Time to Upgrade Your Monitor | Hacker News Reader

Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

30 pointspabs323 comments

> I think that laptops are not good for development. They are great in mobility and convenience, and this argument might outweigh everything else for some people. I accept that. But still, a desktop monitor + external keyboard are always better than a laptop. There might be other reasons for not buying a monitor, but having one, I hope, no one would argue it’s a superior dev environment.

100%! If you look at the image below this statement, the ergonomic disaster of craning your neck down to view the screen ("tech neck") is another reason to use monitors instead of laptops.

Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p. The only monitors that do are 5K displays, but neither of them can do 120Hz.

> the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p

Is this true even with the help of 3rd party apps?

My 3840x1600 ultrawide has that problem using the native screen resolution tools but I can get it to full-res HiDPI using BetterDisplay [0].

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/

Too bad 25-30 inch 5k screens and 20-25 inch 4k screens are still nearly nonexistent. Otherwise, that would be a good size for 2x scale.

There are three 27" 5k screens, the Apple Studio Display, LG Ultrafine and the Samsung Viewfinity S9. I just picked up the Samsung for $700.

The prices for monitors with the features described in the piece have come significantly down from when it was written. You can get a very decent 4K@144hz monitor for around $650 USD.

Even that's high, if you're not fussed about having good HDR then 4K IPS at 144hz can be had for about $400 now.

If you do want good HDR, look to the QD-OLED monitors that are currently flooding the market. Those are still pricey though.

> Because the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter.

> Because TODAY the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter.

There. Fixed.

All the bad examples given have antialiasing applied.

In the past there were bitmap fonts that were redered without antialiasing and they were very sharp (as sharp as a CRT could draw them) and then there was manual font hinting with no size interpolation and again with no antialiasing.

Today we can choose between antialiased fonts that are blurry, or no antialiasing that are sharp, but with ugly random stroke widths.

That's because today, who would spend a year to manually do font hinting on thousands of unicode glyphs and dosens of font sizes? And who would deny the user's "right" to footgun their eyes with a 12.5 font size on a bitmap font that only has sizes 11 and 13px?

Want some proof? Open the devtools on his blog and remove the unhinted "IBM Plex Sans". See how much better it looks with the old Arial instead.

The old fonts that have been designed as bitmap fonts or as scalable fonts, but with good manual hinting (which is equivalent with designing bitmap font variants for a set of usual sizes), can indeed be perfectly sharp.

Nevertheless, such fonts are always uglier than the good fonts which are rendered on a high-resolution display, where more pixels per character cell are available.

Even the 4k displays, when at typical desktop sizes and viewing distances, have a significantly lower resolution than what has been provided by the traditional printing of books on paper and than what is needed to exceed the resolution of normal human vision.

I do not consider any display that is uglier than a printed book from a few centuries ago as an acceptable display.

I accept your choice. Buy whatever monitor you like.

It would be good if programmers like that guy would accept MY choice and not force antialiasing on my eyes, and then blame the monitor instead of the font and the rendering engine.

I feel I would prefer to have one 6k 32” monitor to the two 4k 27” monitors I have had for years.

Because I feel I have to move my head too much with two monitors.

Oh man I sound so spoiled!

6k, 32”, P3, and 120hz will be the holy grail. Probably requires a newer DP standard though.

DP 2.1 is arriving with ludicrous amounts of bandwidth (up to 80gbit/sec!) but it brings a new set of problems, copper cables rated to carry the full bandwidth are limited to about 1 meter. To go any further than that you will need some kind of active cable which don't exist yet. Moving that much data is hard.

Isn’t it “easy” to move that over fiber?

I’d think the kinds of people willing to pay for this combo wouldn’t mind having to pay for this cable.

Either way, 1m seems ok.

From 2020.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551983

4k (1080) is just way too small for me. I don’t see that many 5k or 6k options for a reasonable price. What is a nice setup for a developer? Go with 2x4k screens and you’re looking at bezels dead ahead, 3x4k and you’ll have to move your head a lot, or 1x6k?

4k Ultra wide?

It needs to be retina as per the article's point.

I'm not sure what you mean by 4k(1080), but... I have an LG 38WN95C-W Ultrawide [0]. It's great for coding, great for video (IPS LCD so obv not deep OLED blacks), great for games...

3840x1600 resolution, which is roughly 3/4 of 4K cut horizontally.

[0] https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/ultrawide/38wn95c-w/

By 4K (1080) I meant that a 4K screen has a typical resolution of 3840x2160, which gives you at 2x scale factor an equivalent screen estate as a 1920x1080. That's too little screen estate for me.

The screen you referenced would be even less than that at 2x scaling factor: 1920x900, which is even fewer screen estate. A 4k ultrawide is not retina, so doesn’t cut it.

I use it with an 1x scaling factor, so 3840x1600.

My question is in spirit with what this article is suggesting: upgrade your displays to get crisp rendered text at 2x scaling factor.

I use a 4K 43" Samsung TV as a monitor.

I can just get the whole width in my lateral field of vision, but I really need to move my head slightly to gain sharp visual focus all over the screen.

Wit a vertical 'resolution' of 2160, it gives me lots of lines of text.

Is this sponsored by big monitor? 120Hz displays for "barely moving texts"?

"barely moving texts" ? You must not be aware that, to render the cursor, the whole "surface" of the monitor is rendered. They call this: "progress". /s

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