Monitors for Work | Hacker News Reader

Monitors for Work

etbe.coker.com.au

86 pointsedward77 comments

Just started a new remote contracting gig and did a one-week on-site “getting to know each other” thing. I was shocked that everyone in the office had dual 27” 1080p monitors. Didn’t know they even made 1080p monitors that big!

Anyway after a week of staring at that blurry mess I was having eye focusing issues every night trying to read a book. Those monitors should be treated as ergonomic hazard. Total disgrace.

You just have to set the font size to 16-18pt, as I saw many people do.

(Brought my own 4K monitor to work, like I did the last few times.)

16pt is huge on this monitor, fits too few code lines on screen. 18 is almost headline sized.

But anyway doing these acrobatics is not what a professional should be doing in 2026.

It shouldnt be blurry unless its a 1440p screen running at 1080..

I had to temporarily use a 1080p monitor, and forcing a higher resolution was the only way to get enough info on screen to do what I needed to do productively despite the blur.

What was the task?

I guess they meant "blurry" in the sense of "jagged", from using fonts that are 6 pixels wide at a reasonable point size on a 27-inch monitor.

No, just normal font sizes, macOS. 14pt looks huge, had to lower it to 12pt to look physically about the same as 14pt on a 4K/5K 27”, but at that physical size it’s a blurry mess due to low ppi.

Edit: Oh I misread your comment as 6 pixels large, not 6 pixels wide. Yes, you’re correct.

macOS looks pretty awful on non-high DPI screens because of the way fonts are antialiased. (Actually, same with modern windows at this point)

Yeah I’m on macOS.

There was a time when these were considered super sharp high-resolution monitors. Fonts tended to be more optimized for (sub)pixel-level hinting in the past, though, while newer fonts and font rendering are more blurry on low-res monitors than things used to be. Vector icons are worse as well in that respect than the pixel-art icons of the past. I’ve also observed actual pixel quality (contrast/graininess) becoming worse with newer low-res monitor models, particularly on VA panels.

> There was a time when these were considered super sharp high-resolution monitors.

I think that time corresponded to when monitors were smaller than 27 inches though. A "good" CRT monitor used to be 15" and at that size 1080p is certainly great.

It was before everything became widescreen. 1280x1024 at 19” was pretty common I think, which is 86 PPI and would correspond to FHD at 25.5”. I still have a 27” 1920x1200 from 2007 at roughly the same PPI, which was considered a high-end monitor at the time (only few monitors like Apple’s Cinema HD Display with 2560x1600 at 30”, 100 PPI, surpassed it). 27” FHD is only slightly worse at 82 PPI. Just move it an inch or so farther away.

This wouldn't happen to be in San Diego County, would it? I interviewed at a place a while back where every desk had friggen 1080p televisions on it. Classic case of the owner having some genius idea to save money.

I did not accept the job.

No this was in the UK.

What? This is a very common screen size and resolution, so much so that it's literally recommended for esports players.

Low resolution displays are good for video and video games. So perfectly fine for television and probably gives some performance boost for esport players.

But for work, high resolution displays are always better. And they've been around for 10 years now.

Yes, but my point was that I find it incredulous that the parent was "shocked" that those monitors were even made when it's a very common format.

The only way to get an extra monitor during my first stint at AWS was to loot one from the desk of a departing colleague (before IT got their hands on it). Fortunately there was no shortage of departing colleagues.

Frugality at its best. Sometimes certain decisions prioritize frugality so much over anything else, the time lost fighting is more expensive than the savings. For example, the DevDesktop policy. My org had an Apollo/FMC fleet that only allowed 2-4 CPU and 4-8 GB RAM configurations. Anything else would require manual financial approval and justification from L6+ manager. This is between 2022-2024.

Take the following example, to save maybe 20-30$/month. You make engineers' life miserable while paying the same amount but in hourly rate...

When you run VSCode with bunch of Java plugins (where each uses Java), good luck reliably debugging anything. Me and basically anyone in my team would get into situation that the DevDesktop could not handle it anymore and would be stuck, requiring manual/hard restart or wait until load-avg dropping from 100+. I did the simplest trick, kept the m5.large DevDesktop, but manually added another Apollo ASG, attached the HostClass to a random Production fleet that already has thousands of hosts (still under/in my VP org). Happily lived with m5zn.4xlarge until I left. I am pretty sure the machine is still there and running... (As my access was cut off right away...)

Remember the “Frupidity” wiki page?

