I have 3 27" 5k monitors in portrait and a 32" 4k horizontal above those. It is all mounted with vesa cheeseplates to manfrotto magic arms on t slot aluminum attached to a C stand with manfrotto super clamps. I also have two genelec studio monitors which sound amazing.
The brand names are there, I assume, to show that it's not some cheapskate setup jerry-rigged from salvaged parts. Because even then it's still less expensive that the giant Dell monitor.
I frankly don't understand the point of such monitors. If they are placed reasonably near, they don't fit human FOV well, and the periphery is seen distorted. If they are far enough away, the pixel pitch goes well past the angular resolution of the eye.
I got the 49" version of the dell Alienware display (basically this one size down with different branding and stand)...
. From my perspective you're looking at it incorrectly, the point isn't to be able to look at everything at the same time, it's to be able to quickly glance from the one side to another.
Let's say I have an ide open, I will likely not look at the directory structure often, but I want an easy way to switch files - fantastic for having it available just by glancing over
Now you run tests, start the application etc. It also doesn't need to be in your view, all the time - but isn't it convenient to be able to just look where you know it's?
It's suboptimal for competitive gaming however, exactly for the reason you said. Scenic gaming on the other hand is improved by it, because the larger screen is more innersive
I used to be happy with virtual desktops. Then I switched to macOS. What a mess it is: from the irritating virtual desktop animations that delay you, to the annoying keyboard shortcuts that don’t work in full screen mode, I’ve decided to just move on to multiple monitors or maybe one big display.
And it used to be better -- you could use TotalSpaces which would make Spaces two-dimensional and let you turn off the animation. But they took that from us!
There is a way of using Stage Manager as though it was Spaces, with minimal animations, but it takes a lot of getting used to and it's still not great.
If your plan is to physically move your head to look at the peripheral anyway, then this is much cheaper to achieve by putting a second monitor alongside your primary monitor (I keep an older 2560x1440 in portrait alongside my main 4k display)
Scenic gaming seems pretty niche outside of dedicated flight/driving sim setups? And regular gaming often kind of sucks on ultrawides - way too few games have decent options to pull the HUD into the center region of the display
Perhaps, but I value this simple explanation of the setup because it serves as a "these parts work well for this purpose" testimony. I'm already familiar with Manfrotto quality but not in this use type. It's nice to have my horizons broadened.
Force of habit. The film industry values brand recognition of gear highly because reliability is important. There are a lot of cheaper equivalent parts which could be assumed which wouldnt accurately illustrate my point. I spent around $450 just on the hardware to mount the monitors and it is still cheaper than this dell monitor.
“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.”
I get bonkers annoyed using just two monitors with macos or windows. multi monitor management... nothing behaves how i want it to, apps never open where they should etc etc. I havent tried it on desktop linux enough to know if it's any better - maybe at least id assume have the most configuration control on linux.
How do you do it? I always give up in frustration.
100% would keep the genelecs :)
I can only speak for the Cinnamon desktop environment on Linux Mint, but it’s very simple:
- Apps always launch on the monitor your mouse cursor is on
- Switching the focused window to the other monitor is Win+Shift+Arrow Keys
So if I clicked to open an app, it’s on the monitor I’m already looking at. If I used a keyboard shortcut, win+shift+arrow is super easy and simple.
The fact that it’s a stupid simple rule means I can get way better at just doing things by muscle memory… I don’t have to worry about being outsmarted by the window manager.
I use AeroSpace on mac os for tiling window management with spaces mapped per monitor so that eg space 1 is my top monitor woth my email and chat and space e is on the left for my obsidian, spaces asdfgh are my center monitor for code and terminals, and spaces zxcvb are the right monitor for browsers. I dont stick to this organization rigidly and when I'm doing odd tasks like cad or developing an app I break the patterns and put things on whatever monitor is convenient. I try to stick to a few common apps in the same spaces however.
For Mac I spent $0.99 a long time ago and bought Magnet on the App Store which lets me move windows and resize using hotkeys. For windows I aggressively use windows key + left/right to move the windows around, with 4 displays you just have to remember their ordering and eventually it becomes muscle memory to get it to snap where you want it. It mostly moves left to right, in my case.
On KDE and things like opening app on active monitor / desktop work fine. Only complaint is that on older versions, the taskbar on secondary monitors would sometimes disappear.
For reference I have 3 monitors (2x 4k, 1x 1080p) and am currently using Debian / Wayland and Ubuntu / X11.
It was a bug. I have 3 screens, and it would disappear on the third. An update, sometime around middle of last year fixed it, if my memory is correct.
But, I still have occasional problems with my monitors not waking up when I return to my desk. With 3, I've never had all 3 fail to wake, and a simple disable in the monitor settings, then choose "revert" usually brings them back.
What fixed it for my was switching to Omarchy and using wayland (what it comes with). I don't bother very much with positioning or window resizing anymore. Give it a shot!
The relative distance of the top 4k monitor actually makes it work pretty well. I use that for chats and email and dashboards that I need to keep an eye on.
You should strive to sit with your head balanced on top of your neck, with your arms relaxed at your side and elbows at 90 degrees. wrist rest. good seating position. no donut cushion. etc
tilting your head back to look at a monitor above or to the side will use muscles to hold your body in place and misalign your spine/etc. leads to fatigue/stress/long-term issues
Not for nothing but 6K HDR @ 120Hz is likely a large part of the cost of this monitor.
I don't know if I'd put it on my desk, I got somewhat used to my setup - I had 2x4K 27" 144Hz monitors with very thin bezels (LG or Asus?) that I then traded in when I got a ProDisplay XDR. I do wish for higher refresh, and maybe more screen size.
I was going to comment about the price, but you kind of wrapped it up.
It's like the most popular form of innovation nowadays is just marginally nicer products with a massive premium on them - and I don't get how this is sustainable. Or maybe there's just way more people with massive amounts of disposable income than I realize...
There's no breakthrough of like "here's an amazing product, and by the way, it's for everyone".
This whole culture of scarcity, scalping, hoarding, FOMO, premium, it's so played out I'm literally done with it. This is paired with terrible customer support that takes customers for granted.
Very few companies seem to value their customers, and don't want to squeeze them. Tech, cars, consoles... You name it.
So this is my current stance: I'm out of the market for the foreseeable future, unless something breaks and I need to replace it. Even the "nice to have" stuff is down to almost zero.
I disagree with this take. Particularly because this isn't just a little more of this or that. It's a well-integrated set of features that should have already been on the market in some form, but wasn't really. And it's also a premium setup in terms of each feature individually. It really does feel like the whole is more than the sum of its parts in practical terms.
I don't feel FOMO. I'm thinking more "why did it take this long?"
Two PA27JCV and one LG ultrasharp (it was cheap because it was broken and I repaired it) and the 4k monitor is a samsung which I cant recommend. (Open box was cheap though)
Haha thats amazingly confusing when you look closely.
