Ask HN: What monitor(s) do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What monitor(s) do you use?

3 pointstbolt9 comments

I've bounced around a handful of monitors over the past few years; haven't seem to found an ideal one yet. Though i'm thinking maybe LG C-series OLED 42" could be fun. Nice big canvas, 120hz, built in speakers, clean look.

What do you all use?

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A Dell U4021QW 40" 5K2K ultrawide I recently bought gently-used, which replaced the very similar (but lower-resolution) U3818DW I had bought gently-used in 2017.

Why? Two main reasons:

* My M1 Mac, which I can't imagine replacing just yet, only supports one external monitor, but has no problem driving a 40" 5K2K behemoth. I might as well have one of those.

* The built-in Thunderbolt KVM features of the U4021QW and the other Dell ultrawides in this series are just fantastic. M1 Macbook connected by Thunderbolt, Windows desktop connected by DisplayPort, Linux NUC connected by HDMI, all sharing a webcam and other peripherals, works flawlessly with great cable management.

The new 120hz U4025QW looks great, but is still rather pricy. Hopefully in 5 years I'll upgrade to a hypothetical OLED 120hz version of this monitor.

I have a Dell U3818DW that I love. The only thing I would change is to go even higher resolution - so your comment made me go look at the U4021QW. Thanks :-)

I am generally stuck with 32" 4k screens because there's nothing more appealing at the moment.

I might switch to 41.5 oled (like Philips 42m2n8900 — it uses the same panel as C2 but is an actual monitor and has better anti-glare coating, or so I hope) or 42.5" ips/va (and already would have if there was 8k option and it was possible to drive that with eg. mobile radeon 780m), but mostly because I've got some eyesight issues that might work against my desire for crystal clear text and many windows side-by-side.

To prepare for that, I've already replaced my electric height-adjustable desk top with a custom 45" deep one, so now I just need to splurge on the monitor (but I've been holding hope something higher res would come out soon).

My main drivers are being able to fit a lot of windows simultaneously (Emacs, two email clients [yes, business requires outlook], couple of messengers, calendar and a terminal) + keep text nice and smooth, ideally even with subpixel rendering ("ClearType" for MS folks) off (that's why I'd like 8k).

Dell S2722QC, because it looks reasonable, fits nicely on my desk, and shows me the pixels my computer puts out, which is about all I expect a monitor to do. I don't know what "ideal" would mean.

Self illuminating pixels are ideal instead of a backlight illuminating the entire display

A big LED matrix? That would be cool. Do such monitors exist?

I think he's referring to OLED, in which each LED can organically emit light without the glow of a backlight. But in terms of most productivity monitors today, your current one was likely a great value and works just fine.

A Dell monitor monitor I have had maybe 15 years. Its whites are brownish but I dare not try to adjust it because last time it refused to work until I did something I know not what. Why I stick with it is a mystery. Maybe I need to go shopping.

Laptop screen + portait second-hand monitor from time to time when working on or reading long PDFs such as academic papers else turned off to save a few watts.

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