Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
daniel.lawrence.lu
daniel.lawrence.lu
Apart from programming, one of the motivations for getting the 8K display is to look at lidar point clouds. For example the desktop background in my post is a lidar map of Bernal Hill in San Francisco, which I've here downsampled to only 13006 x 7991 px for your convenience [1].
Admittedly, when I bought it at first, I didn't realize there would be so many random issues, as manufacturers all advertised their gear as "8K Ready" even in 2021. As I incrementally fixed the problems, I decided to document my journey in this blog post.
btw I posted this in the past but it got caught by the spam filter and disappeared [2], not sure how to appeal that when it happens. Thanks ingve for posting it again!
[1] https://pics.dllu.net/file/dllu-lidar/tldr_707_all_c_fine_50... (13006 x 7991 px)
https://www.philips.co.uk/c-p/42M2N8900_00/evnia-gaming-moni...
I use glasses (myopia) and can kind of tolerate the edges of my 32" 4k monitor, but I can't fathom craning my neck all the way up to the edges of a 55"+ display. Not to mention font sizes.
Anyway, I use browsers at 150% scaling usually, although the text is finer on my terminals. I don't use any scaling for UI elements and terminals. Using the i3 tiling window manager, I put more commonly used terminals on the bottom half of the screen since I find that the top half does require more neck craning.
I'm 184 cm tall.
I just bought a 39" ultrawide and for the first few days I thought "oh dear, I have to keep turning to see the whole thing," but I've not even thought about it for a couple of weeks now, so I guess I'm acclimated.
YMMV.
If I sit far from the monitor, then the FOV could be reduced, but then I have to increase the font size defeating the very purpose of maximizing screen real estate.
The longer focal length is much better for eye health, with less stress on ciliary muscles for focusing.
IIRC, some monitors have curved surfaces. Maybe that feature would help you?
> There is also a Dell UP3218K, but it costs the same as an 8K TV and is much smaller and has many problems. So I do not recommend it unless you really don’t have the desk space. Sitting further back from a bigger screen provides the same field of view as sitting close to a smaller display, and may have less eye strain.
What brand and model of desk do you have? I have a 48" TV but I sit rather close so it probably takes up the same field of view as your 65".
As to your last paragraph, if you email hn@ycombinator.com and explain the situation, they'll sort you out and sometimes put you into a second chance pool, as it's called.
I got the black laminate desktop in a custom 75" x 42" dimension so the whole thing cost me almost $2000.
[1] https://www.upliftdesk.com/uplift-4-leg-standing-desk-v2-v2-...
Nothing wrong with doors as desk, just get the framing solid.
https://www.aboutamazon.com.au/news/workplace/how-a-door-bec...
Half inch thick solid kiln dried door sized jarrah hardwood is even better .. but that's likely not to hand for most and expensive to order if not.
Is this available outside of Australia? Your suggestion seems oddly specific.
> Your suggestion seems oddly specific.
Hardwoods make great table tops, I've always had jarrah workbenches and general desktops and used other woods for 'fancy' tables .. but then I'm in W.Australia and used to recover treefall for slabbing in sheds and using in Brady Drums etc. (I knew Chris Brady back in the day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55SXxWz0Vpg)
> Is this available outside of Australia?
Significant tonnages of it were blocked, shipped to England as ballast and used to pave the streets - as a consequence quantities are still kicking about the UK after being recovered and repurposed.
Meanwhile, my 60"x30" motorized sit/stand desk is on wheels.
most desks are only 60 or 80 cm
If you want a cheaper option you could buy an IKEA Karlby Countertop that's 74" x 42" [1] and mount it on the legs yourself.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/karlby-countertop-for-kitchen-i...
So, 8K TVs are a big energy-suck! There's a reason why European regulations banned 100% of 8K TVs until the manufacturers undoubtedly paid for a loophole, and now 8K TVs in Europe are shipped in a super-power-saver mode where they consume just barely below the maximum standard amount of power (90w) ... but nobody leaves them in this mode because they look horrible and dim!
If everybody were to upgrade to an 8K TV tomorrow, then I think it would throw away all the progress we've made on Global Warming for the past 20 years ...
E.g. let's say I drive 10 miles a day to get to the office vs use an 8k TV at home?
If I go out of my way to work from home, would I be ethically ok to use 8k monitor?
Back of the napkin it seems like 8k monitor would be 10x better than driving to the office?
There's no "fixed budget" of energy that is ethically ok to use. The parents point was that these devices are woefully inefficent no matter which way you look at them.
The "best" thing to do would be neither, and is usually to just use the device you have - particularly for low power electronics as the impact of buying a new one is more than the impact of actually running the thing unless you run it 24/7/365
Not even 0.00001 W? How is it ethical to live in the first place in such case?
> The parents point was that these devices are woefully inefficent no matter which way you look at them.
It's always a trade off, of productivity, enjoyment vs energy efficiency, isn't it? If I find a setup that allows me to be more productive and enjoy my work more, certainly I would need to balance it with how much potential waste there is in terms of efficiency.
> The "best" thing to do would be neither, and is usually to just use the device you have
That's quite a generic statement. If my device is a budget android phone, do you expect me to keep coding on it, not buying better tools?
>> There's no "fixed budget" of energy that is ethically ok to use.
> Not even 0.00001 W? How is it ethical to live in the first place in such case?
The idea of no fixed budget is there is no binary threshold. Where above is bad and below is okay. Just a spectrum.
Is there a level of energy that is ethically okay to use for video games?
My point isn't that all energy use is bad, it's that there's no line that says "use to hear as you wish but everything after this is wrong"
This is wrong for basically everything we ever use - from a house, to an electric car. And especially for small items like electronics
To put it in perspective, an electric car might need 350 Watt-hours per mile. A 10-mile drive would use 3.5 kWh. That's equivalent to about 24 hours of using that monitor at normal settings, or about 8 hours at maximum brightness.
The comparison doesn't make sense, though, because if you drove to the office you'd still be using a monitor somewhere. A single 4K monitor might take around 30-40W. Using four of them to equal this 8K display would come in right around the 139W typical power consumption of the 8K 65" monitor.
I run my screen on a brightness setting of 21 (out of 50) which is still quite legible during the day next to a window.
Also, I have solar panels for my house (which is why I'm able to see the total power usage of my house).
The parent comment is completely wrong on nearly every point it makes. I don't know why it's so upvoted right now.
It doesn't even pass the common sense test. Does anyone really think TVs have 200W CPUs inside just to move pixels around? That's into the territory of a high-end GPU or server CPU. You don't need that much power to move some pixels to a display.
200W is the realm of powerful GPUs and enthusiast/server CPUs.
Common sense would rule out an 8K TV requiring as much power as an entire gaming GPU just to move pixels from the HDMI port to the panel.
RTINGS measured the Samsung QN800A as consuming 139W typical, with a peak of 429W.
Your numbers aren't even close to accurate. 8K TVs do not have 200W CPUs inside. The entire Samsung QN800A uses less power during normal operation than you're claiming the CPU does. You do not need as much power as a mid-range GPU to move pixels from HDMI to a display.
> There's a reason why European regulations banned 100% of 8K TVs
This is also incorrect. European regulations required the default settings, out of the box, to hit a certain energy target.
So large TVs in Europe (8K or otherwise) need to come with their brightness turned down by default. You open the box, set it up, and then turn the brightness to the setting you want.
> until the manufacturers undoubtedly paid for a loophole
This is unfounded conspiracy theory that is also incorrect. Nobody paid for a loophole. The original law was written for out-of-the-box settings. Manufacturers complied with the law. No bribes or conspiracies.
> If everybody were to upgrade to an 8K TV tomorrow, then I think it would throw away all the progress we've made on Global Warming for the past 20 years ...
