Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Does 4k matter?

I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here

https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen.

Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point where I am going to start putting Pepper's ghost machines in my windows. I think I want to buy a new TV, but I get a free old TV. I pick up monitors that are in the hallway and people are tripping on them and I take them home. Hypothetically I want a state-of-the-art monitor with HDR and wide gamut and all that but the way things are going I might never buy a TV or monitor again.

View on HN

All the browsers on my machine report my resolution as 1080p despite using 4k. I assume this is because I run at 200% scaling (I believe this is relatively common among anyone using a 4k resolution)

If the above-linked website uses data reported by the browser, I wonder how this scenario might be taken into consideration (or even if such a thing is possible)

A pixel is defined as 1/96th of an inch in the web world so it is dependent on your dpi/scaling. There is a window.devicePixelRatio that JavaScript can use to get actual pixels.

Remember the days when you would be in danger of your apartment being burglarized and thieves would take your TV or receiver or CD player etc.? Nowadays that's called junk removal and you pay for it! How times have changed...

> Does 4k matter?

The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units).

I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for "cinematic" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like "Timelapse of the Future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines.

So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.

A unit based on the average size of the human foot is not "weird".

Correct. It is insane. Bonkers. Absurd. How the hell can you live with that-stupid.

No. It is in fact completely normal and has been repeated many times in human history. A unit based on an arbitrary fraction of the distance from the north pole to the equator is quite a bit more odd when you think about it.

Curious to hear more about the a11y work.

Run of the mill.

A complex desktop web form with several pages, lots of combo boxes, repeating fields, etc. I cleaned up the WCAG AA issues and even the S, but the AAA requirement for click targets was out of scope but had me thinking that I wanted to make labels (say on a dropdown menu bar) as big as I reasonably could and that in turn got me thinking about how much space I had to work with on different resolution screens so I looked up those stats and tried to see what would fit in which constraints.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com