I'm using baby pin reciever plates on 4080 extrusion with m6 thumbscrews into drop in t nuts. There is only one c stand. The extrusion is actually two parts in a cross. The speakers are on the horizontal extrusion mounted on magic arms. My momitors are angled slightly upward and the bottom is a few inches lower than standard desk height.
I would pay the premium to have just this one monitor, although I find it too large.
And that’s fine for me: that different people want different setups. I’d never want a multi-monitor setup if I can avoid it, where others say it makes them more productive and whatnot.
Would love to see a picture of this setup and your thought on the brands / models you have. I’m in the market for new monitors / setup and yours sounds very much like something up my alley.
Why? Just out of curiosity. Is it that you don’t need that much low end for the media you’re usually playing through your monitors or do the 8030Cs have enough low end to eliminate the need for a separate woofer?
I’ve been debating getting genelecs for a few years now but the price jump from something like JBLs or Yamahas is so huge that I can’t justify it. At least not on my current budget.
I currently have the 8020D + 7040A. It's pretty much perfect sound with room correction applied, but the 7040A is kind of big and ugly. I'd be willing to give up some low-end to simplify the setup. Also the sub performs the crossover, so it's a lot of cords: 2 cords for DAC -> Sub, and 2 cords for sub -> L/R. And these cords have to be really long for when I raise my desk because the sub has to go on the floor.
Also have 2 8020D's but I skimped on the subwoofer. Probably a bad idea, since they deemphasize the lows so much, but surprisingly I can crank up them up on my mixer's EQ to make up for it without losing clarity.
They are the tiny 8010s. I don't produce much with this setup so accurate near field monitoring was all that I needed. I love how crystal clear the high end is with these. I bought them used and they were pretty beat up. I take them traveling so as an anti theft measure I painted them neon green and covered them in stickers to make them look cheap. They are mounted on magic arms to the aluminum extrusion. I also have some random Klipsch subwoofer. I send them a balanced output from a yamaha mixer at 192khz.
Oh, nice! Yea, was wondering what Genelecs, combined with your other gear, could be less than the price of this monitor. Makes sense that it’s the smaller ones!
Interesting, manfrotto's website has a cookie notice with two buttons: ALLOW ALL and ALLOW SELECTION.
However, there's no selections -- there's only a description of hundreds of cookies they store (e.g. 73 in Marketing section), but there's nothing to select, it's only text.
There seems to be grey deny button at top-right on first view but it disappears if you select the details. You need hide the details first if you want to click it.
This monitor is not aimed at the same market segment as the pro display xdr which values high brightness, accurate color, and higher than normal contrast for hdr content mastering. In my opinion for productivity there are much cheaper setups which provide more ppi and more pixels per dollar.
I literally have this monitor already and these pixels are humongous. Even at 3 feet away. Also the viewing angle degradation is too much, so much so that it irritates to look at the edge of the screen from the center. A very poor monitor indeed.
> This is 128 ppi, which would be considered "retina“
If by “retina” we mean “pleasantly sharp”, not by me. I’m never buying less than the 218 ppi of my Apple Studio Display unless I absolutely have to. I’m totally spoiled.
I think the point was that people care about ppd, not ppi. 218 ppi would be too low if the screen is 1 inch from your eye or too high if it’s 100 inches from your eye.
I have the Apple 6K 32” Pro Display XDR and a Kuycon 5K 27”. Both are great. Apple was $6,500 and the Chinese version was $400 on EBay plus the $100 stand. Kuycon has more types of input, and a remote. Frame and display quality are on par for a dev.
They aren't even close in comparison? Like 600 nits brightness vs 1000 (1600 peak) for one. Contrast ratios are very very different. It only supports HDR600. They are very different displays in person. Perhaps at low brightness on text they are similar, but outside of that they really aren't very similar.
Amazing, checked just now and seems that these are now in stock in many places. When I checked last week, they weren't, seems like some stock got released for EU then.
macOS can specify regions of the screen to be 1x. If I'm using Capture One or Lightroom, my photos are at normal resolution while the UI elements are "retina/2x".
You can configure macOS to scale everything more or less, just like you want it.
Same for Windows and Linux.
And you keep the crispness of the full pixel resolution for text and images.
Yes really. A pixel is a pixel. This dell monitor has pixels the size of boulders. Apple Pro Display XDR has 4.6m more pixels in a significantly smaller area creating a much denser display.
What is going on here? Why is everyone in this thread using 'pixels" to mean ppi? It seems unnecessarily confusing or even misleading. I mean blatantly a 6K monitor has more pixels than a 5K or 4K one, regardless of the pixel density.
I've got an eye on the CES Samsung Odyssey offerings at 32" 6k 165hz. I'd prefer 16:10 and currently run two 16:10 30" displays, but nobody making them.
I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).
To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D
Is there a significant benefit for programming in going from 4K to 6K on a 32" display? I'm currently on 27" 1440p and looking for more screen estate for my neovim setup.
On macOS too. On both operation systems 99% apps do though. Maybe its 99.9% on macOS vs 99.8% on Windows. But I'm using HiDPI on both and it was a long time ago that I encountered an app that didn't support it.
On the official Kuycon site, it says "Since 2023, Kuycon has partnered exclusively with ClickClack.io to bring its innovative line of monitors to customers outside of China[...]". I'm seriously considering getting one of these.
Those look like the monitors used on the F1 movie, which is strange, considering it was an Apple production and they maybe should have used apple monitors for product placement . I guess it is a testimony about Kuycon from Apple.
You should look at pictures of Apple's Pro Display XDR. The Kuycon monitor is an obvious rip-off of that in terms of styling, especially the ventilation on the back.
There's an awkward zone where scaling doesn't work well. But if you have a screen that can do nice high levels of detail, then you can run older UIs at exactly 2x and they will look just as good as they ever did. An Apple Pro display is a good fit here, offering 218 pixels per inch compared to a "traditional" 96.
By having fewer pixels, lower quality screens? Crazy what you can do when you cut corners.
This screen reminds of when I did tech support in high school and I helped a guy who bragged about his computer monitor, it was a TV running at 720p (if not lower) and a massive screen. The windows start bar was hilariously large (as were all UI elements), I had to just smile and nod until I got out of there.
Sure, your screen may be bigger but it's blurry and everything is scaled way too large.
The HiDPI/Retina bullshit is just bullshit. I've been running a 4K 43" 4:3 display at 100% scaling since 2018. It is neither blurry nor scaled too large. It can, however, comfortably fit 10 A4 pages simultaneously. Or 4 terminals + a browser + a PDF reader.
My arithmetic nodule is having a konniption fit. Does not compute. If this is 16:9 and you mistook your aspect ratio I can breathe again. √2:1 says 1.41:1 isn't 1.33:1
10 A4 pages do not fill a 4:3 or 3:4 aspect ratio box. They don't fill a 16:9 box either but it's more plausible, the wastage is different.