The Samsung QN800A 8K TV the author uses, even on high settings, uses incrementally more power than other big screen TVs. The difference is about equal to an old incandescent lightbulb or two. Even if everyone on Earth swapped their TV for a 65" 8K TV tomorrow (lol) it would not set back 20 years of global warming.
This comment is so full of incorrect information and exaggerations that I can't believe it's one of the more upvoted comments here.
Can you explain why does a TV's power fluctuate so much? What does peak load look like for a TV? Does watching NFL draw more power than playing Factorio?
I have a 42" 4k LG OLED. With a pure black background and just a taskbar visible (5% of screen), the TV draws ~40W because OLED pixels use no power when displaying black.
Opening Chrome to Google's homepage in light mode pulls ~150W since each pixel's RGB components need power to produce white across most of the screen.
Video content causes continuous power fluctuation as each frame is rendered. Dark frames use less power (more pixels off/dim), bright frames use more (more pixels on/bright).
Modern OLEDs use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) for brightness control - pixels switch rapidly between fully on and off states. Lower brightness means pixels spend more time in their off state during each cycle.
The QN800A's local dimming helps reduce power in dark scenes by dimming zones of the LED backlight array, though power consumption still varies significantly with content brightness. It's similar to OLED but the backlight zones are not specific to each pixel.
Dark mode UIs and lower brightness settings will reduce power draw on both QLED and OLED displays.
Traditional LCDs without local dimming work quite differently - their constant backlight means only brightness settings affect power, not the content being displayed.
This explains those power fluctuations in the QN800A measurements. Peak power (429W) likely occurs during bright, high-contrast scenes - think NFL games during a sunny day game, or HDR content with bright highlights. For gaming, power draw is largely influenced by the content being displayed - so a game like Factorio, with its darker UI and industrial scenes, would typically draw less power than games with bright, sunny environments.
I was under the incorrect impression the power consumption would related to the rendering of the image (ala CPU/GPU work). Having it related to brightness makes much more sense.
Private jets can't run off nuclear power grids. Also the real problem-child of emissions is not America. China has a billion more people, what are their TVs like?
The US consumes 500 gigawatts on average, or 5000 watts per household.
So if every household bought an 8K TV, turned it on literally 100% of the time, and didn't reduce their use of their old TV, it would represent a 10% increase in power consumption.
The carbon emissions from residential power generation have approximately halved in the past 20 years. So even with the wildest assumptions, it doesn't "throw away all the progress we've made on Global Warming for the past 20 years ...".
The average American household uses about 29 kilowatts of power per day (29,000 megawatts).
The difference between using a 4K screen and 8k screen for 8 hours a day is about 100 megawatts difference.
I wouldn't get over excited about something increasing overall energy usage ~2.5%.
Ignoring the megawatts error that the sibling pointed out, it's 29 kilowatt hours per day. Watts are a unit of power consumption -- joules (energy) per second.
One kilowatt hour is the energy used by running something at 1,000 Watts for one hour.
I replaced it with an LG 43UN700 which is a 43" 4K display that I use unscaled and although the LCD panel is vastly inferior I love the thing especially at the price point (under $700). I hope manufacturers continue to support this niche of large singular flat displays because they are fantastic for coding, data viewing/visualization and pitch hit at content consumption as your article states although this one would be no good for gaming. And getting a "monitor" or "professional display" firmware load means a lot less problems than a Smart TV load.
After that phone call to customer support, I made a similar vow to never buy another Dell product. These days, I use a Framework laptop.
Batteries (and ie chargers) are one of the things that's utterly idiotic to shop around on chinese portals. You literally always get what you pay for (or worse) and can't punch above this threshold.
These days I'm older and wiser.
We had a commodity (local cloud) computing Dell infra in the mid 2010s and were constantly replacing/returning “simple stuff” (fans, support flanges, memory, NICs).
“Dude, you’re gettn’ a Dell” became—-nope, never again.
Dell: the land of motherboard dying and dog shit trackpads.
Asus: dead soldered RAM.
Most BIOS: too long to boot, it's fucking 2024 what is your BIOS doing it needs more than 2s to boot? It was taking the same time to boot 30 years ago.
Every mouse: double click problem due to wrong use of the actuators.
And every hardware company has to try to cram some badly designed software and require you to create an account.
We all had the same OS (NT) to the same patch level, same trackpad config, and same model of Dell laptop and every _single_ trackpad felt different. They weren't strictly "defective", but just wildly disparate physical feels and responsiveness.
I will give shout-outs to: 4th gen Kindles (has physical buttons and lasts forever), first gen iPhone SE, and Microsoft Mobile Mouse 3600.
Me crying in first-gen Ryzen/x370 with my upward of 20 seconds POST time.
I haven't used it much in recent years, I built it for gaming but had kids a couple of years later, now I game on whatever is convenient in the small burts I get; which is also the reason I haven't bothered upgrading it.
> tho@phobos:/usr/local/src/sbcl$ uptime 11:31:50 up 250 days, 21:10, 1 user, load average: 0.60, 0.37, 0.40
I kinda like my desktops.
PS - I have seen Dell go downhill as well. I returned the last Dell laptop I bought. My wife was sitting next to me on the couch and her macbook had full wifi bars while the dell had one bar. I did some research and they were using a pretty cheap wifi controller and maybe also had poor antenna design. I ordered a ThinkPad for the same price and it was great.
Which Samsung are you talking about? We got some new screens at work, Samsung S9 something or other. 27", 5K, thunderbolt 4. As you say, the text is very sharp, and colors seem fine enough. But that's about it, and I would not recommend them at all.
The worst issue is that the viewing angles are ridiculously bad. I'm sitting at arm's length, and the borders are very dark and somewhat blurry. They're of course OK if I move and look at them straight on, but my 32", fairly old LG doesn't have this problem.
Another pain point is the fact that it cuts off the power supply and the USB peripherals plugged in when it goes to sleep. I couldn't figure any way of disabling this behavior. But if you leave your PC running and expecting to connect to it over a USB network adaptor or similar, you're gonna have a bad time.
I believe the viewing angle problem you're talking about is due to the anti-glare finish. It's a trade off for sure (one that some people would not want). I assume that's why Apple offers their consumer 5K monitor with or without that finish.
Apple also has a Pro 5K monitor. LG also has one older 5K, and those are the only 5K monitors currently on the market.
However, in that particular office, there are no strong sources of light that would shine directly on the screens, so it's hard to say how good it actually is, especially when comparing to other models. The screen can also get pretty bright, so it should be able to handle most lighting situations in an office.
I type this on a Dell U3223QE, on a black background, with two lamps right behind me. The lamps aren't very bright, but the room is fairly dark (it's still night here). I can see the glare if I pay attention to it (didn't notice it before reading your comment). This is a 32" screen, sitting at roughly the same distance as the Samsung, yet it doesn't exhibit the viewing angle issue at all.
I do know that having a brightish window behind me with this screen requires upping the brightness, or the glare would be a pain. Never tried the Samsung in that configuration.
Thinking back the only other monitor I've ever lost was a Dell as well.. including 30 years of CRTs and CCFL LCDs never had any issues with other brands :(
Today I mostly use my 16" Macbook, which is quite close to being 4K. I really enjoy the HiDPI and the 120Hz refresh rate, makes it hard to use an external monitor since you can rarely get a HiDPI and high refresh montiro.
Just curious how your experience with sway has been. I installed it but wasn't expecting to come with no config at all and didn't really want to be bothered setting it up just to test screen recording.
The issue with X11 is that even if you record (using any software) it causes the display refresh rate to artificially drop and its a very bad experience overall when you run at 4k144hz. Ultimately, the future is wayland but I am a little surprised how slow it has been for everyone to integrate it into their software.
Similar to hard drive vs SSD. Before I used a machine with a SSD for the first time hard drives were fine, then my normal was conditioned to that of SSD speeds. Going back to hard drive speeds is painful, just like 60hz even for things like moving windows around the desktop.
