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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).

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Are you using enlarged text or native 1440p? If the latter, have you used 4k or retina displays in the past? It’s hard to go back after that.

Native 1440p, never used retina nor 4k.

(not parent commenter, but hold same opinion)

Same here... 1440p 32" is optimal for me, the only improvement I'd consider right now is 1600p equivalent.

Biggest draw for me with 1440p 32" is being the same DPI as a 1080p 24". I like to have one big monitor and then 2 small flank vertical monitors and having them all be the same DPI just makes headaches go away on every operating system I use them with.

Damn. I am so happy with my old 17" monitor and 1280x1024 resolution here. :D

Look, you can insist that a 1440p monitor can only show blurry text all you like, but the problem that people are talking about is that the text is even blurrier than that.

I didn't insist that. Understood, but specifically, I was talking to the comment I replied to, which was about 1440p monitors in particular.

Ah, yeah. You aren't the person they replied to.

I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.

Text on 1440p looks great with full hinting and subpixel rendering. Unfortunately, macOS does neither, so the jump to retina feels more significant than it is.

How big is your screen? At 27", I can clearly see pixels on 1440p. A 4k display with 150% scaling (effectively 1440p) looks much better. Maybe you haven't used a higher resolution? If so, you might not know what you're missing.

Not GP. But I have a 24" 4k (close to retina), the MBA screen and while they're nicer than the 27" 1440p I have, the latter is essentially worthless on macOS. With Linux, it's more than fine. Not super sharp, but quite readable. On macOS, the blurred text is headache inducing.

(cross-posting on both subthreads): I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I mean the last time I saw anyone have a 1440p display was back in the early 2010's, so ... nowadays most people that I know buy 4k 27"/32" displays at minimum, with 5k displays gaining popularity as the price for them goes down. Macbooks for example come with a very high resolution display, and so do most high-end PC laptops, too.

Great sample size

Yes yes, all your friends are rich, good for you.

4k displays are available at just a few hundred bucks these days, I'd hardly call that being rich.

That was absolutely not true in the "early 2010s", not even 5 years ago unless you wanted to seriously compromise on some other aspect of the display.

I did not say people used 4k displays in early 2010s en masse, I said that's when I last saw people use 1440p displays. I live in present time, and in present time 4k displays are very cheap. It gets a little more pricey if you want high refresh rate as well, though my 4k 144hz display was just around 400 EUR, which I would consider a lower-mid-tier price range.

You are misremembering things. Macbooks in early 2010 had only 800 rows of pixels: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111958

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