1. I don't think I'll ever buy Dell again. My current monitor is a Dell S3221QS 32" screen and it has vertical lines and starts flickering on both the Macbook M1 and the Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip after some time, which is a known issue[0][1]. It also defaults to YPbPr colors rather than RGB/SRGB, so the colors look off. I'm using HDMI to HDMI connectivity currently.
Part of it is also my fault as I thought a monitor would work with any computer.
2. That aside, what are you all using for window management on these large screens? I'm currently using Rectangle on Mac, but I was wondering if there's a better way.
I've gone the other direction - and after having struggled with other various monitors (the worst is easily the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - both cruddy capability (should have noted before buying it has no Power Delivery) as well as easily some of the blurriest text ever) - I've decided I will only ever buy Dell Monitors. Every one I've purchased (5 of them) in the last 15sh years has been a flawless performer - no hardware failures either.
Every monitor on every desk at work (around 3000 desks) is a Dell U3821DW - no broadscale systemic complaints that I've ever heard of.
I'm currently using my 4K 27" Dell P2715Q that I bought for $400 back in December 2017, and I've carried (physically) with me from office to office from Michigan to the Bay Area - thing runs for 10+ hours a day (minus weekend) for 8 years running. Eventually it's going to have to give in- and when it does - definitely going to buy another Dell (probably the U2725QE 27" 4K)
I'm kinda the same. I have a Dell monitor and a Gigabyte monitor side by side and my mac constantly loses the connection to the gigabyte monitor. At least once per day I have to unplug my video link to the gigabyte monitor to get the mac to rediscover it, this never happens with the dell one.
Counter-anecdata: I have 2 Dell U2720Q (Ultrasharp 27") bought in 2021 and they've been great.
That said, I've always stuck for Dell's upper-range Ultrasharp (U prefix in models) monitors, being slightly wary of their cheaper series which the S in your S3221QS implies.
I'm using 2x Dell U3011s, one I purchased around ~2013 probably and the other I got used recently for $100. My only issue with them is that they have PWM coil whine that only goes away if I crank the brightness to ~90%, which seems to produce an immense amount of heat and probably power consumption. I'd love to find a viable alternative solution for this, because these are my favorite monitors for now.
The model appears to have been released 16 years ago.
I haven't yet found a monitor that makes sense to replace them with either.
I think there is a slightly newer version of these, but I have the same set up.
I haven’t been able to find anything that has the vertical space that these monitors do. Even Ultra Wide monitors just aren’t tall enough. If I got this 52 inch behemoth that would help, but I would actually lose horizontal space.
I have the 27" from that series. In my experience, after I fixed the RGB issue, I also fixed the flickering issue. And to fix the RGB issue, I used BetterDisplay[1], controlled by a Hammerspoon[2] script[3] that calls its CLI on the appropriate display events.
The free version of BetterDisplay is sufficient, I really don't use any of its other features.
The flickering seems to be gamma related, and is triggered by Nightshift or Flux for me.
I bought a brand new Dell monitor through Amazon’s Dell Store (i.e. fulfilled by Dell themselves and shipped to me directly from their warehouse). The HDMI port broke a couple months later as it was sitting undisturbed on a desk, which was a common problem mentioned in its reviews. Dell flat out refused to replace it, saying that their database showed a different owner than me. Remember, they themselves shipped it straight to me. Amazon did right and let me return it even though it was already past the return period.
I will never, ever buy Dell hardware again. They’re dead to me. And when the IT department at a previous job reported to me, and a Dell rep cold called me to offer us a business plan, I politely explained why I’d rather gargle broken glass than risk my reputation on a vendor who doesn’t understand what a warranty means. That felt pretty good.
Not all of those have "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" below the shipping timeframe line. It changes depending on inventory stock. The first monitor in the "plus" list says "Ships from and sold by computersale". Some third party sellers can register a device's sale with Dell.
The invoice on my order history says Dell was the seller, and I specifically remember that the label on the unopened box showed that it was shipped directly from Dell’s warehouse.
I went through this like 100 ways when it happened. I bought the monitor from Dell. They shipped it from their hands straight to mine. And when it broke, they refused to make good on it.
I had a strange problem with Dell P2720DC (27'' 2560x1440) - the whole outer edge of the screen would flicker if I used dark background with a lot of dim colours (like dark mode in IDE, or default Grafana theme). It wouldn't happen all the time, but it would happen on a weekly basis (I most often seen that on Sunday). I've RMA'd it, got another monitor, which also started showing the same problem. I gave it to someone who doesn't use dark mode - no issues.
So, I'm not getting another Dell until I'd be sure this issue won't happen again :)
Have you tried disabling GPU temporal dithering via BetterDisplay or StillColor? I had a similar problem with a different brand of monitor, and this has been the only reliable fix.
One of my Dell's would randomly decide that the mini DP connection has no signal, and rebooting the MacBook Pro was the only way to restore it. HDMI would work just fine.
I bought a refurbished P24-something, basically the last 4K monitor I could find that was 24” or smaller — 4k @ 27+ looks bad for me. That Dell has been amazing. Just a counterpoint :)
I just setup mine today, and I am not sure I recommend it.
I went from a 40" to a 52", and I'm just moving my head waaay too much and my shoulders hurt. It is curved, but very little imo, it's almost like it's flat. I'm going to try it for a week before making the call on whether to return it.
I feel like this needs a workflow where you do work in the middle and use the fringes for other applications that you rarely look at. Otherwise you're moving your head waaay too much and squinting a bunch.
Based on personal experience, I think the upper bound for comfortably useful size at normal sitting distances is probably about 32", and even then I think there'd be better returns on adding vertical pixels to a ~27" monitor. A modern equivalent to the old 16:10 30" 2560x1600 monitors (ideally 2x scaling 5120x3200) would be great for example, but one could also imagine a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor with the same width (~23.5") as current 16:9 27" monitors.
I'm still rocking a couple of 30 inch dell 2560x1600 monitors. They're about the perfect size and not dealing with scaling in Linux is nice. I'd pay a ton of money for a modern equivalent.
Same! My employer offered a choice of 32-inch and 40-inch monitors. I “upgraded” from 32 to 40 but I regretted it. I just don’t make use of the extra horizontal space effectively.
That was my issue with multiple monitors years ago - I'd be cranking my neck over too often (looking at logs, etc). I vastly prefer an ultrawide where I can put logs / monitors on the side flexibly.
I have a 34 inch now, and feel like I could use more space - but it's nice to know there's an upper bound. Do you feel like there's still room to go beyond 40, or is that the sweet spot?
3x27” high-PPI displays in portrait orientation is the winner and no one does it
The center display is always actually centered. The short edge of a high-PPI 27” screen is wide enough for actual normal width browser or IDE usage, but now you get much more vertical real estate on that window.
Not nearly as much neck movement as an ultra wide and since the entire array is pretty square, the neck movement is way more balanced.