If you are working with text a monitor with high pixel density is important. 4K 27” is good for Windows, 5K 27” is great for Macs. I think companies should provide a monitor of this calibre and a laptop powerful enough to easily drive them to technical workers. I would spend my own money on the hardware if I could use it for work. It’s like if a company said they will give you a $5000 pay raise, but you have to use a 2006 flip phone from now on. I think a lot of people would refuse the raise.

And 6K 31.5" is good for Linus / Linux [1] :-) More specifically the ASUS ProArt PA32QCV [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

[2]: https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proar...

I'm seriously considering just ordering two of these and taking them into the office. My only fear is that someone else will feel slighted thinking I got special monitors, even though I bought them myself.

Yeah, without debating the price, in itself, the now-discontinued ProDisplay XDR, I love, at 6K 32", though only 60Hz. Ironically, I ended up with this display because Apple messed with DSC to make it work, and crippled my Asus 27" 4K HDR 144Hz screens.

I thought after years of dual displays I'd be (and I am) happy with a single display again, but when this thing goes, it is probably hard to pass up dual 27" 5K 120Hz displays...

Many good points, and I largely agree.

But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.

If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.

Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).

P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.

Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/

In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.

Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.

I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.

Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.

I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.

I think that providing modern monitors that make sense is probably the easiest way to please employees. No matter how excellent the salary is, if they are stuck working on old, small, blurry, faded screens, they'll be unhappy. It also gives a bad impression of the company as a whole. I did L1 tech support a long time ago, and people were overwhelmingly happy to see me coming to replace their old CRTs with LCDs.

Every time I’ve worked at a company where teams started picking their own hardware and expensing it, it ended like this. It usually started with reasonable orders, but once some teams notice that expensing hardware is working they try to push the limits of what they can get away with.

Ended up with weird situations like software and accounting people rocking those ultra expensive Apple cinema displays while sitting in their new Aeron chairs at their motorized standing desks which were always in the sitting down position.

Then someone gets shocked by the office expense line item at quarterly review time and cuts it off for everyone to try to balance out those expenditures for the rest of the year.

So we’d have a few people in the office with tricked out workstations and high end gear and then everyone else was on the same generic monitor and chair that was decided for the whole company long ago.

Even the most generous company I worked for that made a point of supporting engineer’s workstations eventually had to cut it off and standardize because the purchases were getting unjustifiable. There was also a lot of stuff like nice monitors or computer upgrades “disappearing” where you couldn’t really pin blame on anyone, because it was actually common for people to swap hardware around.

The only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan that doesn’t involve one giant expenditure in a single quarter.

Yeah we had the same thing. We had one person choose a massive curved ultra wide screen and then decide they didn’t like it so it sat in the hall beside their office for 6 months.

> the only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan

Design by committee doesn’t work IMO, and the phased upgrade plan works until bob decides that Fred got a new PC and wants the new GPU or feels stung by the fact that he got an older model by virtue of being upgraded 6 months earlier.

The only way I’ve seen it work is when engineering accept that they don’t need the absolute latest and greatest, and the directors plus agreeing on rolling stock upgrades. On my last team, I had someone argue with me that they needed a GPU upgrade from previous gen flagship to current gen flagship, when our game didn’t even require the tier below their current card to develop. They had the newest workstation of any team member at the time.

TBH 27" is a sweet spot for me, I feel overwhelmed with 32″ screen. 4k to get a retina like quality, which makes text more comfortable to read.

I really like my two BenQ RD280UA. They are as wide as an 27” and as tall as an 32”. For me it’s the best Aspect Ratio for desktop screens.

The aspect ratio on the RD280UA looks great but I wish they offered a version with a PPI similar to that of the 27" 5k Studio Display.

I can't afford a giant monitor that displays text well enough for work use.

I have poor eyesight and need to sit closer than normal, and I find 27" to be just a tad too large. In my home-office setup I have a decade-old 24" 4K IPS panel that is the perfect size, and I dread the day it gives up the ghost because apart from some very expensive professional monitors, no-one seems to make them at that size and resolution class any more.

2x dell 2415q's is my favorite setup I've ever had. I hope that some more options for high-dpi 24" monitors come out in the future.

After 27" 4K OLED last year, I suppose 24" are next! I didn't have the patience to wait and I have migrated to 27" 4k OLED (Alienware).

In 2016 I bought a $700 40in curved 4k monitor for my job at Amazon. It's funny they probably spent over $1500 on a laptop I almost never used but did not want to pay for a decent monitor.

I really don't get the curved monitors for working. They're fine if you're playing a video game or watching a movie in the dark at home, I guess, but wouldn't want one for other uses.

They are wider than is comfortable to view at once from the short distance many office desks offer, especially if they're on a flex arm that eats up more space. They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment. They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.