Not something that makes me want to update the screen right now
I alternate between 120hz and 60hz monitors depending on where I’m working.
For software engineers: 120hz is “nicer”, and if you are buying a monitor today I’d say it’s well worth it to pay another $100 or whatever to go for 120hz+ versus 60hz. Certainly not worth upgrading for this alone however.
For designers: Same as above but it perhaps leans a little closer to being worth the upgrade. The mouse cursor is noticeably much moother and if you’re doing digital painting or something all day, 120hz+ might really be worth the upgrade all by itself if budget allows. Working with the 120hz (or is it 240hz now?) stylus on iPad Pros is revelatory for that kind of work.
For gaming: For any fast action gaming (for games and platforms that support high frame rates) it really is worth the immediate upgrade. Your world now looks and feels fluid. It feels real. Input lag is usually halved as well.
2160p actual 'workspace' resolution at this distance (2 feet?) and size (43") seems close to a practical limit for typical use I thought, requiring with this measly 43" still a little bit of occasional head movement to see the top right corner. I noticed a tendency to sit slightly to the left of centre on this monitor, to avoid distortion and maintain clarity with what I'm focusing on (e.g. code/windows, not reference materials). Because of this I suspect at this distance a 43" with a slight curve would be optimal, at least for me.
What I wanted to ask you:
- What is your 'workspace' resolution? Is it something like 6K? I'm guessing your scaling is either 125% or 150%? Your PPI should be around 135, mine 102.
- Are you actually sat perfectly centre? I was wondering this because I keep noticing I tend to gradually shift my keyboard to the left over a day. Maybe this is years of 1440p + side portrait monitor use, I'm not sure, but eventually I accepted that I prefer slightly to the left (odd because my side portrait was on the left...)
- Do you think a curved monitor at this size/distance would improve the ergonomics? I imagine you must get a bit of a neck workout.
After getting this monitor, I'm pretty much sold on single screens again - but I had to switch my window management from keyboard-based tiling shortcuts to 'hold CTRL and move mouse' window management (BetterTouchTool on MacOS), with a tendency to stack up windows messily. I tried custom resize snap zones with BetterSnapTool - but I don't use them. I think that was the biggest challenge to switch from multi monitor to large format. It's a huge benefit to have everything in your context on one screen, but had to rethink how windows get moved around. Now I'm used to it, I want CTRL/SHIFT + mousemove modifiers on every system to deal with windows.
Also related, I bought a 4K tv last weekend for another system to use as a monitor, but found that the gaps between the pixels were unexpectedly large, creating a strange optical effect at close distance, making it unusable (but so close). There might be something different about the screen outer layer (on most TVs?) that polarizes light in a way better suited for distance viewing, but clearly not all TVs have this issue.
I am old enough to recall 100W as the typical single light bulb and I still use an electric tea kettle that touches the multi kW range daily.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/eu-8k-tv-ban-goes-into-effect...
> I am old enough to recall 100W as the typical single light bulb and I still use an electric tea kettle that touches the multi kW range daily.
Not sure why you mention this here? Just because we had horribly inefficient light bulbs our monitors can use twice as much?
Sort of like how Americans always measure size in “football (gridiron) fields.”
The energy consumption of a traditional incandescent bulb, while obviously inexact, in nonetheless somewhat of a useful rough relative measurement. It is a power draw that is insignificant enough that we don’t mind running a few of them simultaneously when needed, yet significant enough that we recognize they ought to be turned off when not needed.
[edit: the above estimate is almost certainly an upper bound on the energy I would ever use myself with such an item; I would be curious to measure it properly if/when I upgrade to one, and curious if the OP has a measure of their own usage. My best guess is that in practice I would average between 2 and 3 kWh every week (2 USD/month) rather than 5 kWh, because I tend to work in low light.]
I'm regularly in a museum where they showcase some of the 1800s/1900s wares of households in my area. One is a kerosene/gasoline powered clothes iron. Just because something was one common doesn't mean it was good.
> I still use an electric tea kettle that touches the multi kW range daily
How many hours a day is your tea kettle actually using multi-kW? The more useful comparison is how many kWh/day are these appliances using.
And yeah as your comment shows it's really kind of an odd comparison to make in the end. Ultimately I'm of the mind that if the 8K screen really gives you a lot of value then it's probably worth it. You're dealing with that energy cost, and ultimately it's up to society to properly price externalities into the energy costs. You can make the decision whether the energy costs are really offset by the extra value you get.
But like, an 8K screen does use a considerable amount more energy than say a 4K. For a bit back in the day people really started to care about energy use of CRTs as they kept getting bigger and fancier. Then LCDs came out and slashed that energy usage massively compared to an equivalent size. Practically negligible compared to what a decent workstation would use. Now we're finally back to the screen itself using a pretty big fraction of energy use, and IMO consumers should pay attention to it. It's not nothing, it's probably not the single biggest energy use in their home, but it might be around the same as other subscriptions they're questioning in a given month.
And yeah, in the end I think that energy metric should be based on how many kWh you end up using on it in a month or whatever your billing cycle is. Compare it to the value you get for other things. Is it worth a week of tea to run it for a day, cost-wise?
I had a period of time where I bought a car for $3k. I then valued every big ticket thing to the utility I got from a whole car. "That's like .75 Accords, is that worth it?" Kind of an odd way of looking at things but really put a lot of value into perspective.
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Hey, I have a similar setup (https://kayg.org/uses) where I use a LG C148 as my primary TV and monitor. I do all work on it, however I am unable to use tiling window managers as you recommend because I always struggle to see windows / text that is placed above my eye-level. For that reason, I prefer to use manual window management solutions instead. I am curious how do you deal with that problem, one big TV user to another? or do you not have that problem at all? thanks!
Btw I would use two different glass when I use it as tv or playing fs2020/4 vs when I sit close to use it as programming station.
but you should be able to adjust brightness on either the TV or your OS (or both)
In the early 4k era, whenever I saw a TV used as a monitor, the eye strain was high. It was too bright, too contrasty, and generally, the picture was not great for using for things like programming. In addition, many TVs would do not-so-great things to the picture, the worst being digitally sharpening the image (which resulted in e.g. a halo effect around small text).
This might not bother some people, but it bothers me a lot.
How are you finding the display compares to a real monitor? How do I buy TVs which I know won't do this sort of thing?
Pixel density impacts the distance you need to be from the monitor to avoid eyestrain
I think this is primarily driven by console gamers to the benefits of PC users. Our needs align here.
If you check rtings.com they usually evaluate how good the TVs are as a monitor.
You might still have issues with local dimming etc. But that is the price of cheap. Better models works really good today.
I am using a really cheapo LG 43" 4K as a monitor. Properly adjusted it is usable. Would I like better? Yes. But it is worth the trade off. And there are only a few options for a "proper" 4K monitor at 43". I find that a little strange as it hits the sweet spot around 110ppi. I used to used dual monitors but I much prefer a (I know: comically) large screen. Only real annoyance I have is that it does not turn off automatically like a real monitor using DPMS. This means that I have to turn it on using a button. It will turn off after 15 min if there is no signal. Like in the olden days.
I also detest the miniled HDR that they have going on, which can cause bright things to glow, so I disabled that. Unfortunately my QN800A still have a bit of "full screen HDR", namely, that the whole screen may uniformly dim if it detects that the scene is dark. This means that sometimes when you have a black screen with a single cursor on it, it gets dark, and it becomes hard to see the cursor. This doesn't affect normal usage though, when the screen is at a constant brightness.
[1] https://i.dllu.net/2024-10-30-09-36-11_DSCF2616_11f836ca2100...
[2] https://i.dllu.net/2024-10-30-09-37-18_DSCF2617_eeab771f780f...
I know in this case you're working with HDMI and hopefully have managed to set the TV up to just display an HDMI output on bootup, but did you run into any of these infuriating "smart" TV things?