I went from 34"(3440x1440) which felt a little bit small to 38"(3840x1600) and it is nearly perfect. I can have my main window in the middle and 2 or 4 smaller windows (logs, chat, youtube, etc) on the side.
The only thing I want now is double pixel density.
When I owned a 40" monitor, I had to get a deeper desk and sit pretty far from it. Even then, I couldn't game on it, because games shove the HUD and minimal into the corners, and they were too far to the side to keep an eye on.
Can't picture a 52" being usable as a PC monitor, really.
I sometimes think that my 40" is too much because the extra space just ends up hosting distracting junk like Slack.
I also have a mild take that large screens make screen real estate cheap so less thought goes into user interface design. There's plenty of room just stick the widget anywhere!
It'd be pretty interesting to compare how much the amount of information one can cram onto their ~27" screen has changed between 2005 and 2025, with the comparison points between between a Mac running OS X 10.6 and a Mac running macOS 26, which I think is a particularly salient and apples-to-apples comparison since Apple was selling 30" 2560x1600 displays back then, which are close cousins to modern 27" 2560x1440 displays.
My gut feeling is that the difference would be around 30-40%. Information density of the UI of OS X 10.6 and contemporary software was much higher than today's tabletized "bouncy castle" style UI.
It would be interesting but I don't think that information density necessarily makes a good interface.
As a personal pet peeve example, developers love to cram a search bar (or browser tabs) into the top of the window. It's more dense but it's also harder to use and drag the window.
True. More accurately, it's a combination of high density, judicial allocation of whitespace, and layouts that have been thought through. The 2000s versions of OS X were better in those regards too, though.
I've been using a 49" monitor for almost four years.
I have the center window taking half of the screen, and on the sides I have my email, messaging clients and other things I like to monitor from time to time.
Kinda like this: [ | | ]
I am on mac and I use an app called Magnet to manage the windows. I will only change this setup for a larger monitor.
Seconding this. I have one for my work desk, where (surprisingly enough) it made a lot of sense. The DPI isn't as big of an issue as people make it out to be if your workflow doesn't depend on high density, but the curvature definitely could benefit from being a bit tighter. You need a fairly deep desk or a keyboard tray if you don't want to be turning your head a bunch.
That being said, having this in combination with PowerToys FancyZones has been fantastic. At any given time, I'm usually running 1-4 main working windows plus Signal, Outlook, and an RSS reader. This gives me more than enough real estate to keep them all available at a moment's notice. I have roughly 40% of the screen real estate dedicated to Signal, Outlook, and my RSS client, with the interior 60% being hotkey-mapped to divide in different proportions. Compared to my old setup (one ultrawide plus two verticals) it's been awesome.
You'll get used to it. I have 3 24 inch monitors side by side. Center one is usually the editor, right one documentation or more editors, left one browsers with info.
Maybe it's a head turner vs eye mover thing. It's a lot less fatiguing moving eyes, which might not be option for glass wearers. I sit 2 feet away from my 50 inch OLED and moving eyes is much less work than windows management. Otherwise it is very workflow dependant, i.e. working on visuals or schematic diagrams.
Yeah, I'm on a Lenovo 5k2k 40" UW and it's never occurred to me to want something wider. Though I will admit I definitely noticed the loss of total real estate vs my old 3x 27" setup.
I purchased this as soon as it was announced, I was surprised they had it ready to ship on the day of the CES announcement.
I do enjoy it, with Fancyzones, I can set up Unreal Engine Editor, Rider, discord/teams and a small corner window for searching and/or youtube watching on the side. At first I thought the pixel count was going to be too low but from my position it 'feels' retina at 125% windows scaling. Yes you can do the same with multiple monitors but I don't get the fatigue of turning my physical head, it's the perfect size to sit in middle and use your eyes to adjust/focus if that makes sense..
120hz and fast motion helps a lot. DCS World looks amazing on this, it feels like it's your full fov when playing games. Granted this isn't an OLED panel, I wouldn't play anything competitive on here but EU V and/or RTS games are very nice at 6k/52.
This replaced my dual 4K 120hz monitors. Recommend if you're not gaming.
I've found ideal monitor size and resolution depends greatly on viewing distance and relative position. I use a 38" ultra-wide and it's almost too wide - but I have it 'floating' on an adjustable monitor arm so it's only about 24" from my eyes and a bit higher than most monitor stands would allow. The monitor arm is key because once I put a full ergo split keyboard at a comfortable arm-rest distance, a normal monitor stand sitting on the desk would force the monitor to be too far back.
For the full breadth of a 52" monitor to be comfortably viewable for detail work, I'd have to be farther back enough that the difference between 4K and 6K wouldn't be meaningful. It's kind of like how 8k resolution can provide meaningful value in a head-mounted display two inches from your eyeballs, but 8k on a 65" living room TV seven feet away from your couch viewing position is pointless because even those with 20/10 vision can't resolve the additional detail at that distance.
For detail work I find my best ergo seating position is up close with my legs tucked well-under the desk and my stomach almost touching the edge of the curved desk inset. This allows my forearms to be supported comfortably on the desk. I also have my desk surface a little lower than most and my Aeron chair a little higher, putting the top of my legs almost touching the underside of the desktop.
To whoever needs to hear it, I will never buy another 16:9 monitor. Vastly prefer the 3:2 on my Framework and also liked an old 4:3 I had. Also great in portrait.
I ordered this within 30 minutes of learning about it. I've been waiting for something like this. Here's why:
- My eyes are getting older, and I need a better visual connection to my work.
- We spend much of our lives in front of these devices. Optimizing this just makes sense.
- It is more than just a monitor with some features. It's a well-rounded kit with good software support.
- I previously used multiple 4K monitors and external KVMs. The built-in KVM and management software that works with the display makes multi-system use as easy as it could possibly be.
- The resolution has _more than_ overcome the issues I had with font rendering on lower resolutions while trying to have more visual workspace.
- The thunderbolt hub has vastly reduced multi-system USB/wiring/speed clutter and confusion.
Yes, it was expensive. Yes, I'm very happy with it. Within this week, it has drastically improved my sense of comfort and utility, and I got rid of all the other monitors.
Ok, for the gripes:
- The curvature is a bit minor compared to what I'm used to. Given the spatial density I want, the optimal distance is less than 30" from the display, and with my aging eyes at this distance, looking from center to edge changes my focal depth by more than a small amount. That said, the off-axis views are quite good. Essentially, looking at this display from a longer distance wastes much of the effective ocular resolution.
- The software is great, but if you want something more tactile, reaching to the sole multi-purpose menu stick is not that great. It wouldn't have hurt for them to provide a USB-connected desktop switch. I hope they still do. This monitor runs its own "OS" of sorts, and can be extended with new functionality should they choose to.
- Finding the improved dynamic range took a bit of learning. The way it works feels better (less of a special case) for me, but I had to go adjust the settings to tap into higher resolution per color plane.
