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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a 240Hz, 1920x1080 IPS monitor from Dell, I definitely agree 120Hz -> 240Hz is nowhere as big an improvement as 60Hz -> 120Hz is.

That being said, I would still buy a 240Hz instead of 120Hz if I had a choice and the price difference isn't that much. There is still a perceivable improvement as far as I'm concerned.

On a tangential note, I frankly think 4K (let alone 8K) is a waste of money if you're still rocking 60Hz. The smoothness of 120Hz or above makes a far bigger impact than the higher DPI from rendering 4K. Everything from reading texts to watching videos to playing games benefits from higher refresh rates and to a greater degree than from higher resolutions.

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Reading text definitely benefits from the resolution more than refresh rate. Once you've used HiDPI displays, it's hard to go back to noticeably pixelated fonts.

I'd rather have 1080p at 120Hz than 4K at 60Hz. The most legible font is the one you read the most often (people had no trouble reading cursive or blackletter scripts when they were standard), and pixelation in no way compromises legibility. Blur is a problem, but that's easily avoiding by disabling antialiasing and enabling full hinting.

> Everything from reading texts to watching videos

Video is still generally 24, 25, ~30, 48, 50, or ~60Hz, is it not?

Video needs to catch up to higher refresh rates, but there are also those of us who regularly watch videos at 2x or higher speeds, so there is that edge case where a 60hz video can benefit from a 120hz monitor

Yes. And 1000Hz lets you get reasonable frame pacing even at non-integer multiples of 60fps.

video is typically way less than 120 Hz for sure. There are ways to get your PC video player to increase / motion interpolate your video (similar to how some TVs do it and everything somehow looks like an old soap opera). I myself have found it to work via potplayer with "avisynth processing" enabled plus various tweaks you have to lookup (reddit thread somewhere) to make it work -- presumably it would crank to 1000 hz but never tried.

And even if we assume that there is no further improvement in perceived smoothness or your ability to predict motion; a monitor that updates every millisecond instead of every four millisecond will show you any new information earlier, like say somebody appearing around the corner. It's basically a 1-2% boost to your reaction time just because you get to react earlier. At a competitive level that's nothing to sneeze at

I’m interested; how is reading (static?) text better with a higher refresh rate? Or are you meaning scrolling text in support of reading it is smoother and more appealing?

Not the GP, but yes, scrolling is smoother and more appealing. That can make the difference between choosing to scroll by wheel or by page down key.

In principle I would prefer the latter, but in practice web pages with headers that aren’t accounted for while scrolling causes the key to be quite inconvenient.

Mostly it’s a matter of fatigue, however: low frequency monitors make my eyes get tired faster.

> On a tangential note, I frankly think 4K (let alone 8K) is a waste of money if you're still rocking 60Hz.

Thankfully it's not too expensive to have it both ways, 4K 144hz monitors are pretty affordable now.

I find all the monitors on the market for 4K144Hz are too big. I like 22 or 24 inch for 4K for the super density. 27" is for 5K.

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