Admittedly it’s a macOS issue.
You mention input lag only once where you say:
> Although this post is mostly focused on productivity, most if not all 8K TVs can be run in 4K at 120 Hz. Modern TVs have decent input lag in the ballpark of 10 ms and may support FreeSync.
Have you measure this, or where do you get this number from?
The TV I bought was also advertised as low-latency, but I found it too high in practice (when typing in code, or scrolling, and waiting for the screen to update).
To me, the segmentation is a feature. It lets me offload information density and focus. For example, I commonly have an editor on one screen, a browser on the second, and something like a chat app, terminal, etc on the laptop screen.
it has quirks and limitations, some of which can be fixed by disabling system integrity protection but it can definitely handle window tiling and navigating with keybindings when you use the companion daemon https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd
I use 3 monitors but would switch to 1 if games respected the dimensions and 8k displays could refresh at 360Hz.
Every modern major OS now has some level of tiling/splitting on a monitor's edges baked into their window manager by default now. Some can be tweaked to split into smaller subgroups, but that often requires less well tested/polished options (some apps just ignore the hints), or even third party extensions.
Continuously micro-manage the layout of individual application windows your window manager is a form of procrastination.
Back to work!
Some discussions over here:
I did get it to work for me with thick black bars between the screens, but when you're giving up an inch of screen real estate for every virtual monitor then you might as well get physical ones.
Initially thought having one monitor experience was more seamless, but I do miss implicit window organizational aspect that dual monitors provide. And screensharing on the ultra-wide is a pain.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...
Most screen share apps should support sharing by window. Also best for privacy (so your viewers don't see the side channel chat notifications pop up).
Also an ultrawide monitor is preferable for spreadsheet warriors.
I will not give up my 49" 21x9 for anything lesser.
Does require two cables of course, but if you're driving an ultrawide, you're probably using a graphics card with three or four outputs anyway.
This is only possible under macOS and Linux, unfortunately. On Windows virtual desktops are still kind of a weird hack that spans one desktop across all monitors.
This article, and a lot of "productivity" articles, feel like spending a lot of time and effort for marginal-at-best improvements. I don't know their specific workflow, but I'm pretty sure they could get basically the same amount of productivity with a handful of 1080p monitors.
> four unique FHD partitions via Internal Multi-Stream Transport (iMST) when connected to a single PC
That's nice for people to organize their windows without needing to figure out a tiling window manager. If only it was 8K instead of 4K...
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-43-4k-usb-c-...
Personally, I'd love an 8k which could act as two 4k in the middle, and two vertical 1920x4320 sides.
I use vertical monitors for documents, documentation, and word-processing.
At the same time I use virtual desktops that I can switch with both keyboard and mouse.
Either I have an abnormally short torso, or that advice was written back when most people were using a 14" display.
Now I put a monitor directly in front of me, and a secondary monitor on the side. No more neck pain.
Sometimes I think about upgrading to a 5k monitor. The Apple Studio Display looks great, but I'm a Windows user and I'm guessing a lot of the nice features of that display are Mac-only.
There aren't a whole lot of options for 5k monitors. Other than Apple I think there's a Dell, but it's too wide. There's a Samsung but I've been burned by Samsung too many times. There's also an LG 5k monitor but it gets pretty weak reviews.
I can possibly be of some help here. I have a Studio Display, however my work-provided machine is a Dell laptop and so that is what is connected to it most of the time.
Providing your machine can output video via Thunderbolt or USB-C, it will work. That is fairly common these days, though Windows machines capable of driving a 5120x2880 signal can be harder to come across, particularly in the corporate laptop world, though I don't know how much of a concern that is to you.
My last work machine maxed out at 4K which the Studio Display would happily scale up to full screen. I would describe it as substantially sharper than e.g. a 2560x1440 display of equivalent size, but still noticeably less sharp than the full native 5K (obviously). My current machine can do the full 5K, but the performance leaves a lot to be desired (however the thing is a turd anyway, too much corporate security crap bogging it down).
Speakers, camera, and microphone built into the display all work totally fine from Windows. What may be a total non-starter is that you need a Mac or iPad to change the brightness, because there's no physical controls on the display itself and Windows doesn't expose a way to control it. I am lucky/unlucky in that my home office does not get a huge amount of natural light, meaning I've been able to set it to a comfortable brightness from my Mac and then just leave it.
Overall it's a very nice monitor if you can work around the brightness thing. A possibly better contender though is the recent-ish 5K variant of the Asus ProArt[0]. I was using the 1440p version of the same monitor before I got the Studio Display, and I was very happy with it. Good colour reproduction, USB-C Power Delivery for one-cable laptop docking, and a far more adjustable stand than the SD. Worth a look.
[0] https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proar...
The ASUS one is pretty interesting and it's only $800.
Also a dual/multiple setup bothers me for losing the mouse boundaries when it crosses to another screen - I'd rather have the mouse bounded on one screen for faster access to menu bars at the edges.
I honestly think the curve is essential when dealing with such a wide display. The alternative would be - as article states - to set it back a little and have a deeper desk so you can actually see the edge of the screen properly. I don't see the point in having a large screen with high pixel density if the edges are not actually easily visible to me without moving my head or body laterally.
The lack of bezels is great though - I'd definitely agree on that front, having 3 web browsers or editors open side by side suits me really well.
I also don't see the point in having a screen so big I have to move my head, or contrarily a screen so big that I have to push it back so the pixel density matters much less.
I have a ruler flat 55” OLED TV as main monitor. It’s perfect for me. I’m like… 1-1.5 meters from it where I’m closest to it, haha. The edges are further away. It’s fine! – imo / ime.
(The need for the curve is also subtly different depending on how the panel was made. I tried a flat 43” IPS 4K monitor, expecting IPS to be good. And it wasn’t very good. The IPS features in that panel were large enough to affect viewing angle.)
The amount of curve also varies a lot between models so there's some nuance even within that. The curve might be as strong as 800R or as weak as 2300R depending on the monitor, where the number corresponds to the radius of the circle the panel follows in millimeters.
These monitors are expensive and do not have very high resolution. If you're not a hardcore fast reflex gamer, and you spend a lot of time looking at text, then IMO it's better to buy a higher resolution monitor for less money.
Even 240Hz is usually enough for really good players. 480Hz is just for the 0.01% who can take advantage of it.
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Swift-Gaming-Monitor-PG32UCDP/dp...
https://www.amazon.com/LG-32GS95UE-Ultragear-DisplayHDR-Dis...
https://www.amazon.com/LG-32GS95UV-Ultragear-DisplayHDR-Dis...
https://www.amazon.com/Predator-Monitor-FreeSync-Premium-100...
If you want pixel density first and speed second then you should go for a 27" 4K instead.
I'm skeptical that any human can take advantage of that. Even 240Hz is stretching it.
I mostly play simulation games, particularly flying, and having a wider FoV makes things easier, until you're ready to go to the top step of using VR instead so you also get depth perception and essentially 360 FoV since you can rotate your head.
During the pandemic I did try out my 4K TV as a game monitor. I had a combination of furniture so that I could sit rather close with my eyes approximately half way up the screen, with a keyboard and mouse in a reasonable position. Then, using an older FPS game I got it to where my laptop GPU could hit good frame rates and I adjusted the game's viewing angle to match how the screen fit my field of view.
It was deeply immersive in spite of me being so close I could "see the pixels". The only time I've felt more immersive was demoing Quake in a 3 wall + floor CAVE at a national lab decades ago.
The math is pretty simple to account for a curved viewport, even though I don't think any apps actually care about that. Most displays aren't curved enough to make it a meaningful difference.
We don't have fixed function pipelines anymore either so that could definitely be handled by hardware.
PC games have kinda been forced to support ultrawides whether they like it or not - the 21:9 class especially has exploded in popularity for gaming PCs.
