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Comment by gr4vityWall | Hacker News Reader

* High-ish DPI is desirable. 27" 4K displays are a good start and look pretty sharp at 150% scaling. 5K screens were still pretty overpriced last time I looked, and there weren't many options available, but you can use them at 200% comfortably. Avoid monitors that would require you to use fractional scaling if you're running NVIDIA on Linux

* even for non-gaming uses, high refresh rates are comfortable, IMO. 120hz or higher is fine. Going higher has diminishing returns.

* OLED panels are desirable.

* if you're making a multi-monitor setup, avoid introducing displays that require different levels of scaling. You'll avoid headaches, though KDE improved that drastically in recent years.

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Is it even possible to have 5K, 120 Hz and HiDPI together? I also want all three, but the last time I checked, literally the only 5K 120 Hz monitor you could buy was Dell’s 40-inch curved UltraSharp. Which does look nice and has gotten rave reviews, but 5K at 40” just seems too low density for what I want, and there’s literally no other 5K 120Hz monitor out there, unless I’m overlooking something.

I’ve been carefully watching CES hoping someone would announce another one, but so far no dice - Dell did bump their 27- and 32-inch 4K UltraSharps to 120Hz, which is a welcome development, but if you want more than 4K you’re still out of luck.

EDIT: The next hope if that doesn’t happen is that Apple refreshes their 5K and 6K displays with 120Hz when they update the Mac Studio, which is supposedly happening this spring. It would be a logical time for it now that the latest Macs have Thunderbolt 5 (TB4 literally didn’t have enough bandwidth to do 5K@120, much less 6K), but so far there don’t seem to be rumors to this effect, and historically Apple waits a very long time between monitor updates.

Why the high dpi? Especially if scaling up anyways. I've never understood that trend

Going from 2k / 27" to 4k / 27" screens severely reduced my eye strain after a long day of code-staring. Both were IPS panels so I can only attribute it to the incredibly sharp text rendering.

I see, I never had any trouble with eye strain at all.

It just looks better. Text specifically will look much crispier in a 4K 27" monitor at 150% scaling than a 1440p 27" monitor at 100% scale, despite both having the same working space.

Yeah.. Exacly this. I recently started to look for monitor, and dug up site with DPI etc. That high DPI monitors annoys me a lot, its actually very hard to get anything w/ Pixel Size larger than 300um. Smaller pixel put a lot of strain on my old eyes... And upscaling really suxx.. unless you do 200% with means you need to buy expensive gear like 150um pixel size.. and upscale x2...

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