I agree. I'd rather hi-dpi 32"+ monitors first though. Hidpi displays are becoming standard on top-end laptops but on desktop you're almost out of luck.

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.

What are you calling "hi-dpi"? There's a ton of 4k monitors in the 27" to 32" range, which are definitely higher DPI than typical. And for a lot less than $5000.

I'm typing this on a 4k, 32" monitor, which is 137.68 DPI, but I also have a Dell XPS 15, which is 4K and 15", 293.72 DPI, and the difference in sharpness is astounding.

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.

DPIs don't mean anything unless you factor in viewing distance.

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.

>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.

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.

30 degrees vertical is actually a recommendation for work[1], not for movies. If you look around for guide about ergonomics, you will often see that 30 degrees figure, or "top of the screen at eye level, center 15 degrees down", which mean the same thing.

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...

If the recommended horizontal viewing angle for a movie is 36 degrees, why is it hard for you to understand wanting a desktop PC display with significantly larger field of view, given that large PC displays are used subdivided into multiple windows? There's real usability value for a PC display that extends further into your peripheral vision than a movie screen, because you don't actively watch the whole PC screen at once.

>DPIs don't mean anything unless you factor in viewing distance.

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.

> 4k is 2160 vertical, so that's about the limit of human vision.

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)

It assumes no anti-aliasing.

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.

I always noticed I could do this, but wasn't sure what it was called. Thank you!

Why scale it if you think that makes me everything huge? I don't do the scaling and enjoy the extra real estate.

Because then you lose the sharpness, and the extra real estate is too much, so everything is both less sharp AND tiny.

I don't scale it, but then I lose the text sharpness. I would like both.

You could use bitmap fonts to get truly sharp text. I'm a big fan of terminus at 9pt. It makes non-bitmap fonts look blurry and awful by comparison. A real shame that Pango broke bitmap support and your choice of terminal emulator and other stuff is limited now.

IMO this is a huge and underrated advantage of bitmapped fonts.

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.

To keep the same pixel density you'd need an 8K at 30" or 10K at 36". I'm sure we'll get there but not anytime soon, at least not at prices almost anyone would be willing to pay, or not without sacrificing other specs that you surely want.

Yeah, I know.

I'd be happy with like 8k at 34" or so.

There's settings other than 100% and 200%. Set it to 125%. Or 150%.

That is not the same. Non-integer scaling results in worse sharpness because of the way it needs to be implemented.

See eg: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

That's not true at all. Fonts & other vector-based graphics scale to any resolution just fine.

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.

>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.

Apple-ism? Please. Most plarforms and GUI libs are pixel based, and we always have photos to see and other such bitmap assets.

Your photos rarely if ever match the size they are displayed at anyway. What Apple does is the worst possible thing for your photos, which typically end up double resized (once to the app's internal size, then once again for the display scaling).

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.

> The myth of 1x, 2x, and 3x being "preferred" is just an Apple-ism

And a GTK-ism.

You are not getting any 'sharpness benefit' if your 4k display is showing an upscaled 1080p image.

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 have the same displays as you- Dell 4k @ 15" and currently using a 32" 4k (I sit 2ft away from it). I also have a Macbook Pro 16 (3072×1920). I honestly don't see a substantial difference between any of them, and I'm generally pretty picky about resolution.

Right but if you scale the 32" so you get the hidpi sharpness (and put it far away), you lose the real-estate that you could have on a 32" screen.

I use 4K 32" with scaling at 100% and it seems totally fine. Lots of real 15-17" laptop screen at 4K makes no sense to me as I can't use 100% as the text size becomes too small.

Right, the whole idea is that you use 200% and get that really crisp text.

What I have already feels crisp enough and since I do a lot of programming I'd rather see more lines of code than increase scaling for no real benefits. As a matter of fact one of the 2 4K monitors on my desk is in portrait mode just for that.

You shouldn't be as close to the laptop screen as to the big monitor. And at larger distances the pixel densities can be lower.

This is the argument that HiDPI displays are pointless if you're not very close to the monitor, and if you've used a retina display, you know that there is absolutely a difference.

You probably hold your phone about 30-40cm from your face. You probably look at your laptop screen at 50-60. You should be at least 75cm it not 90 or 100cm away from a big monitor.

I'm not convinced the difference is obvious.

Did you say that backwards? On my lap, the screen of my laptop is 17"-20" from my face. At a desk, the monitor is usually about 28" from my face.

Yeah, I might have :-)

You should be farther from your monitor than you are from your laptop.

