Hacker News Reader

Comment by pazimzadeh | Hacker News Reader

Is the mirrored mac as sharp as the rest of the visionOS UI for you? For me it's not. Also, even visionOS UI elements are almost but not quite retina quality unless I move them 1-2 feet from my face, which is exactly what he describes.

Also the FOV is such that there's no point in having a huge screen, since I'd have to move my head from left to right to see everything.

View on HN

It is for me. However it wasn't in its default configuration, where it was actually downscaling a 5K display to 4K. When I changed the display settings on the Mac to actually 4K it got a lot clearer.

Not sure why the huge screen is relevant. I definitely sometimes prefer to have what amounts to a large display further away, rather than a small display up close. I don't see why you'd make it bigger than your FOV.

For me the default is 2560 x 1440. If I change it to 1920x1080 things looks bigger and thus crisper. If I select 3840x2160 or 5K from "show all resolutions" then everything becomes small and blurry.

Right - so 2560 x 1440 is the default for a 5K studio display or old 5K iMac. 1920 x 1080 is the default in MacOS for a physical 4K monitor.

Note that these numbers are half the actual pixel count in each dimension because MacOS defaults to assuming the display is a 2x Retina Display.

So, if you choose the 1920x1080 option you get what I see using my actual 4K display. It also avoids the downsampling, because the stream itself is 4K and so is sharper.

I don't know why Apple set the default for 5K downsampled.

Ah ok that makes sense then, thanks!

Nope. The 4K limitation is a letdown and it’s in the virtual display implementation because native applications, and the browser look amazing.

Are you using it at 4K, or in downscaled 5K (which I agree is disappointing)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com