I've gamed in 32:9 for years now - I wouldn't go back. The curve is not exaggerated enough to be a meaningful projection issue on most curved displays and games.
Got it on a Samsung sale for ~$1500 IIRC, one of the best upgrades I'd ever done.
I sound like a shill, so Samsung plz hmu. $999 for a beautiful OLED monitor that fits a terminal, a browser, and 4 (font size 8...) 100col text editor windows is a gamechanger.
I use mine for productivity only (I don't game at all) and it seems the consensus is OLED's no good for things like Kconsole/xterm (-style) windows and general text readability, though.
The proper monitor height is when the top third of the screen is at or slightly below your eye level when seated or standing upright. This positioning helps prevent neck strain and allows for a comfortable viewing angle.
The top third of a large TV will be much higher than that, which will cause long term discomfort.
That's why large monitors have much wider aspect than TVs.
I haven't noticed any burn-in or dead pixels. You need to set it up for success, enable all the burn-in prevention settings the monitor provides (static image darkening, pixel shifting&cleaning). It's also a great idea to do other things such as sleeping the monitor after 1min if inactivity, no screensaver (or just black), black desktop background, hide taskbars, etc
edit: to add, i have the monitor mounted to the wall and about 1" above the height of my desk[1] - this puts the center of the screen directly at eye level
[1] - https://i.postimg.cc/nhqvM4Yz/62395566614-66-C9-BCAA-367-C-4...
It's otherwise awesome though, for the type of gaming I do (non-competitive, so stuff like D4 and Cyberpunk) it's completely unmatched.
I just wish it was a little bit better for smashing out code without annoying text fringing that distracts me.
If you connect the network to also use it as a TV, if you don't also tick all the right "I do not give you permission" boxes ( and the firmware actually respects these choices ), then your TV will be uploading signatures of everything you watch ( including HDMI inputs ) to the TV manufacturer for them to sell on to advertisers, political parties etc.
While I believe the normal mode of operation is just to upload some kind of image signature / hash, I doubt there is anything that technically or legally stops screenshots being uploaded for "additional analysis".
Note that this is incredibly lucrative for the manufacturers, so their incentives are minimally aligned with protecting our privacy or security here.
https://boingboing.net/2021/11/18/tv-manufacturer-makes-more...
“It can display seven equally spaced vertical columns of text (critical importance), has driver issues (minimal importance), wake issues (who cares), it costs as much as four smaller monitors (this is good), I need a huge desk (hell yeah), there are multiple image quality issues (well it’s not like I have to look at it all day)…”
It is like “I spent fifteen hundred dollars on a multitude of hassles due to purchasing the wrong type of display, but due to the lack of bezel this is a prime efficiency move “
Sure it's 8K but it's 65", it's only got a PPI of 135. For comparison Apple (computer) displays and a handful of third parties that target Mac use are generally 200-220 PPI. That is can't see the pixels density, even if you smash your face against it.
If you are coming from typesetting world, laser printers from the early 1990s did 600dpi (dots per inch), and that remains sufficient for smooth lines, though newer printers will do 1200dpi too. Going down to 300dpi printouts is crap.
Heck, newer Kindles do 300ppi and that can clearly be improved.
Apple's "retina", like all things in life, does work for 90% of the human population as advertised, but there's still a big number of people who have better angular resolution than what they target.
Can you reference an example that shows this phenomenon with angled lines? I haven't had an eye test specifically, but my vision is generally fine, and I don't see the effect you're referring to, on for example a lower-case "y".
Only the first one (dirty screen) is a real issue, but it is subtle and irrelevant to programming; the second one (checkerboard), as the post explains, is solved by toggling an option in settings.
> Driver issues
The post explains that it works perfectly with current NVidia drivers on Linux, and on Windows both AMD and NVidia on Windows have had driver support for HDMI 2.1 for years.
That's one of the main drawbacks of a massive screen is if you lose the pointer it takes a lot longer to find it. It's not a linear scale based on the width of the monitor. It's with the square.
So 50-in monitor is going to be about four times longer to find a mouse pointer than a 30-in one.
I don't like those hotkeys where you know it highlights it. I like the the mouse tail. That's the one that I can most easily find it. But generally those came out of fashion about 15 years ago
I haven't seen anything I like quite as much for quickly finding the cursor as macos's "wiggle for giant cursor" feature.
I have a problem with over-shopping for things, such as spending too much of my life researching and frustrated before either never buying, buying above budget, or just impulse buying making the research time wasted. So, if I can instead work with something I can drive to Walmart and spend $300-400 on, I am happy.
It's been fine but it's nothing special. Does the job and the picture is pretty clear when focused properly. It's bright enough and has good color and picture quality for my purposes. It's 100" on my wall across the room from my couch so we use it a lot for gaming and watching videos. For programming stuff it works but can't optimize for space in the IDE by bumping font size down like I would with high DPI monitors.
I'm also on my second one as the first was left on constantly and started to develop dark spots. They were kind of fun to watch as they'd start really bright and then fade but obviously only in hindsight because it made the screen hard to see. The last time I bought it, the price was dropped I think it was <$200. I have had it for about a year and turn it off when I'm not using it and it's holding up a lot better!
It will do screen mirroring though. It has 2 inputs and I use those directly and it doesn't offer apps or anything from what I've seen.
Remember dropping a grand on a 30- inch 2560x1600 on the day and thinking that was the ultimate.
I The 40 to 45 inch is the ideal, otherwise screen real estate goes too far in the peripheral vision.
The other issue was a lot of really big screen. Real estate is managing lots of Windows. With dual screens you can usually been in Mac's ride of applications more easily than with one cuz when you Max on the super big screen it just takes up everything.
And pushes the usually the most relevant stuff is the upper left hand corner that goes to the upper upper left left corner, which actually is pretty far out of your main field of vision.
But I still love the 43-in 4K TV I've been using since 2010 or so
The most expensive one - the $75 one - is a 24" 1920x1200 IPS display with HDMI, DP, VGA, 2x DVI, S-Video, and YPbPr composite. Never seen those last two on a monitor before, but there they are. I don't use that display as my main one anymore, but I keep it around because it's awesome and it plugs into literally anything.
There are smaller, OLED displays that would be more suitable(while still rather big). Many are 'just' 4k, but the smaller sizes should give one a decent pixel size.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/a1-oled
For anyone using a TV I recommend using https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay to properly scale the display.
> Doesn't support variable refresh rates or HDMI 2.1.
Unfortunately that makes it a deal breaker. The search continues
The trick for me was to wall-mount it and get a deep desk. I prefer to be at least 36" away from it.
A mere 55" with 8K resolution makes no sense as a TV, but it's glorious as a productivity monitor. But instead of becoming commonplace as monitors, the panels seem to just be disappearing even as TV's. At the moment I can't find anything at any price that can replace my current setup.
The market isn't working for monitors. Everything available now is either crap, or costs 10x more than it clearly could. Millions of people are spending years of their lives in front of bad screens because monitor makers don't want to make good ones.
https://bsky.app/profile/benhouston3d.bsky.social/post/3l7li...
I mentioned this here on Hacker News just yesterday, but most respondents were appalled that it was only a 4K monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988340
It doesn't work great with an all white screen but I use dark mode for most things
With the LG I'm about a meter or less away from screen and use window management tools to pull focus to the center lower section for any focused work. I run Win 11 from an RTX3080 card with a 2.1 HDMI cable. 3840x2160 120Hz.
For gaming I just use windowed mode and use the full width of the 65" but just the lower half usually for COD or FPS games. I don't notice any eye strain or other issues but do run everything I can in dark mode including using the browser with the Dark Reader extension.
And if the solution is to sit further away, why not just get a smaller screen and sit closer?