It's that you have to go to such a larger screen size. I just upgraded my monitor from a 1080p. I really wanted a 24" @ 4k for higher dpi and crispness. Practically impossible to find, despite being common on laptops with much smaller screens. I had to go up to 27" instead, which is still crisp, though not as much, and larger than I wanted for the space it's in.

I need both 4K and 120/144Hz on 32inch but it's not available now. Maybe soon.

There was some really dark times around 2002 to 2012 where good CRTs became unavailable and almost every LCD screen was "HD" meaning 1080p. Still at the tail end of these times, I guess.

I suppose my lack of age here is obvious, but what made the CRTs better? Presumably they weren’t outputting any more pixels than LCDs were?

They were. Most tech people I knew had a 19 or 20 inch monitor, at 1600x1200 in the late 90s/early 2000s. 2048x1536 was available too. Early LCDs were usually 1280x1024 and by around 2005, larger sizes and 1080p LCDs were available. It was hard to find anything approaching the pixel density of an old, common CRT until around 2010 if I recall correctly.

Monitors like LG27GL850 are 1440p 144hz with great color repro. Not ultra-wide, but ultra-wide is not something I personally value

I currently use multiple monitors, and apparently nobody at Apple HQ uses a monitor in portrait mode. Catalina routinely forgets the monitor is portrait and requires manually changing it back _every time the machine is locked_.

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

And now the Dell Alienware AW2721D which has 240 Hz https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/alienware-27-gaming-monitor-...

I personally can't stand the ultrawides. OS support for a huge monitor just isn't where I'd want it to be. Sure I can install applications to handle window management better and whatnot, but even trivial things like fullscreen video don't work well at all.

I'm a huge fan of the LG27GN950. 4k 144hz glory.

There are plenty of ultra-wide monitors with greater than 120Hz refresh. Just not with the resolution you are asking for.

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).

I'm seeing a resolution of 3840 X 1080 for that monitor?

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.

There's a 2x1080p version for $750 and a 2x1440p version for $999 (CRG90)

This is pretty close - https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--ody...

5120x1440 | 240 Hz

I'm looking for something similar, but not ultrawide. There's plenty of 27" 4k 100Hz+ monitors, but not the same in 30-36" sizes. I have 3x 24" monitors, and would like to replace one or two of them with one bigger screen that's higher resolution and faster.

Yeah I'm on an iMac Pro (which is the same display as the 27" iMacs) as my main display at its pretty glorious with 218 PPI. My older 34" ultra wide next to it is really showing its age, both in terms of overall quality and 110 PPI. The newer LG 34" that is 5K2K is not horrible at 164 psi.

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.

My current dream monitor is a 42inch 3840x2400 or 7680x4800 - 120hz screen. I love the 16:10 aspect ratio and real estate of a monitor like that. I’m currently running 3 24inch monitors in portrait mode, so 3600x1920

I am still mad that all display vendors went 16:9. The black bars are fine when watching movies if you mostly use the display for productive work, whereas 4:3->16:9 was a shitty transition for someone like me working mostly with text and written music. It was as if the world had decided that the use case for computer screens was something else than what I was using them for. Although I do costume some video content on my computer today, I would switch to a high-res 4:3 display instantly.

A 27" 4000x3000 display would be a dream come true.

I'm waiting for the same thing. Hoping LG actually has this in the works, as their current 34" 5120 x 2160 has been out of stock for a while now, and they make a bunch of other high refresh rate displays.

I am also going to be buying one of these as soon as they hit the market.

The LG 38GN950-B [0] gets close. 3840x1600 so not quite your wanted resolution but close - enough to fit most 4K movies if you remove the black bars. Personally I am hoping someone will make an OLED with this format.

[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-38gn950-b-gaming-monitor

Xiaomi Surface 34

I doubt you'll find any gaming monitors at that resolution for a while. The newest Nvidia GPUs can't hit high enough frame rates at 4k to utilize 120Hz.

Why do you need 120Hz+ for productivity?

1. With DLSS 2.0 you can get 120+ fps in a lot of things on the 3080 @ 4k

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.

My understanding is that if you aren't gaming (i.e. most of the content on your screen is static) your GPU is smart enough not to redraw the entire frame so you can probably get very low latency refreshes.

Even without DLSS, this isn’t necessarily true. My 3080 has no problems pegging some recent games at 144-160 fps at the corresponding refresh rate. In fact, I’m generally CPU bottlenecked at 1440p or below.