Ask HN: What monitors are great for coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What monitors are great for coding?

Probably like a lot of HN’ers, I spend 10h+/day in front of the laptop looking at text (coding, email, browsing...). I’d like to make it easier for my eyes and get an external monitor. What should I look for?

Some notes from what I already googled:

* I prefer larger fonts, so I’m aiming for a 27” size

* somebody mentioned “I've found is that I get the least eye strain by using a large (37"+) 1080p TV as a monitor”. What is your experience?

* pivotable display, in order to see more lines of code

* IPS panels seem to be the best, however others mention they aren’t so great for text: “every IPS has the same sparkle effect” (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1466914)

Thanks and a Happy New Year with great eyesight :-)

View on HN

On Windows the higher the resolution the smaller the text and the more eye-strain. Windows only supports 125% text size without breaking stuff. "Large" (150%) is totally broken in most applications.

So if you go high resolution in Windows then expect to be manually altering the size of the text in every program you use (Chrome, Visual Studio, Word, etc).

In my personal opinion LED causes less eye-strain than LCD (less "flicker" with LED). I haven't noticed an improvement between IPS and TN panels, but I also look at the screen straight on (and most of IPS's perks are in things that don't help text anyway).

I strongly recommend that whatever you wind up getting turn the brightness down. I took mine from 100% (default) to 25%. The default brightnesses are for displaying them in stores (in the "brightness wars") and have no place being that high when in use.

If you're using a Mac then you're fortunate as Apple support 2560×1600 displayed as 1280x800 which means much higher resolution fonts and no need to mess with the sizes of things (ala Windows).

I have a Lenovo x220 (matte, 12" IPS) and two Dell 2311h's (matte, 23" IPS's, can rotate to portrait) - I don't have any complaints, and I don't think I'll ever buy a TN display in the future. I'm not sure what the sparkle effect is; it seems like something that that particular guy is more sensitive to.

It sounds like you're looking for one of these: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/the-ips-lcd-revolut...

This article mentions a lot the sparkles: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/22/hard-choices-the-... (part 1 has an explanation for this effect)

The 27" Mac monitor is expensive but amazing (and not pivotable). I have found it worth the money. I have one at home. At work I go to a really crappy ViewSonic 24". The smaller size is a slight problem, but what I really dislike is how dark it is. And there are dead pixels.

I switched from a Mac display to a monitor from Eizo. My eyes have been thankful ever since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com