It's wild that the only hidpi 32" monitor is ~$5000, and it was released a few years ago now.
My eyeballs need that sweet crisp text.
The other problem with hidpi scaling (200%) at 4k 32", is that everything is huge, and you lose a lot of screen real estate.
Honestly I think 8k 36" is the sweet spot.
In fact, it is common to recommend a vertical viewing angle of 30 degrees. Not more as it tends to increase eye fatigue and neck pain. If you follow that recommendation, what matters is the definition (the number of pixels), not the resolution in DPI.
So, let's run a few calculations. The "retina" resolution is based on a pixel size of 1 arc-minute, that's 20/20 vision, at 30 degrees, that's 1800 pixels. 4k is 2160 vertical, so that's about the limit of human vision. So, basically, 4k is what you want at any size.
8k is not useless but you are pushing the boundaries here. In order to notice it, you need perfect, over 20/20 vision, high luminosity and high contrast. Beyond 8k, you enter superhuman territory, with an exception: you can notice discontinuities at a much higher resolution (vernier resolution), but it only matters if you don't have anti-aliasing. And of course, high contrast, luminosity and perfect vision.
There are exception. For example there is a limit on how close a screen can be, so having 4k on a tiny smartphone screen is mostly useless. The other end of the spectrum would be VR, with fields of view over 100 degrees, 8k per eye is considered a minimum for an immersive experience.
No, because I don't want to move my 32" monitor further away to get that 30 degree viewing angle. The reason I have a 32" monitor for work is to have more screen real estate. A 30 degree viewing angle works for watching movies and stuff, but when I use it for coding, I essentially have multiple 30 degree viewing (on-screen) windows.
You might say "ok well just get two or three monitors", but that isn't the same either. Besides the space between the monitors, with one large monitor I can subdivide my screen space in any way depending on what I'm doing, where each window has a 10-30 degree viewing angle or whatever.
>you can notice discontinuities at a much higher resolution (vernier resolution), but it only matters if you don't have anti-aliasing.
That's just not true though. It does matter even with antialiasing, the difference is clear. In particular, the dell xps 15 2019 has a ~290 dpi OLED, which has high contrast.
For movies, THX recommends a 36 degrees horizontal viewing angle[2], which is about 20 degrees vertical. Recommendations vary, sometimes it is 30 degrees, sometimes it is 40, but always horizontal.
Now, no one will force you. If you prefer to have a very large screen right up your nose, that's your choice, and maybe your work environment calls for it. But it is just not what it is generally recommended and I would put it into the "exception" category. And sure, in that case, increased resolution is good.
As for antialiasing, it will not make the image sharper, quite the opposite in fact. However, if your resolution is so that it is over your visual acuity (you can't distinguish between 2 thin parallel lines and 1 thicker line), antialiasing will take care of superaccuity. That's the ability of your brain to use image processing techniques to detect jaggies that are finer than what you eye can see. If you have good vision and a 4k monitor closer to you than the recommended distance, it is normal to see the difference even with anti-aliasing turned on.
[1] https://www.viewsonic.com/library/business/best-computer-scr...
[2] https://www.thx.com/questions/thx-certified-screen-placement...
Between phone, table, and laptop, monitor, yes.
But when speaking of monitors alone, it's not that relevant an observation in practice, since most monitors, whether 27", or 32", or 24" are seen from more or less the same distance.
This is false. Misalignment of borders can be detected with a precision up to 10 times better than visual acuity [0], therefore your numbers should be multiplied by 10, meaning 40K is the optimal screen resolution, or 80K for people with particularly good vision.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacuity_(scientific_term)
Anti-aliasing is the display counterpart of hyperperacuity.
Here is a paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320353446_Effects_o...
Its conclusion is that with anti-aliasing, you only need half the resolution to reach the detection threshold for misalignment of borders compared to other visual acuity tests.
The problem is that you need a font at exactly the right scale to realize this advantage. The right scale is often different for every user/monitor pair and changing the scale means redrawing the font which is a ton of work.