> TVs may have a different subpixel layout than monitors, so small text may suffer fringing. As of writing the Samsung VA and LG IPS panels such as the QN800A have a conventional RGB or BGR subpixel structure. One may also increase the font size or use hidpi scaling which will eliminate all pixel-level concerns.
IT once accidentally bought such a TV and had it in a conference room. Took us a while to convince the relevant people that, yes, it is nominally working fine, it's not "broken" in the sense that it doesn't turn on or half the screen won't light up, but it was intolerable for Zoom screen shares.
But you need to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to end up with those screens. I doubt you could find something labelled a "monitor" that has that, and, well, if you're putting a $150 40" TV on to your computer... I mean... what did you expect?
(There are also low-end TVs that are still using some crappy LCD techs with bad viewing angles that may make them difficult to use up close, but I wouldn't call that a text rendering problem... those issues just wreck everything. I once had a laptop that when used on a lap, had zero viewing angles; if the vertical middle of the screen was correct, the top and bottom was extremely visibly color shifted. Even the cheapest store brand TVs don't seem to be that bad anymore, though.)
It also comes up with very expensive OLED monitors, which do usually have true RGB or WRGB pixels, but their subpixels are usually not arranged in the standard horizontal RGB stripe which breaks most implementations of subpixel font rendering. With a sufficiently high pixel density it doesn't matter, but with the ~108ppi of a 27" 1440p OLED monitor the text rendering can be quite visibly worse than a 27" 1440p LCD.
That’s a previous-generation model. I think all of the LG TVs are good.
There are / were technical caveats. I believe all of them are solved by M3 macs that have HDMI 2.1 ports. (M3 or M3 Pro or something? The ones advertised as 8K capable.) Out of the box, those will do 4K 120Hz HDR with variable refresh rate and full 444 color. This is what you want.
It is possible to get that going on older machines, except for VRR which is more of a nice-to-have anyway.
I have a 2018 Macbook Pro 15”. Disclaimer!: My setup was a “complexity pet”, a tinkering project; There are simpler ways to connect a 120Hz 4K HDR HDMI 2.1 display to a non-HDMI-2-1 mac. And! My tinkering project wasn’t only about getting the display working correctly. It was more about messing with eGPUs and virtualization and stuff. Definitely a long way round.
On my Intel mac, I use an AMD Radeon 6800 XT eGPU with Club3D or CableMatters DisplayPort-to-HDMI 2.1 adapters. Plus some EDID hacking which is easy to do.
EDID is how the display identifies itself to the OS. The EDID payload can be overridden on the OS side. Mostly it’s about copying the display’s EDID and deleting the entry that says the display can accept 4:2:0 color. Only then does macOS switch to 4:4:4 color. I also created a custom “modeline” with tighter timing to get 120Hz going fully.
—Please be assured that this was way more complex than it needed to be. It was for fun!
There are much easier ways to do this. Lots of forum posts on it. On the MacRumors forums iirc? User joevt is The Man.
And even then, what I wrote above is actually easy to do once you know it’s possible.
Mostly though you really want an M3 Mac that just has HDMI 2.1 and is ready to go.
There are/were also OLED gaming monitors available, such as from Alienware. Those have DisplayPort inputs and are ready to go with almost any older Mac. Might be able to find one for a price equivalent to a TV, idk.
I know this a nerdish hill to die on, but I hate fractional scaling with the blazing fury of a thousand suns. To get a 1440p sized UI on a 27" 4k display, you can't just divide by 1.5x the OS has to 3x/2 for every frame. OS X does this best as they've had retina displays for a while, but no OS does this well, and it leads to all sorts of performance issues especially when dealing with view ports. Linux is especially bad.
Having said all that, I absolutely will not be using an 8k tv as a display. I'm currently using a 27" 1440p monitor, and while I could probably handle a 32" 8k display that is the absolute max size I'd tolerate. You start to get into all sorts of issues with viewing distance and angle going larger.
My 27" 1440p is fine for now. I sit far enough away from it that I don't really 'see the pixels' unless I go looking for them. It was also a crazy good deal as it's a 144hz monitor that also has a built in KVM switch that's very useful for WFH.
I'd prefer to skip all that so I'm happy staying on 1440p until 8k monitors are where 1440p monitors are today with regard to price and quality.
I wonder why this didn't stop nvidia.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/uoxtsx/the_nv...
I do agree on the basic idea of not running two monitors tho. I used to, and I got neck pains eventually.
My current setup is a single 32" curved QHD monitor and I wouldn't change it for the world. It's just the right size so you can see the whole screen at once, yet large enough to run 3 browsers side by side.
Also, I want to suggest people to learn about virtual desktops rather than wasting money on bizarrely huge screens or multi monitor setups.
I have a chair with a headrest, my neck never has to move at all, I can see all parts of the screen just by scanning my eyes. Very rarely does my neck ever move and it's usually to see the 65" Tv a few feet over - and even then my chair has a swivel and if I'm watching the Tv more than the computer, my chair will swivel over, not my neck.
My neck is just fine, thanks.
I can only speak from my own experience, and from what I heard others expressing online over the years.
For me, it was absolutely real and I thought for a while I had some other medical condition.
My issue was that I spent too much time of the day reading of the monitor to my left, twisting my neck while doing it. After a few years I started getting worse and worse neck pains.
I have seen this confirmed many times since by others online.
So please be aware this is an issue, but I am happy that your body still haven't said no.
If I want to have multiple things open and be able to glance at them at once, how would virtual desktops help with that?
This sounds a little condescending especially when the author is clearly a technically savvy user who uses a tiling window manager.
I have been using a 55" 8K QE55QN700BT ($1400) at home since Jan. 2023 and a 55" 8K QE55QN700C ($1100 on sale) at the office since August 2023.
I can tell you that I will never go back, but there is definitely room for improvement.
Biggest negative: Sitting close (~12"), the far areas are probably at >45° angle (and TV colors are not great at angles)
Eye strain is ok (lowest brightness & low contrast), but neck strain is a thing (which I never had before, but now I think my neck muscles start to be trained and it's getting better).
Price is amazing, compared to 4x 4K
Refresh rate 60Hz: not for ego shooters (but great for work)
I didn't think it was possible, but at work I operate an 8k, 4k, and a full HD screen from the same graphics card (i need the other screens for UI testing)
Glossy is not great (no matte TVs on the market)
Even at 12", I operate Windows at 175% scaling, so I still have pixels to spare. Next TV will be 65" :)
At the beginning I thought it was a failure, until I found the correct settings combination: TV Gaming Mode, disable all AI image gimmicks, set the correct refresh rate in the NVidia driver options (at first everything was extremely sluggish, until by chance I saw that the refresh rate was set to 30Hz by default). I also remember playing with the V-Sync settings until finally I didn't see visual pixel artifacts anymore. Now the quality is the same as my 4k monitor.
Work colleagues just can't see it... (just like they laughed at the 2nd monitor, and then at the 3rd, and now most use 3 monitors).
No hassle with monitor arms. Such set it on the table and done.
Microsoft PowerToys FancyZones is amazing to divide the screen into areas
Next: TCL unveiled the first curved 8k 65" TV, that's where I'm going :)
Who knows how much it will cost... My theory for the low prices for the 55" 8k TVs is that most people in the TV market go for the 65" version.
Regarding reading distance: For me the important part is to sit straight and avoid hunching. Choose a combination of distance and screen scaling factor that works for you...
For me the holy grail of monitors is a 55" 8k curved screen. Not "ultrawide", I want the full width and height and I want it curved, with full 8k resolution. Maybe someday, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high.
The 8k monitors are progress!
Then it hit me that I can only focus on one thing at a time since I’m a human being, and having multiple attention grabbing things in front of me is never good. I now run a single Studio Display and have a code editor in full screen, switching to other content through virtual desktops. I’m WAY more productive this way.
Now I might just have a short attention span and that’s that, but using a TV as a monitor sounds like hell to me now.