The main advantage of a curved monitor is that the viewing angle is closer to 90 deg which can help with colour uniformity.

That being said, I think you are mostly thinking about the aspect ratio of ultra-wide monitors in general. It's a matter of preference, but I will take an ultra wide (>= 40in) any day over two regular 16/9 monitors. I end up having my main window in the middle 40% with two other windows on the side at 30%.

> They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment.

I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.

> I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.

Offices are notoriously bad at optimizing that kind of thing.

Ultrawide curved are amazing. Put your main activity in the middle since there's no screen bezel and enjoy your neck-pain-free work hours. 2 monitors force you to usually have one on the left, one on the right and always face your head towards either.

Also, it's fine to have side activities on the side, but you usually won't be looking at those all the time, so they shouldn't cause any strain.

Yes, this. At work, I have side-by-side 32" 4K monitors. At home, I have a 59" curved 7680x2160 monitor that is the same size as the two work monitors combined. My home setup is much more ergonomic than work. Beyond your point about angles being bad with two monitors, pretty often I have three things open that are wider than 1920 pixels worth of content. At home, each can be 2560 pixels wide. At work, I can either have bezels in the middle of one or shrink two of them. And the fairly aggressive curve at home means pixels are close to the same angular size.

Ultrawides for me are awesome. Got the laptop on a riser on the left for email/teams. If you use a window manager like powertoys on windows or rectangles on mac you can get a config that utilizes the screen.

Do a decent amount of full stack work and like having vscode on the left like 80% then stack two terminals on the right.

They pair really nicely with a column-oriented WM like Niri or PaperWM!

They also have weird and uncomfortable acoustic effects. The one I have at work forms a perfect parabola to precisely reflect and focus my own breathing sounds straight into my ear canals. It's incredibly distracting so I have to always sit off-center to it

> They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment.

At work we have dozens of curved monitors by Dell. Not once have I seen glare on them.

> They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.

But once you have figured out the window management stuff, they do offer better ergonomics! (And you don't have to daisy-chain monitors, etc.)

I have a curved 3840x1600 ultrawide and it’s basically perfect.

I cannot disagree more strongly. In the correct setup, there is always a tangent line between all parts of the screen as you swivel your neck horizontally. I did not have that without an ultrawide and it led to various neck muscle issues that I regret

First, it wasn't an ultrawide.

Second, I used my own custom window manager on Windows: https://github.com/StackWM/

> They are wider than is comfortable to view at once

Which is why you don't code fullscreen.

First job I had was a pair-programming shop that outfitted each station with a 27" iMac and a 27" Cinema display (along with two sets of mice and keyboards).

Second job was remote, so I outfitted my own home office. I upgraded from a 34" 21:9 monitor to a 32:9 monster and enjoyed having the equivalent of 2x27" monitors.

I've since upgraded that setup to add a 28" LG DualUp to the left side of my 32:9 ultrawide. It strikes a nice balance of a productivity display for calendar/email and one for my main workspace that's plenty wide for spreadsheets (because I write less code than spreadsheets for FinOps modeling work).

I'm a huge fan of wider aspect ratios beyond 16:9 or 16:10. The dream is a 32:10 monitor in tandem OLED.

Reminds me of this this advice from 20 years ago (2006!): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/screen-resolution-and-page-...

> Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you'll recover the investment in less than a year.

Surely the economics must be even better in 2026?

existence or absence of drama around getting the right equipment is usually a very strong indicator of technical leadership quality.

Google recently to SWEs: replacing a mouse requires director's approval.

Also Google: why cannot we ship anything fast and why does Gemini suck so badly.

Because good people leave when you treat them like that, stupid Google!

We allowed people to choose their own equipment at a job about 15 years ago. That policy stopped when in the open office, someone chose a mechanical keyboard with blue switches…

I have two Apple Studio monitors and a max-ram MacBook Pro. Work only paid for the MBP and only after I jumped through the necessary hoops, which I was happy to do. Had they not, I would have just dropped the $6k myself. One time I did drop the $6k myself and then showed my manager. Show don’t tell. He expensed it for me.

A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.

One nice aspect of WFH is that it addresses this problem. You get a laptop and $500-1500 for hardware and many places you get it again after an interval (1-3 years).

Over the years I've settled on 27" 1440p IPS monitors. 2 on my office desk, 3 on my home desk.

I'm currently very satisfied with the Dell P2725DE [1] b/c of the following:

1. 100 Hz refresh rate. I stopped using 60Hz refresh rate monitors years ago and won't go back.