If anybody has any specific questions, I'll be happy to answer them.
I have a 40in 5k (32in 4k, but wider). IMHO, 138ppi is the bare minimum, but it really depends on a person's eyesight and preferences.
I would love a large-ish ultra-wide with > 160ppi. One day, maybe, that being said, by that time those things will exist and be reasonably priced, my eyes might not be able to appreciate the difference.
I'm using three 4k 32" screens arranged vertically, for 6480 x 3840 desktop size.
The only real monitor upgrade I'm willing to entertain is a ~50" 8k curved screen (basically a curved TV-sized screen), which has not been made yet AFAIK. I'm not into "ultrawide", for me it has to be "ultrawide" and "ultratall". I want all that screen real estate in high PPI.
I tried test-driving a 50" 4k TV for a week and the flatness of it was not what I wanted, it has to be a curved screen for workstation use.
100% I used to have a 43-inch 4K "monitor" (16:9). The lack of curvature meant that at the sides of the screen, there was noticeable color shifting due to variations in viewing angle. That's with an IPS panel.
Your dream is probably a ~50in 8K TV (with RGB pattern if you are on macOS), but curved. I don't know if that will ever exist.
Personally, I found that with a bigger 16:9, I would not use the top and bottom of the screen. When I "downgraded" to a 40in ultra-wide, there was not much difference in the space I was using.
What planet are those people on? That's Gucci bag territory. They can take their res and shove it, that's almost NINE GRAND (granted, Canadian pesos) for a freakin display! Who is this for, just Pixar employees?
And how much do you think the Humanscale mount costs that you would otherwise use? The Pro Display XDR is too heavy for a $30 Amazon Basics mounting arm or anything similarly cheap.
The Pro Display XDR is 7.48 kg and a $199 Ergotron LX Pro is rated up to 10 kg, so that's a fifth of the Apple stand's price.
And looking at Amazon.de listings, it's definitely possible to buy a cheap arm that's good for 7.5 kg. A "suptek Monitor Mount" is good for 10 kg according to the listing: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0833NQ8CR
In terms of pixel count it's between Apple's 5k and 6k monitors, and its pricing is between the two. It's also far lower pixel density. So, not really.
Interestingly it has Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb), 6K typically saturates 30-31Gb, which leaves less 10Gb/s which isn't a lot especially assuming 2.5Gb network. Looks like a perfect case for TB5 and given its price.
The radius is too big. This monitor is R4200, 4.2m. I have a Samsung odyssey something 49” monitor and it is glorious. It is R1000, and since my head is about a meter from the screen, it works: even the edges are usable.
I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.
The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.
My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
I have the 40" (5K) and it's perfect. Replaced a 27-32-27 setup (the 27"s being portraits, the 32" landscape). For my coding and office work, absolutely no reason to go wider. Highly recommended.
Note the 40", and probably this one too. support MST which makes the display appear as two monitors to the OS and is great in terms of window management without going too fancy with custom software.
Likewise. I've had the 40" version for about a year. Higher DPI than the 52". It replaced 2 x 27" monitors and I'm glad I made the switch. I generally have 2 apps running side-by-side just like before, but with the ability to go full wide-screen for movies or gaming.
This monitor really does everything. It's crisp enough to read text on all day, unlike many gaming monitors. But the 120Hz is decent for gaming whereas most 5K+ monitors are only 60hz.
Interesting, I'm on 3x27" 2K monitor (same setup as you, portrait, landscape, portrait) and while it works very well for me, I'd like to replace it with just 1 screen (or 3x 4-5K monitors but that is less interesting to me). I already have custom window management software that I use so it wouldn't be hard to switch to sub-dividing 1 monitor to get a similar experience (I think).
Maybe I should look into the 40" 5K monitors, thanks!
Losing the bezel is great, and the Dell 4025qw that I have has also an IPS Black panel which is a vast improvement over what I had before - Dell U27-something (4K IPS), 3219Q (4K IPS). And it's 120hz. I really enjoy it.
I’ve been using a single 24 inch 1080p benq usb c monitor after realizing 4k 27 inch scaling is just terrible and 5k 27 inch is just too pricey. It’s a budget monitor but it’s surprising what 140$ can get you these days cause the quality of the panel is really good. It supports daisy chaining so I can add another monitor to my m1 air (which I can’t otherwise I think). If it was 4k 24 inch I’d buy two as I find that size kinda perfect.
Personally I’ve found that a single monitor is enough 90% of the time while coding. It’s when I need to do something nitty gritty that I need a second monitor.
That being said working with only a laptop is painful and extremely uncomfortable for the posture. I don’t think I can get anything real done without a monitor keyboard and mouse. Going down to an 11 inch iPad sounds impossible.
For some reason nobody makes 2K 24"s anymore -- that was my sweet spot. But now to get the pixel density you have to go way bigger :/ dreading the day the old monitors I have cease working. I like the 24" size but 1080 is just so annoying. I was using 2048x1156 20" monitors back in 2010 and they had better density!
we have become used to retina displays these days so 1080p 24 inch looks 'pixelated'. I sit about 18 inches from the monitor and it looks okay. I find this distance and size most comfortable for me. The 27 inch 4k was too big for my setup and the scaled 2560x1440 is something I would not recommend (was warned about it but didn't listen :P).
I think it's called Displaylink. yet to try it with this particular benq but I know it can be done. The total output pixels are limited though so I doubt what the limitation of the Air is. but 2 24 inch 1080p should be doable.
I've got big monitors, that I hook up to my work laptop and my own laptop. I make it work with a kvm hub. It's really sweet, for my use.
I keep a browser, an IDE, and a terminal pretty much side by side on the bottom one. I keep slack, email, and a clock on the top monitor. I also place pullout tabs from my IDEs on the top one.
Thing is, no matter the cost range, I generally have to replace the KVM hub about once a year. I've just come to accept that as a part replacement cost. <shrug> This thing has its own KVM hub internally. Maybe I'm just rough on my KVM, but if someone puts significant wear and tear on this monitor, I'd imagine that part would wear out, which seems like a potential money sink if you have to keep calling the warranty folks.
If it’s at all representative, I had to replace 2 of the dell ultra sharp super ultra wides due to failing USB C hub / PD parts. I gave up at that point.
My 49 inch Dell ultrawide is failing too. One USB port is already dead, and the other ports have just now started to develop intermittent issues as well.
I have a Samsung neo g9 57" which is like 1/2 an 8k monitor (or 2 4k monitors side-by-side) which is sweet since I use picture-by-picture mode to have my work computer on one side and my personal computer on the other side.
I have the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - but despite spending literally dozens of hours - I was never able to get text to work clearly on it - either Mac or PC - tried both the DisplayPort, HDMI - tried all the (many) HDMI cables I had at home, and a couple expensive Monoprice cables, firmware updates, monitor resets, every setting I could figure - no luck. Text is just ... fuzzy in a way that it isn't with any other monitor I've ever owned - kind of a deal breaker when I spend all day in tmux.