I used to be able to just share one entire monitor and could drag windows I wanted to make visible to that display. Now I tend to share single applications, and have to unshare and reshare to change the view.
First world problems and all, but it would be nice if Zoon let you partition off a part of a display (instead of all or nothing). Would love to draw a bounding box of “share everything in this box.”
I don’t think this annoyance is enough to make me go back, but there are times when I’ve considered it.
This is making me want to get some blackout curtains for my living room so I can go back to occasionally working with my laptop hooked to the projector, though. It's about the same resolution as my laptop but it's really nice to be focusing on something across the room for a change.
I've found a 43" 4k is about the right pixel size for me; a 49" 4k was too big on a desk. Fortunately, it died and I could get a smaller replacement.
I suspect a 49/50" 8k would be ideal, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
What I do instead is configure the desktop to only use the equivalent of about a 36" display. That way it works like a single large monitor that I can scan left to right with mostly just eye movement.
Why have a big TV as a monitor only to use a smaller portion of the screen? The TV reverts to just being a TV during non-work hours (when we use its full dimensions), so it doesn't feel like wasted real-estate - in fact it frees up space for me in the office by doing double-duty as a monitor and a TV.
I am wondering how 8k displays would look replacing my current samsung 4k's as these are pre-HDR, but I'll probably use these until they start dying with no complaint. Plus no one does curved displays now, which I'll miss from my current TV monitors.
That checkerboard effect is certainly interesting. Someone somewhere is going to be nostalgic about this artifact someday, maybe they'll even make a shader to emulate it. I wonder what causes it and why it disappears in game mode.
> on Linux it took about two years for 8K 60 Hz support to work, spawning a salty thread on GitHub
All I see is paying customers asking for support.
> The AMD on Linux fiasco is because the HDMI Forum has prohibited AMD from implementing HDMI 2.1 in their open source Linux drivers.
That's weird since nvidia's open source driver has an implementation.
There's less of a gulf now than in the past, but TVs are generally made for media watching at a distance.
* Curved (flat is eye strain above ~40 inches)
* 8k.
* Flicker free / PWM free.
* Not glossy.
Otherwise, I'm in!
Ready to retire my fleet of 2560p x 1440p vertical mounts.
Note: Combined these effectively form a curved 5760p x 2650p monitor with vertical bars, heh.
I use Windows and the PowerToys utility which might arguably be the best window manager I've used, even about tiling window managers on Linux, simply because I can specify exactly the layouts I want for every single virtual desktop and every single app.
Overall it works well but for the first little while I did get a headache from sitting too close, but it went away soon after.
I'd be willing to give up >60hz refresh rates, which pulls in the Apple Studio Display, but it also only has one port, which means I'd be giving up my gaming PC. That was mostly on the way out anyway, but it's currently a psychological blocker.
Has monitor tech stagnated, or is this another case of the tyranny of the majority (less-than-Retina PPI) crowding out everything else?
Unless I'm misunderstanding, one of the advantages of using physically distinct monitors is that it's easier to send things into a full screen mode without affecting the other displays - I guess apps that support "borderless windows" are less of an issue.
Maybe there's some type of cross platform (Mac, Lennox, Windows) virtual display driver software that can allow you to create "picture in picture" virtualized monitors though?
This is one of the reasons I stuck with two monitors instead of one long one when I upgraded a while back. I know there are workarounds and helper programs you can install and whatnot, but I like being able to drag something to the side and full screen it without any additional hoops. Plus the long monitor crowd tend to have things centered on the screen and then have small accessory areas to either side instead of two distinctly large screens. Plus resolution wise, unless you're going with a really wide monitor, you probably have more overall resolution with two screens, especially if price is a factor at all. Standalone 27" monitors are basically the standard and are priced accordingly.
My previous setup was a 34" curved ultrawide and I didn't like it. Primarily due to the poor text quality and generally feeling it encouraged too much distraction.
I like being able to have very separate concerns per-display -- code editor on one display and browser on the other, and then I use virtual desktops on each one where needed.
The Dell UltraSharp UP3218K
That's XBox Scorpio old.
Just hoping for some 32 inch 8k OLEDs driveable @120hz before my eyesight detoriates.
Isn't "plain" DP 1.4 confined to HBR3 - thus its maximum refresh rate is 8K-30Hz?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Resolution_and_ref...
HiDPI, two 4k monitors without a bezel, 120Hz, and no need for a separate thunderbolt hub.
This is naive speculation lacking empirical support. Most movies are released at 23.976 fps, which would necessitate at least one double frame being presented per minute at refresh rates which are multiples of 24 fps. Also there is no 48 fps version of The Hobbit currently available on home media.
This display is color, however I have considered getting a grayscale only rads display for "ADHD purposes" i.e. the same reason people are interested in e-ink displays (well, one reason).
It will probably be a huge waste of time and money but I'm just a masochist for tech pain I guess...
I wonder if there's an interesting reseach opportunity: how complex does a syntax need to be before highlighting is beneficial - and is it ever really? I don't think highlighting ever helps me understand code or even more quickly grasp it - it's mainly just a way to cue a syntax problem.
Examples:
In a perfect world I'd have smart glasses that would display arbitrary resolutions that you could move, minimize and expand at will.
I split it into 3 sections (browser for docs, and rest terminal/nvim), but i can easily change this if I want to show slack for example. For gaming I go fullscreen (and use overlays for stuff like VOIP or browsing) because it is a lot more immersive.
But you can't use the computer at the same time then. With a 3 monitor setup I can add an HDMI switch to one of them, and when I want to play, then I can switch that monitor to connect to the PS. This way I have still 2 monitors to use. Then one can be used for TV in the browser and the other one for other stuff.
So anything above 30-ish inches I would consider either curved (expensive for hidpi resolutions) or two/three 27" screens angled a bit.
I can't imagine how bad it would be on a 65" flat screen.
That chart doesn't even fully account for the increased size, pixel density, color accuracy, contrast, and refresh rates.
I'm sure not everyone would run into that problem, but it is a fairly strong con to be aware of.
Another option could be to temporarily lower the resolution.
And how does it look when you press page-down or scroll? Or insert a line on the left? Any lag?
Or is the only solution to clone the file into 7 different views? Seems hard to keep track of.
Edit: ok, I guess Figure 3 is 7 separate files? But without tabs at the top?
I've since switched to a 32" 4k curved display (still 16:9, not ultrawide) and have been much happier. The curve makes more of the view useful from the periphery and the display has some quality-of-life features, like displaying multiple inputs as separated and ratio-configureable "monitors" in hardware. It's also nice to have controls on the display; the TV relied on the remote, and I kept losing track of it.
The only thing I miss is being able to switch to watching sports at the end of the work day, and being able to cast video to it. Those were luxuries duplicated by other things already in the house. I'd like to say I miss gaming on it but I honestly don't, it's much nicer to not have to extend the keyboard and mouse back far enough to also see the entire display at once.
I work mostly with text and code so the curve isn't an issue, and I could see designers preferring a flat panel to avoid distortion. Otherwise I'm not sure I could go back to having such a large display, much less a 65" display.
EDIT: Per another comment, I have mild hyperopia diagnosed about a year into using this setup, which continued for another year after getting glasses to correct it. My prescription has not changed since getting the new display.
New ideal setup is 8k120hz TV placed about 3-4' away. Better for the eyes too.
The one issue that I have with using TVs as "monitors," is that they are too damn "smart." They play with the images, and it can be a devil to find all the settings, to turn them off. On my Samsung, there's a couple of things that I can't turn off.
It’s extremely sharp for normal use, and doubles as a 4K 120Hz monitor for gaming.
Well that's not technically true...
https://www.jvc.com/usa/pro/projectors/dla-vs8000g/
But obviously not affordable.
https://www.projectorcentral.com/JVC-DLA-VS8000G.htm
I'm not sure if they ever shipped it to any retail customers. I'm a JVC projector owner so I kinda follow JVC projector news. The higher end JVC PJs are used by Boeing for flight sims:
https://www.boeing.com/defense/support/training/constant-res...
