (I made a point of avoiding "non-standard" panels). I only notice this with very thin fonts, since sometimes the vertical lines end up "in between" pixels.

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.

I also find 24" to be the "perfect" maximum size for a 4k monitor. 27" is close, 32" is clearly too big.

Does it support DDC over i2c? I want at least sleep mode, input, and brightness control.

Lunar dev here. Looks like it does support DDC brightness control: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/nAa7gs/Image.png

I checked this on https://db.lunar.fyi using the following query:

    select control, name from displays where name like '%U3224K%'

Can’t be sure about DDC input switching though, I have no way of knowing that it works without trying it in front of the monitor. DDC reports success even if the command failed to switch the input.

Just wanted to say, thanks for the fantastic app. It's the first thing I install on a new computer.

Hey thanks! So happy to hear that ^_^

I'm really glad I stumbled upon this thread. I need this app badly.

i know my old Dell Ultrasharp U2415 supports this feature. There is a tool in linux with which you can switch input, also dell has a display manager in windows which allows you to perform the switching and controls. I totally love it!

Sorry, I am not quite sure what that is. Sleep works great with my PC (motherboard is ASRock WRX80 Creator) and M1 MBP, but I can only adjust brightness through the OSD.

There’s a Mac app called Lunar that uses DDC (a protocol for sending commands to a screen) to allow you to adjust the brightness and volume of an external monitor with the usual keys on your MacBook keyboard (in clamshell mode at least) or with a slider. Very convenient, can’t recommend enough.

Oh OK sorry but yeah I wouldn't use that. If this is usually supported on Dell monitors, I would bet it works on these.

Personally, I rarely adjust brightness on my desktop displays and my ZMK keyboard volume buttons work reliably cross-platform.

I you don’t need it, you don’t need it, but I don’t understand the first sentence. Many different displays support DDC, my Philips at home does and the Dells and I think BenQ that we have at the office do too.

My macbook is my work laptop and we're encouraged to minimize installing extra software.

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 have 3 24" Benq 2K video grade monitors running at 2560x1440 giving me nearly 11 million usable pixels. It has a huge boost in productivity for me.

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?

The point isn't to have more pixels, it's to have more detailed pixels. You use scaling to get whatever display size you want.

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.

Yeah I love my 4K 24" monitor but nobody seems to be making them anymore :'( especially at this price point ($250). It's the minimum DPI I'd consider HiDPI. Really worried about it breaking at some point. I wish I had bought two.

27" 4K just won't cut it. And I don't want a monitor that big anyway.

My Dell P2415Q is thankfull still kickin' (knock on wood).

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.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LPNKFK0

I've got two of the P2415Q's and will probably keep using them until they kick the dust. Every 6 months or so I look at monitors and anything with an equivalent or higher DPI is too expensive for me to justify ($1200+ per monitor)

That's the exact one I have! It's great, perfect for me. It's old stock I think, in Europe these aren't available anymore :'( I recommend picking one up.

Wow that Dell P2415Q looks very tempting for replacing my junk 1080p 24” work gave.

I'm using a 30" Dell Ultrasharp which would be slightly less dense than yours. It's great, but I'd just like the same visual appeal as the macbook pro I have plugged into it. Text looks far better

32" displays are a sweet spot in size for me as long as the pixel density is >200 ppi, but more for graphics applications than text editors. For 3D applications especially, it's very beneficial to have a lot of area on one screen since the GUI default layouts tend to fit best on 16:9 screens or close to that and larger screens give you larger multi-viewport layouts. 24 inch displays just couldn't come close here. 32" allows me to work in a 4 viewport layout all day long. It's also nice in IDEs, but my main purpose is various graphics applications. And sure I could fiddle endlessly with multi-display layouts but that's such a time suck and every application is completely different so I wouldn't bother no matter what my screen size is.

It makes total sense for graphical applications especially with 3d and the emergent VR/AR stuff and something I'll have to keep in mind.

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.

Can you elaborate on the kvm/switching feature? My current monitor is awful for that, I really just want a dedicated "cycle input" button. Or ideally, an N-position slider switch, but I can't imagine anyone would ever build such a thing.