Is it an oled display? It’s likely that the subpixel rendering does not match the physical display, so the subcolors are in the wrong location making the text worse instead of better (in the case of macs Apple entirely removed subpixel rendering some years back so there is no solution whatsoever, Apple on standard density always looks like shit).
Sadly they're not super common which makes them expensive, and I don't think I've seen any that wasn't 16:9. The world has decided to go with refresh rates rather than resolution.
Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.
Past 2880p on most desk monitor viewing distances or past 1080p on most TV viewing distances, you hit steeply diminishing returns. Please, please let's use our processing power and signal bandwidth for color and refresh rate, not resolution.
This is also why I think every console game should have a 720p handheld 'performance' and 1080p living room 'performance' mode. We don't need 1080p on handhelds or 2160p in the living room. Unless you're using relatively enormous screens for either purpose.
> Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.
If you can’t resolve that kind of DPI at that distance you need to get an appointment because you require glasses. The low end of normal vision stops differentiating around 175 dpi at 50cm. The difference is very noticeable (and disturbing) on contrasted detailed features like text without subpixel rendering (or when the subpixel rendering does not match the physical structure of the display).
Everyone I know can immediately see a clear difference between 120 ppi and 200 ppi, but I've yet to encounter anyone who can reliably tell 120hz from 200hz. We have monitors that render lego-sized pixels at 500+ hz now, it's enough.
Gamers have been gaslit to believe they have the reflexes of spider-man and are a lost cause, but their preferences have been listened to by monitor makers for 30 years. Enough already!
Millions of office workers are working all day reading text on screens optimized for playing games at low resolutions. It's just sad.
Steve Jobs showed a decade ago that 4x resolution could be sold at great profit for normal prices. Text on screens can be as crisp as on paper.
Sadly it only became the standard on phones, not on productivity desktop monitors. It so easily could be, and it should be.
I've recently gone from 60hz to 240hz to 480hz. Refresh rate in games is not just about what it looks like. It completely changes game mechanics, like movement, recoil etc. It is such a big difference between 60hz and 240hz that you're not really playing the same game. There are things you can do at 240hz that are impossible at 60hz. At 480hz, there's also so much more time to react, so you really don't need fast reflexes to take advantage of it.
I'm guessing you play FPS competitively and are in your 20s, and for you it might be true, I won't argue that.
The issue for me is that even if your experience was true for all gamers in the world, that would still be a tiny minority compared to all people in the world who use monitors to read text, day in and day out.
A low-res monitor cannot show a high-res image, but a high-res monitor can show a low-res picture, so both sides can get what they want here.
I run 8k/60 but my screen can also do 4k/120. If it could also do 1440 at 240hz or 1080 at 480hz wouldn't bother me, but that the industry spends all effort on making 1080/480 and basically NO effort on 8k does.
The industry should throw everything below say 200ppi on the scrap-heap of history where it belongs. It would harm nobody and benefit everybody.
Right, that should be imperceptible. The 240hz monitor was also 15" while the 480hz monitor is 27". I'm sure that contributes as well. My subjective experience is that I now just have a lot of more time to react.
It's a shame that this 6K tunderbolt hub monitor does not support the latest thunderbolt 5 standard. Otherwise you can connect and daisy chain two of these 6K displays together.
I was hoping that 8k tvs at ~50inches would become widely available.
They were high enough density and tall enough for coding applications, but as first versions they had some rough edges (text rendering not great by default).
Instead they just disappeared from the market :(
I think Aliexpress has no brand panels, but at $600 it is a non trivial gamble.
$2900 seems pretty reasonable to me considering the size. Works out to $416/sqft, which is much cheaper than Bay Area real estate.
I never understood the draw of these huge monitors until I had to do CAD for work and now I understand. Giant monitor + SpaceMouse is a gamechanger. My current monitor is 36” and I could easily use more width.
I can recommend the 45-inch LG Ultragear too. Nice OLED. 5120x2160 resolution. Perfect curvature for me, coming from a G9.
Just don't be an idiot like I was. I connected my monitor to my dock with both DisplayPort and some random USB-C cable. Worked fine initially. One day, cleaning my office, I swapped out that USB-C cable with a higher-quality one. Took me a bit to realize that the consequent Wayland post-resume resolution flakiness came from a race condition enumerating the real-DP and USB-C-alt-mode "separate" monitors that my machine thought I now had.
It's not often that downgrading a USB cable fixes a problem.
My desk has 2x 27" and 1x 43" Dell monitors. Unfortunately the new work MacBook only supports two external displays so one of those 27 sits idle.
What used to be nice is now a case of constantly shuffling windows, not made easy by MacOSs janky window handling.
I've been looking for a second 43" to replace the 27"s but the high price and sub-par quality of the 43 is making me wait.
I am also finding it difficult to find monitor arms that will carry such large and heavy screens. The 43 is already at the limit of the one reasonably priced arm I found and a definite struggle to mount.
Looks slick! In the >50" category, I've recently upgraded from the Samsung Odyssey G9 49" (with res 2x1440p) to a Samsung Odyssey G9 57" (2x4K). With a tiling window manager and workspaces it's really a pleasure to use, and contrarily to some beliefs, I do more focused work that way because I don't have to switch workspace to find the information I'm looking for – less risk of distraction.
I have a 34" ultrawide and it is huge. I can't imagine a 52" - the edges would be so far away that it must be hard to read text without physically moving left/right
Since well before the pandemic, I've have dual 28" 4K screens on my desk. When ordering them, I liked the fact that they had the same pixel pitch as my 14" 2K laptop screen. One monitor was like a borderless 2x2 grid of those laptop screens.
I found myself repositioning things so that one is in front of the keyboard as a primary screen and the other is further off to the side as a secondary dumping ground. I found myself neglecting the second display most of the time so it was just a blank background. Eventually, I noticed I wasn't even using the entire primary screen. I favored a sector of it and pushed some windows off to the edges.
Ironically, with work from home, I've started roaming around the house with the laptop instead of staying at my desk. So I'm mostly back to working in a 14" screen with virtual desktops, like I was 20 years ago. I am glad that laptops are starting to have 16:10 again after the long drought of HDTV-derived screens.
Do you... usually read content in a full-screen window on that thing?
I only have a 27" monitor and sit about 2.5 feet away from it and I move my head _slightly_ to focus on different windows. But that's the reason I have a larger monitor, so I can have a bunch of normal-sized windows open at once.
If the edges of the screen are further from your eyes than the center, the content and text doesn't appear at the same size. If you wear glasses, the edges might even fall out of focus unless you physically move closer.
I like having three columns of code open in my editor, but the left edge of the leftmost column (since code is left-justified) gets pretty far away from my face. Or I need stronger glasses, one of the two.
Now I use a 38" ultrawide, which is roughly the same width (in pixels and in inches) but doesn't require my head to move up/down as much.