JVC accommodates that use case with things like extra chassis mounting points to allow the projector to be mounted securely in a dynamic environment. This looks like it may have been an early POC in native 8K for Boeing.
Note that it took a few weeks for JVC to get back to me.
Getting 3 32" 4k monitors is still better than having a single point of failure. But also I'm extremely happy with my single Odyssey G9 55".
I bought a 30" monitor back in 2008 when that constituted a large monitor. It had a 12 month warranty and died after 13 months. :-(
I switched to 2 24-inch monitors which cost less, had more total pixels, and most importantly I no longer had that single point of failure.
My 780M already struggles running GNOME at 4k, so maybe that's for the best.
27 inch is the sweet spot for me. The further through my career the more i've effective with smaller screen space and I am.
I actually prefer working on my 16 mbp nowadays.
Anything bigger than 43" diagonal causes neck pain because it is too tall.
I understand three 32" TVs also work.
I plug my TV directly into my laptop with a USBC -> HDMI cable. Docking stations often fall back to lower refresh rates.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seiki+4k
Niche no more.
1. At what size and resolution are flat screen monitors most useful?
2. At what size do curved screens start becoming useful?
3. What is the upper limit for useful screen sizes?
4. Is there an upper likit for useful resolutions?
The 4th one I've seen the most heated discussions about. In my opinion, highest you can afford (both money-wise and computational power-wise) is the most useful resolution. Even if you can't distinguish the individual pixels (aka screen door effect) aliasing is still an issue.
I have a feeling they might not be able to repair it, in which case I am getting a Lenovo P40w-20 which is currently on sale for $1099 at Walmart for some reason.
But yeah, we're talking $1k+, if you want both high-resolution (5K) and ultrawide. If you're ok with good old 16:10 aspect ratio, then a 5K monitor is much more affordable.
Ended up with two vertical 4k monitors. Side bonus: I can put my web cam dead center in front of me.
For my money, I have 2x 1080p 24” displays, and a third curved 32" 1080p display which is hooked to a KVM so I can game on it.
I like the 3 monitor setup because they are all at angles from each other, approximating a huge curved display. Plus, this was a cheap setup off woot.com parts.
1600x1200 on a 21" CRT was king. though.
Also, old stuff lacks shady smart features. Bonus!
I kid, of course. I wouldn't want to use it myself, but you do you.
I am still on dual fullhd display and was considering a single 4K or 5K display vetween 27 and 32".
I don't want or need my monitor to take up a huge amount of space. But I do want high pixel density. Looks like I'm in too small a market to serve.
I know I'm getting into old man yells at cloud territory here, but nobody needs this. Code on a 1024×600 netbook display, it will build character.
From the 90s on 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 2048x1536 were resolutions one could find on professional displays.
From the 2010s on resolutions increased tremendously and 3840x2160 became the norm for consumer and professional displays.
When working with code you essentially work with text. You just want a big canvas and crisp text, thus high resolution.
Where do you think those vi commands come from?
ed(1)
/old man yells at cloud
It looked pretty nice, but it had some problems.
- The only actual 8K modes reported on the HDMI were some variant of YUV, it means you could not select what your OS considered an RGB mode
- Even using it at 4K, with the 55" TV a couple of feet from the back of the desk, my eyes could not keep all of it perfectly in focus.
- The power consumption was much higher than a typical ~30" monitor, and the amount of heat created was also significant. This became hard to deal with in summer.
Eventually I gave up on it and returned to a ~30" monitor.
All else being equal, a TV (i.e., TV-sized) unit generally has a broader set of use cases and longer useful lifecycle than a computer monitor for the original purchaser†, which could be argued makes good economical sense.
† in my experience, computer monitors can have a long useful life when factoring in the potentially long tail of "donor/hand-me-down" cases...
- I am very sensitive to glare, and all TVs are glossy
- Smallest size you can get is 55" (up to 50" would be good for me as I keep my 32-incher on a custom 8" stand — I am pretty tall — so it would simply be a wider screen that goes to my desk with top being at the same point)
- Connectivity sucks: I am so used to running only my laptop with a single USB-C connection: I had enough with early Dell MST 24" 4k screen that required 2 DP 1.1 connections IIRC (basically the same thing their 32" 8k has).
- I've mostly use Linux (Mac for work though)
So I am waiting for a monitor that can do 8k at 60Hz with an ultraportable that runs Linux and an iGPU that can drive it for productivity (software dev, browsing, video calls — yes, full screen video call is a hog at large resolutions, at least in Linux).
I'll probably sacrifice on the resolution front next (4k at 32" is not enough either) and go with a 4k option at 42-43" people have mentioned elsewhere.
maybe my eyeballs don't rotate far enough?
Counterpoints:
• All my keyboard muscle memory is setup for multi-monitor setups. Theoretically fixable with the right tiling window manager... which I would presumably have to install, since I do too much Windows stuff to go full time Linux. Or perhaps develop. Buying more monitors is a better use of my time.
• I curve my monitors inwards, intentionally, for better viewing angles. Also lets me hide a tower in one of the corners behind the curve on a straighter desk.
• I do too much multi-machine development (e.g. testing refactoring of multi-platform abstractions.) HDMI switches are super convenient, your TV's picture-in-picture functionality... may or may not be. Dual Windows PCs for testing on nVidia and AMD simultaniously, or remaining unblocked when busy reformatting/reinstalling/compiling/linking/syncing 100GB+ on one? Yes please. It's often interactive enough to want to keep open, yet passive enough to need something else to do. OS X for iOS and Linux for debugging server code? Sure. iOS and Android? Well... those have their own monitors. Consoles don't though, and I've targeted those too..
For an entertainment setup, I can usually scrape by with 2 or 3 monitors (1 landscape for fullscreen game, others typically portrait for chat/wiki/etc). Right now, I'm on a 75" 4K chonker. I have good eyes, but 8K would be a waste of pixels, and I'm already close enough that the viewing angles are noticable. Yet, I still hauled out a second monitor: an old 2.5K to exile junk I want to monitor off the main screen.
For a development setup, I've bought or brought a 4 x 27" 4K setup if one isn't provided. A 5th monitor has occasionally been useful (1 landscape for console, 4 portrait for console IDE, devtools, devtools IDE, and docs/wiki/jira/chat/notes. Replacing the 4x portrait with 2x 8K landscape... would probably work, at least, although I'm not convinced it'd feel like much of an upgrade, if any.)
4k screens are already somewhat questionable for productivity for this reason alone. The only serious argument that can be made is 1440p vs 1080p (personally I would argue for 1080p, if using bitmap fonts and having perfect eyesight). A 4k monitor wall is a rather fringe setup, that only works out to an advantage for day traders and weird surveillance applications. And it requires that you constantly do very energetic body gymnastics to change your perspective's location and be able to see all the details. With a single 8k screen without upscaling font size (hence preserving all technical real-estate), the body gymnastics required would be so much worse than a 4k wall, it would be absolutely ridiculous and clown-alike and almost impossible to use while typing. Otherwise people mainly want big 4k/8k screens for dual use as a TV set. But this is just wrong in itself, it creates a paradox for no good reason, like using screwdrivers as chisels. Some things are not meant to be. The only arrangement where 4k makes some sense for common use cases, is maybe above a curved ultra widescreen.
And also interested in their neck related issues 10+ years later.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/three-monitors-for-every-user/
Time to realize that not everyone is your friend in the internet. They feed you bullshit all the time and laugh how gullible people are and question nothing, just follow based on perceived merits of an individual.
One screen for documentation/browser
One screen for running the application (being developed).
Please, go ahead a explain to me how I don’t know what I’m doing.