I'd be happy with like 8k at 34" or so.
See eg: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
The myth of 1x, 2x, and 3x being "preferred" is just an Apple-ism because their UI toolkit is pixel-based. That's a flaw in their toolkit, not an inherent technical constraint. Combined with then Apple scaling it yet again after it's rendered.
Other platforms are not nearly as badly designed.
Apple-ism? Please. Most plarforms and GUI libs are pixel based, and we always have photos to see and other such bitmap assets.
The largest platform, Android, is not pixel based. The largest desktop platform, Windows, also went through the effort to try and do things properly here, letting the app handle DPI instead and then providing updated toolkits to do that automatically.
And a GTK-ism.
All applications i use on windows support scaling natively, and provide crisp text at 150%. It's not 2010 any more, this is a solved problem. Anything that doesnt should be killed with fire.
I'm not convinced the difference is obvious.
You should be farther from your monitor than you are from your laptop.
Why is this relevant? I'm seriously considering a 1440p 32:9 240hz Samsung G9 so that I can ditch multiple monitors and move to a single display with similar overall screen space just to dodge pesky multi-screen bugs like this. Just docking my laptop and using a massive screen would be SO NICE!
Only thing that's holding me back is I really want 2160p tall in that form factor. Will probably need to wait for DisplayPort2.0
I'm a huge fan of the LG27GN950. 4k 144hz glory.
Or at the size you are looking for.
Samsung 49-Inch CHG90 144Hz
It's a 49 inch, so not the same PPI. Different aspect ration too (32:9, so 5120x1440).
https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--chg...
Thats a PPI of something like 80, which may be fine for gaming but is not at all comparable to the high PPI monitors discussed here.
If Apple just sold there 27" display for 1500 bucks or something they would make a killing for folks who want a really nice pro display but don't need the overkill of the Pro Display XDR.
A 27" 4000x3000 display would be a dream come true.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-38gn950-b-gaming-monitor
Why do you need 120Hz+ for productivity?
2. No one need do anything except die, but shaving a few ms of response time is nice for productivity. No one thing is critical but making sure you have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, refresh rate, and programs that aren't throwing latency out the window makes for an overall nice feeling system.
I bought all of my other high-refresh screens because wow computing feels so much better in the day-to-day desktop because of it! Not joking in the least.
Another factor is that some (many?) 60 Hz displays buffer a whole frame themselves, and often don't have quick response times. If you go from a 10 ms response time IPS screen with a frame buffer to a 120 Hz gaming screen with 2-3 ms response time, you already got a difference of about 25 ms just in the screen itself.
8 ms is hard to notice. 50 ms less so.
The difference is pretty huge, even on systems that are much better tuned than Linux desktops (e.g. Windows 10).
That being said, while it is very nice and feels nice, it's not necessary for development work; I spend most of my days developing on a system over a VNC connection through a VPN, so the basic input lag of that setup is around 200-300 ms. Gnarly yes, but not particularly bad for text input. You get used to just do everything very slowly with the mouse.
What would you suggest, or either Windows 10 or Linux, to get the lowest latency in a terminal?
As per the linked article, the observed delay improvement isn't one frame, more like ~3 frames. It doesn't go up from 1/24 to 1/165, it goes from 2.5/24 to 2.5/165.
Computer software waits a lot more than it did in 1977. That's why 240hz displays feel much more snappier even if it's supposed to be less noticeable -- you're waiting for same 3 frames, but they pass by much faster.
Though in my totally subjective experience it feels better.
Interestingly the person who did this latency test also did a keyboard latency test:
https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
Compared to the slowest keyboard measured it's possible to shave 45ms which if you were latency sensitive would be the biggest reduction.
That's disappointing. He isn't measuring latency nearly as much as he's measuring point of actuation.
With a clicky switch I expect it to actuate when I hear it. With a tactile switch I expect it to actuate when I feel it. With a linear switch it depends on the switch. You can get linear switches that actuate as soon as you'd like.
