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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

1920x1920 on a 26.5" panel is only 102 pixels per inch. That is a low pixel density for a modern monitor. It's the same density as a 1920x1080 21.5" panel - certainly usable, but you won't get the crisp text you'd have on a higher density display.

Of course, many monitors are worse. A 1920x1080 27" monitor is only 82 pixels per inch!

The monitor I'm buying next is probably the Dell UP2414Q. With 3840x2160 resolution on a 23.8" panel, it has 185 pixels per inch. It's expensive and you need a machine that can drive it properly, but that is a nice pixel density.

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I'm near sighted. My eyeglass prescription is about -6.5. Using either windows or linux, anything over about 105 dpi is too small and I need to get closer to the monitor than what is acceptable from an ergonomics stand point.

If I need to use something with a higher dpi for any length of time, I have crank up the font size which causes some problems in some applications.

Right now I use a 19" 1280x1024 and a 20" 1600x1200. A monitor like this would be great.

> Using either windows or linux, anything over about 105 dpi is too small and I need to get closer to the monitor than what is acceptable from an ergonomics stand point.

I see this as a big failure of "modern" graphic systems. Having a 105 ppi should just mean more refined graphics, not smaller size of rendered objects.

The way a GUI appears on the screen should be a function of the screen size and the viewer distance, not a function of the screen ppi! We must get rid of all the layers of hacks that we have accumulated over the years (the reference 72 ppi, for example).

>I see this as a big failure of "modern" graphic systems.

Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons we were stuck with such incredibly shitty low res displays for so long. Up until windows vista, high DPI monitors were simply unusable in windows. Even now they have problems.

We still have a similar problem forcing us into having tiny screens. Windows and all the desktop environments that copied it are absolutely worthless at their primary function: managing windows. So people prefer two small monitors over one large monitor simply because the two small monitors allow an easy "make this take up half my screen space". Something that is of course trivially easy to implement, but most "modern" windowing systems don't care about at all.

> make this take up half my screen space

For what it's worth, in GNOME 3 and Unity (Ubuntu) moving a window to the left or right border will make that window half of the screen. Same with top and bottom border. Moving a window to one of the corners resizes it to a quarter of the screen.

Windows 8.1 has keyboard shortcuts to make a window take half the screen, the full screen, etc. Hold down the Windows key and try the various arrow keys. You may be pleasantly surprised.

There are all sorts of other useful shortcuts that use the Windows key as a modifier, for example Windows+E to open a File Explorer window. Basically, try Windows+(every key) to see what it does.

I'm aware, but until the majority of people are using a system where basic window management exists, vendors have little incentive to sell double wide monitors because so few people would be willing to use them. So those of us who can make good use of them have to wait forever, just like we did for reasonable DPI LCDs.

Also, even in the newest windows it is still crippled. Applications can prevent themselves from being resized like that, and often things like games that you would want to run in borderless window mode can not be moved around using windows shortcut keys.

Are you gonna sit very close to the screen?

You probably will sit half a meter (1.64ft) from a 26.5" monitor, maybe more, right?

According to isthisretina.com the density of a 26.5" 1920x1920 becomes equivalent to retina (326ppi) at about 34 inches (86cm).

I always position all of my monitors at the same distance from my eyes. That's because I'm an old guy and my eyes can't focus to different distances easily like they used to. So I have a pair of single vision computer glasses - like a reading prescription, but adjusted for the approximately 20" between my eyes and the laptop screen (almost exactly the half-meter you mentioned).

Typically I have three displays in a row: a monitor on the left and two computers on the right, a MacBook Pro Retina and a ThinkPad W520 (145 ppi). Whichever computer I'm primarily working on that day goes in the middle and is connected to the external display.

I wouldn't be able to use a display 34" from my eyes unless I used a different pair of glasses, and then I'd have to switch glasses back and forth to look at the different screens! Unless I gave up using the laptop screens at all, but I'm not about to do that.

So with all my monitors at the same distance, what feels like a "retina" density is the same on all of them.

Beg your pardon, I wasn't trying to suggest that you should sit further from the screen, not at all.

I was just stressing the fact that depending on the size and distance, even sub-100ppi screen densities might be good enough.

Admittedly if you sit 20" from the screen regardless of its size you may want a slightly higher ppi.

I wasn't disputing what you were saying - just pointing out that the idea of a lower pixel density on a monitor that's farther way doesn't work for me, because my eyes can't focus back and forth like that. All my monitors have to be at about the same distance.

If someone can easily focus at different distances, then of course that opens up more options.

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