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Comment by mcav | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it'll still be fairly expensive (~$4K+) if the exchange rate conversion is to be believed[1]. FWIW, I have an ASUS 4K monitor I purchased recently, and it feels like a world apart. It's not quite retina, but the extra real estate makes all the difference. I've used multiple 27" displays side-by-side before and the effect isn't nearly as useful even though the screen area is greater.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=HK%2441%2C899+to+usd&ie=utf-...

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I think you read that wrong. At the current exchange rate to the US Dollar, it's $5,404.

The ASUS PQ321Q (great product name, guys!) is offered at B&H Photo for $3,262 [1]. I'm a big fan of Dell's Ultrasharp line and have bought several over the past decade, but ASUS is winning this battle. That $2200 is almost the price of the low-end MacPro you're going to want to buy in order to drive this beast.

[1] http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=98636...

As an aside, if you're in NYC for any reason, go visit B&H in person. It's amazing.

What's better with retina? And are you saying multiple 27" are worse or better than 4K?

I'm saying two things:

- A 4K monitor has less DPI than a "retina" monitor, so you still see the pixels, thus it's not like someone took a 27" cinema display and doubled the pixels.

- Two 27" displays feel 'worse' to me: While it seems like dual 27" displays would be able to display more, I can't use them both horizontally because my head has to pan too much. And if I switch them to portrait, it's hard to fit two editing windows side-by-side in 1400 pixels comfortably.

So I like the 4K better than the 27" (or dual 27") setup I used before.

You could put one in landscape (code), and one in portrait (browser, email, etc). that solves some of the width issues, though it might offend one's aesthetic sensibilities. I got over that very quickly when I decided to try it.

Don't you mean portrait for code and landscape for browsing? That's how I thought people with mixed setup were using it.

Not here, web pages are virtually always a lot taller than wide. Putting them on a portrait monitor means much less scrolling.

Fair point but you also miss out on features because of responsive design. For example the sidebar on Facebook disappears when I browse it on a monitor in portrait mode.

I always imagined using dual 27" screens like that too. However, I have found that I prefer to stack a tall-ish browser window and terminal on the portrait monitor and keep 2+ panes of code on the landscape monitor.

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