If it works like the 3419W you have one button press to wake the OSD and then a press on the input you want to switch to. Not terrible, not great either because on the 3419 the OSD is a bit slow and the button are below the screen so you can’t reliable double click to switch.

If you ever try using the KVM feature on for instance a Phillips monitor, you'll realize the Dell feature is a dream!

Oh I’m sure, it’s mostly fine, my biggest annoyance is actually that the OSD buttons take just a bit too much force (especially for how small they are) so you pretty much always lift the corner, which results in the display “bouncing” for a few seconds before it settles.

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).

The Dell 6k has the buttons on the back so this is not a problem.

This is more or less how it works. If you want to install software then you can control it with keyboard shortcuts, but the shortcuts respond much slower than just pressing the button so I doubt anybody actually uses them after trying them once.

Software hotkey/gesture can select monitor input via DDC, https://www.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/hm2mvk...

We have ultrawides at the office that send usb to the source of video in auto mode but also has a button to override that and you press it to toggle between targets. Not sure about brand and model. Can check it when in the office.

The built-in kvm feature is very basic and I don't even setup the keyboard shortcuts because that requires software to be installed on the computers. Basically it just lets me switch between computers with 2 quick button presses on each monitor. I use an additional usb 3.0 switch from CableMatters so my peripherals can be switched between each display incase I want to have both computers up side by side.

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-...

Extremely badass but still 60Hz :(

I wonder if I’ll ever find a way to drive 4k@144Hz and switch inputs without the current cable replugging ritual.

The best option I've found is to hook both computers up to a USB-only KVM, and plug them in via separate video cables to the monitor. Then set up the computers to tell the monitor to change inputs (via DDC commands, which most but not all monitors support) when you change devices on the KVM

There's software to help do this automatically (https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch)

I set this up on my M1 Mac yesterday, it’s awesome, and because I have Mac on all the time I only need it installed on that machine

Gigabyte m32uc

I think displays with built-in KVM switching is your only option right now.

Does this KVM work with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse? Do you have to reconnect the devices every time you switch?

I don't think any KVM supports Bluetooth. You either need to use software like Barrier or get devices that can switch between multiple. The other option is wireless peripherals that use a USB dongle can work fine with KVMs like the ones Logitech sells.

If you want unified switching, you need to go through USB ports AFAIK.

There’s an app called Synergy that lets you seamlessly move mouse and keyboard input between devices, if you ever feel the need to run the Mac and the Windows machines side by side rather than using a KVM switch.

But... it can be a bit spotty. A physical KVM will be far better.

do they make kvms for moving the mouse between screen borders or just switching displays / inputs to a seperate pc?

Not sure, but that's definitely a particular thing Synergy does alright. I do find it's a bit meh still between OS' but only in some cases where you might have a full-screen game open on one computer and other non-full-screen content on another.

I personally just use a kvm to switch between computers on my desk with monitors that are dedicated to them because of issues with synergy. But also synergy doesn't work with vpns.

Have you tried that? How does it actually work? Does it not add lag?

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

Synergy worked great without perceptible lag for normal desktop stuff in the late 90s (including across all the steam powered pcs in the school computer room).

Does the refresh rate go higher if you configure it to 4k or 2k?

I don't think so https://www.displayspecifications.com/en/model/cae72f76

Sorry I haven't tried and not near them atm, but I am quite confident it does not.

Would you mind elaborating on the cables and connections? Do you plug a DisplayPort and an usb cable from windows and get kvm working? The monitors are daisy chained?

> Do you plug a DisplayPort and an usb cable from windows and get kvm working?

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.

Thanks for providing all of that information. Maybe I missed you answering this:

What do you do with the monitors? Do you work with images, videos, code, etc.?

My day job is software development for creativity/art related software and I do a lot of visual creative work on the side, both personally and professionally. I use the PC for 3D rendering.

Ugly camera blob up top bother you at all?

I think I misunderstood this question earlier so here's another go at it...

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.

Not enough to have a lower resolution display, and if a higher refresh rate will get rid of it then that is news to me. Will it?

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