I could imagine using a 52" ultrawide if it were placed further away from me (i.e. deeper desk). The extra pixels would make it effectively a retina display.
I have a 42" 4k TV that I use as a monitor (in gaming mode). Not sure I would want anything shorter than that. (Of course, I have an eye issue, so the side-to-side is even more pronounced for me.
And that would strain your eyes or force a bigger font. At that point, you'd be wondering, like me, on why I spent $$ to buy a bigger screen in the first place.
I got an open box lenovo 24 inch QHD monitor for years and it just works solid across windows, mac and various docking stations. I could imagine upgrading to a 27 or 30 inch but beyond that is just too much IMO.
Maybe taller, more square could be of more use than wider.
I had a Dell thunderbolt hub monitor (not sure if that was the exact name for it but functionally the same thing) in idk 2018? 1440p. Loved it. It played so well with my 2016 MBpro too. Even had HDD’s running through it. It worked fantastically from top to bottom.
For 2 years.
Obviously this is not the same product and it has been a long time. But man I hadn’t thought about that in years and now I’m all bitter about it again ha
So I use a 49" Dell U4919DW (5120 x 1440 @ 60Hz) with an Anker 777 powered Thunderbolt hub to support a MBP, but also use it directly with a lab Windows box. I can't see spending $3k on a monitor because this one was $1100 + $157.29 tax and shipping in 2022. I threw on a 4 port USB-C hub that clamps on the front bezel, so it has reachable ports.
I guess this almost replaces the Anker, but lacks Ethernet.
I use 2 32" 4K which cost about $800 for both monitors. The small gap between the monitors is annoying but I can't really justify paying $2k more. Also there is a samsung dual 4k that is about the same price as the dell.
Moving my head to see everything doesn't bother me. I also have a setup with 3 32" 4k which I find a little too wide but in that setup 1 monitor connects to different computer.
Looks nice enough. But seems pretty steep. The 42" TV I bought five years ago for $260 does basically the same thing. Slightly more vertical space (albeit at a lower DPI) and somewhat less horizontal. But it still supports four 80-column text windows without a sweat.
Late stage FAANGery is watching 20-somethings try to find ridiculous junk to spend money on.
I refuse to buy a dell monitor again because I found their quality low and their warranty process onerous. Took hours of my time to get a replacement sent and it had I failed in a different way soon after.
For a cheap throwaway monitor maybe. For anything premium no way.
Even though apple, asus and samsung have some top-notch models, premium monitors is actually where dell excels. At least the different models I’ve bought through the last decades. Cheap crap hardware are not welcome in my home.
I run a pair of the 43" model listed on the page (U4323QE). Coming from a desk full of 24" 1080P screens which I used with no scaling, the selling point for me was that the DPI was similar (~114, no scaling needed) while the total real estate was larger.
This 6K panel seems like it would scratch a similar itch.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out - I should have said it explicitly. It's why I said "product line" rather than "product". I thought the 32" vs 52" distinction would be clear for anyone who clicked through.
I also didn't realize that at the Dell store webpage, clicking the "32 inch" option actually slightly changed the product line - from U##26 to U##25 (as the 52" option is the only model associated with 2026), and generally I only consider UltraSharp's of different sizes to be "approximately equivalent in quality" if they share the same model year - and nothing yet shares the 2026 model year with this 52" option.
Interesting! If you sort their monitor reviews[0] page by "Office Rating" the top monitor is the ASUS ProArt Display PA27JCV with a score of 9.0
But their "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026"[1] lists a Dell Ultrasharp in the #1 rank and the Asus ProArt does not appear in the recommendations at all. The info cards imply that the recommendation rankings might result from a weighted blend of "Office Rating", "Text Clarity" and "SDR Brightness". However, the ProArt outscores the Ultrasharp in both "Office Rating" and "SDR Brightness" while exactly matching the Ultrasharp's score in "Text Clarity".
So the "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026" appears to be a somewhat subjective list, rather than purely a result of objective measurements.
In the end of the day everything is subjective. A choice of what objective measuremetns to make is already a choice.
I think the reason for their list not having that 9.0 monitor is that it is 50% more expensive, and doesn't really add that much more. One might say it is superfluous. They should probably add their justification to the article though. Personally I am in agreement, I wouldn't buy a 5k display for my office staff because I really don't think it adds anything over the 4k display to their productivity, but I could definetly justify a 4k display over a 1080p display.
I love the Dell Ultrasharp series, interesting they went with Thunderbolt though I had issues with it not working when trying to use another dock with my Thinkpad.
I'd rather buy the USB-C one so I know it will work with the Steam Deck, etc.
Dell has a shitty habit of down-rating monitor model numbers over time. The very expensive monitor your internet buddy waxed poetic about six months ago is now half the price and also half the monitor. It's not worth the trouble.
Very large monitors are amazing. I’ve been rocking a single OLED 48” monitor for my MacBook Air M3. It is killer and I can not go back to smaller screen sizes. I just wish it was 6K or 8K instead of my current 4K. And if I do upgrade it will be to a 52/55”.
I wonder if this would work for me. I sit 36" from 43" 4K TV, I run it scaled at 125%
I think I'm already at the edge of how big of a monitor I could use without spinning my head all around. But the curvedness of it might make up for it.
I have dell with similar resolution and 32 inches. It is a decent matrix to work with code. But increasing diagonal without increasing resolution just makes it expensive tv and not something where you read text
Do product companies visit their own websites? You have to click on three (!) overlays/popups if you visit the website - cookie notice, another popup telling me that I am not from the US and can visit their european website, and an AI alert overlay telling me about their new AI features. Only after clicking away all three I can actually see the product content. Madness.
4200R is very gentle curvature. Wouldn’t it have been better to curve more aggressively, like at least 2000R for such a large screen if the purpose is a desk monitor?
I have a smaller version of this and it's pretty good as a display.
I'm somewhat disappointed with it as a hub/KVM. It's better than having to swap cables, but just barely. It can't handle any high bandwidth USB devices I've tried (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, a DSLR via capture card DSLR and a Logitech webcam). The downstream USB strangely isn't even sending down a keyboard and mouse to a PC, I ended up having to get separate dedicated KVM for those. It worked fine with a Thunderbolt to my Macs, but that's not surprising. I'm not sure how it would work with two Macs (one would have to be HDMI or DisplayPort and use that downstream USB port). I could try that but it's not my use case.
Yeah… Not sure of your model (I have the U4025QW), but mine is so close to perfect as a KVM between a Mac and 2 PC’s, if only the KVM had one more USB output port.
It takes 3 video inputs, but only 1 dedicated USB output. But oh, one of the video inputs is really Thunderbolt, so you get USB over the same cable and it works… but only if your machine supports this (for many laptops this is fine.)