The more I think about this the more useless it seems. Several of the keyboards he tested come with your choice of switch, different switches with different actuation points, and so you can't just say Keyboard X has a latency of Y without mentioning what switch you were using if you're going to measure from the beginning of the keypress.
The same logitech mouse performs much faster through their universal wireless adapter than trhough bluetooth (it has 2 modes), they also have lightspeed adapter, but I haven't noticed much difference.
I recently got a 165 Hz monitor for my decade-old PC (Sandy Bridge era) and with my (now old) G302 mouse, it's like having a new, much faster PC.
> The interface has two main signal lines, Data and Clock. ... To transmit a byte, the device simply outputs a serial frame of data (including 8 bits of data and a parity bit) on the Data line serially as it toggles the Clock line once for each bit.
Increasing the clock rate absolutely does reduce latency on a PS/2 port.
I guess it's because the latencies stack on top of each other?
It helps both slightly with latency directly, but it also gives you more points to sample from for input prediction which then helps with latency even more. Or for things like drawing applications it'll give you smoother curves assuming the drawing app looks at all intermediate touch samples.
Now whether you will notice that can depend what environment you are in. If your editor already has an input latency of 100ms then shaving 8 off probably is not noticeable. But going from 20 to 12 might be.
Generally, from the tests I've seen, input latency is 30-40ms on a wired keyboard on Windows.
Even at 60fps, you should be able to see the difference between 30ms and 100ms. Newer phone cameras often have a "slow motion" mode that'll give you 120+ fps video, too
SOME people can see the difference between 30ms and 100ms, but it's almost impossible to actually see it. You'll mostly end up feeling that everything sucks and not knowing how or why.
"The human eye can't tell the difference past 30 FPS" was literally just a thought-killing cliche repeated by console gamers getting into internet slapfights with PC gamers.
You can see the difference for yourself here on any 60hz monitor: http://www.30vs60fps.com/
In it, they have a segment on frame rate[2], where he mentions that the neurons can only fire about every 13ms, or about 75 FPS. But, the important point, they're not in sync like a computer screen is. This means the effective update rate for a group of neurons can be much less.
Even then, the problem is that eyes don't work like cameras or monitors. Our eyes don't work with "frames". Each receptor updates on its own time. It's easy to see that, if the updates are staggered, multiple sensors could perceive higher frame-rates, even if they can't individually.
However, there's another angle to this. Disregarding input lag, which is a very real phenomenon and is greatly shortened by higher refresh, higher refresh rate monitors are able to show more 'discrete' steps for anything that's in motion. Our eyes (and brains) perceive this as movement 'smoothness', even if they can't quite make out every single frame that's displayed.
You should try that yourself. Do a blind test.
The easiest way to show this is by wiggling your mouse around quickly on a computer screen.
At 30hz - you'll see the mouse teleporting around - hopping from spot to spot, but not moving. For example, if you stare in the middle, and jerk the mouse quickly to the right, you'll see the 4 or 5 spots where it rendered.
With 60hz, you'll see the 9 or 10 spots - and have a stronger illusion of movement.
With 120hz, it might even look as smooth as a real object flying across your screen.
It's as absurd as saying it's impossible to tell the difference between a 55" 720p display compared to a 4k one at a distance of 1 foot away.
Additionally, another thing I've noticed in the last decade is the very badly PWM-frequency-tuned LED headlights on some cars. Those engineers selected the wrong LED brightness and tuned it to terrible frequencies which leave flicker-trails when you look at or away from them.
Get those PWM frequencies above 500Hz please! Especially get above 200Hz with your LED frequencies at the very least.
Lower framerates are less noticeable in low light, which is another reason why films look acceptable.
*Talented animators/cartoonists can get away with lower framerates
I also find the responsiveness noticeable when typing. You'll be able to tell that the text appears faster on the screen.
I wouldn't say it's a requirement. But it does make the user experience nicer.