2. Much cleaner cabling. At work I only need to 2 cables: laptop -> usb-c cable -> monitor 1 -> Display Port MST cable -> monitor 2. The usb-c cable from my laptop to monitor 1 provides video and power. And being able to daisy chain from monitor 1 to monitor 2 helps minimize cable clutter (this cable routes out of sight along my monitor arm).

I got all of them refurbished at $163 each. I still feel that's an excellent price b/c, if I recall correctly, few others, if any, offered this unique combo of features I was looking for.

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-pro-27-plus-qhd-usb-c-h...

when will we just understand that everyone has an individual way of working?

no one can claim a specific monitor or tool is universally "correct" - that's crazy

The happiest I have ever been with my monitors was with 2x 24 inch 1440 displays (dell s2421sgf) - it’s not an IPS display but it’s a single panel high refresh rate with solid software support and good color mapping. I calibrated it and it was worse than my MacBook but only slightly.

Unfortunately they appear to have a shelf life of about 6 years and the panels are no longer made…

I also was looking for 24-inch 1440p's and was surprised they didn't exist. The closest is probably the 24-inch 1920x1200, which I do like for the 16:10 aspect ratio.

Does anybody else feel that 27-inch monitors are uncomfortably big? It feels less like something to look at work on and more like a movie screen right in front of your face. edit: I see xmodem expresses a similar feeling in a cousin comment.

Yeah, I replaced my 24 inch with a 27 inch and it's too big to have two of them on my desk.

I had 3x32" 4k at 100% scaling for the longest time (32" 4k is still the best bang for buck right now imo). Main horizontal center display and a vertical on each side, angled aggressively towards my head.

But 4k is quite weird for productivity, if you do two columns you get 1920px on each side with a split right in the middle, which is far from ideal. With 3 column layout you end up with 1280px a piece, which ends up being too cramped with most apps.

Recently I got a 40" 5120x2160 LG display which ends up being about the same PPI as 32" 4k, but it lets you have three 1706px columns, which is much more comfortable. It's quite nice, but unreasonably expensive. I could've bought three 32" 4k for the same price.

Bit of a counter point, but I ran a very nice wfh setup at a previous job, 4k monitor and ergo keyboards. I was a bit dismayed when I joined a new co and found that we had 1080p monitors and a generic Logitech keyboard. After a week of the text looking pixelated I entirely got used to it and think maybe complaints about monitors being a health hazard and rsi are a tad overblown by a vocal minority.

One of many questions at the interview will be asking what hardware they offer and what furniture. I had PTSD from sitting on a cheap office chair and developed massive back pain. If there isn't at least Herman Miller, anything else doesn't matter.

If you have massive back pain, maybe you shouldn't be sitting in a conventional chair at all.

Source: I have massive back pain.

My back pain's gone once I started using Herman Miller chairs.

That’s great! I had to switch to weird stuff like the Swopper.

3 screens is always the best.

One for work. One for communication. One for documentation.

Teams still does not make it easy to share your screen when you have a non-standard size. Have to either make the receiver deal with the size mismatch, or share a single window at a time. I have to maintain a 1080p monitor on the side just to have a convenient place to host a screen share.

Come on, Microsoft, please. I would even take a vibe-coded, crap solution that only works on Tuesdays.

For my home office I started experimenting with a 4k60” TV far away from my desk. For some reason I like it more than my 6k32”retina setup I have at my work.

> It wouldn’t be difficult for someone to put one of those on each side of the monitor or monitors that their employer provides and put them in a desk drawer at the end of the day to minimise risk.

In a decade of working in IT I’ve never seen a broken monitor in any of the offices. I think the risk is vastly overestimated by the author

Recently I’ve often wondered if LLM productivity gains (for coding) could end up mirroring the productivity gains of a good monitor setup.

That is, table stake on the one hand (nobody likes to work for a company stingy enough to refuse to buy one or two more screens per worker), but also not obviously more productive either (it is not easy to measure the productivity gain of a monitor setup and most developers who are productive with it will also be productive without).

If LLMs do not bring a lot more value to the company than providing a good monitor setup to every tech employee, this is a clue that once the bubble pops AI expenses should not be priced very differently than a bunch of screens (~700$ per worker per three years?)

Larger monitors are inversely correlated with productivity

Especially a second monitor. Often just used for watching youtube videos during work

My second monitor is my laptop screen. Great for keeping the music playback and IM chats on it, while the main screen is all editor and terminal windows.

Citation required.

One monitor for nvim/zellij, one for browser & devtools.

My __third__ monitor is for YouTube, thankyouverymuch.

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