But that’s 2 machines max in the KVM, while the monitor has 3 selectable inputs…
It would have been nicer if they could’ve added one more USB output, so you could have KVM match the display input for 3 machines with a single toggle.
(I have a Mac, a work desktop, and a gaming desktop, and I can toggle between the Mac (thunderbolt) and one of the PC’s, and the kvm input will follow the display’s. But I have to pick which PC I want to plug the downstream USB cable into… so I bought a little $15 USB A/B switch to help. So Mac keyboard always works, but when switching between gaming PC (hdmi) and work PC (DP) I just have to remember to toggle the A/B switch along with it to make the keyboard go to the right host.)
Size and pixel density concerns aside, one downside of larger monitors is the power draw. This burns 64W, which adds £3 to your monthly electricity bill if used for 8hrs every weekday. It's not a terrible amount, but I can run 3 micro pc servers 24/7 for that cost.
Imagine living in a so-called "civilization" in which your productivity is limited not by time or tools but by how much it costs to buy photons to shoot into your eyeballs.
Is HN the last refuge of real internet discourse? While some of the replies are very Reddit m-coded, it still feels like real humans. I wonder how long this will last before the agents take over.
I got both of my 4k dell 27" monitors for like $450 each and it's amazing. I would never pay this much. I'd just buy a 48" OLED. But that was too big. This is just silly and overpriced.
More accurately, you have spotted not a Linux user in general, but a user of certain Linux distributions, which in my opinion have inadequate display configuration settings.
I am also using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, and I have never used any display with a resolution less than 4k, for at least the last 12 or 13 years.
Despite of that, I have never encountered any problems with "scaling", because in Linux I have never used any kind of "scaling" (unlike in Windows, which has a font "scaling").
In the kind of Linux that I have been using, I only set an appropriate dots-per-inch value for the monitor, which means that there is no "scaling", which would reduce graphic quality, but all programs render the fonts and other graphic elements at an appropriate size and using in the right way the display resolution.
I configure dots-per-inch values that do not match the actual dpi values of the monitors, but values that ensure that the on-screen size is slightly larger than the on-paper size, because I stay at a greater distance from the monitor than I would keep a paper or a book in my hand (i.e. I set higher dpi values than the real ones, so that any rendering program will believe that the screen is smaller than in reality, so it will render e.g. a 12 point font at a slightly bigger size than 12 points and e.g. an A4 page will be bigger on screen than an A4 sheet of paper; for instance I use 216 dpi for a 27 inch 4k Dell UltraSharp monitor).
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.
Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.
I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.
The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.
If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor, so it uses a DPI value that corresponds to the obsolete VGA monitors.
A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.
Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.
In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.
Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.
The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.
While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.
In the limit, as pixel density increases, regular, unhinted floating-point-x text looks just like it would on a printed page. How can you get better than that? With enough resolution, you free yourself from all the hacks we've devised to make text on a computer halfway tolerable. Shouldn't doing so be the goal?
If you want that blocky-font retro look, you can use vector art to make squares.
plasma 6 for example has really good fractional scaling, i'd argue it works nicer than windows, where some old apps do not get rendered in higher resolution, some apps do not properly take advantage of it.
I mean, sure, but you're basically saying "anything other than the absolute top-end displays are absolutely awful". 133 PPI is going to be higher pixel density than >99% of desktop monitors that people are actually using.
e.g. The Steam hardware survey only goes down to 0.23% usage, and doesn't have any >4K resolution listed.
No, it is a poor pixel density when compared with a printed book, which should be the standard for judging any kind of display used for text.
At the sizes of 27" or 32", which are comfortable for working with a computer, 5k is the minimum resolution that is not too bad when compared with a book or with the acuity of typical human vision.
For a bigger monitor, a 4k resolution is perfectly fine for watching movies or for playing games, but it is not acceptable for working with text.
I have an LG OLED C3 as a monitor, 42". I may be able to distinguish separate pixels if looking at a '.' or something like that (a stuck pixel happened for a few weeks, which I could notice on a white background).
But the density is definitely enough for text for the distance required for such a screen size. At least when using grayscale AA, because OLED subpixel...
I have 3 27" 5k monitors in portrait and a 32" 4k horizontal above those. It is all mounted with vesa cheeseplates to manfrotto magic arms on t slot aluminum attached to a C stand with manfrotto super clamps. I also have two genelec studio monitors which sound amazing.
All of that cost less than this one monitor.
All the brand naming makes this read like something from American Psycho.
The brand names are there, I assume, to show that it's not some cheapskate setup jerry-rigged from salvaged parts. Because even then it's still less expensive that the giant Dell monitor.
I frankly don't understand the point of such monitors. If they are placed reasonably near, they don't fit human FOV well, and the periphery is seen distorted. If they are far enough away, the pixel pitch goes well past the angular resolution of the eye.
I got the 49" version of the dell Alienware display (basically this one size down with different branding and stand)... . From my perspective you're looking at it incorrectly, the point isn't to be able to look at everything at the same time, it's to be able to quickly glance from the one side to another.
Let's say I have an ide open, I will likely not look at the directory structure often, but I want an easy way to switch files - fantastic for having it available just by glancing over
Now you run tests, start the application etc. It also doesn't need to be in your view, all the time - but isn't it convenient to be able to just look where you know it's?
It's suboptimal for competitive gaming however, exactly for the reason you said. Scenic gaming on the other hand is improved by it, because the larger screen is more innersive
I used to be happy with virtual desktops. Then I switched to macOS. What a mess it is: from the irritating virtual desktop animations that delay you, to the annoying keyboard shortcuts that don’t work in full screen mode, I’ve decided to just move on to multiple monitors or maybe one big display.
And it used to be better -- you could use TotalSpaces which would make Spaces two-dimensional and let you turn off the animation. But they took that from us!
There is a way of using Stage Manager as though it was Spaces, with minimal animations, but it takes a lot of getting used to and it's still not great.
If your plan is to physically move your head to look at the peripheral anyway, then this is much cheaper to achieve by putting a second monitor alongside your primary monitor (I keep an older 2560x1440 in portrait alongside my main 4k display)
Scenic gaming seems pretty niche outside of dedicated flight/driving sim setups? And regular gaming often kind of sucks on ultrawides - way too few games have decent options to pull the HUD into the center region of the display
It's really not that complicated: do you prefer to work at a tiny desk or a huge desk?
Same with monitors.
Either you stack huge piles of papers and work through the piles (with everything in the way all the time) or you spread them out in front of you.
In case you don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY
Gear fetishism is a serious disease, and the symptoms are obvious
It does read exactly like Bateman in my head, but didn't pin it down until you helped. Still, that Dell monitor is pretty crazy itself.
Paul Allen has this Dell monitor
Let's see Paul Allen's monitor
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/auction-of-paul-allen-items-in...
Thank you. I did need a good chuckle to start the day right.
Perhaps, but I value this simple explanation of the setup because it serves as a "these parts work well for this purpose" testimony. I'm already familiar with Manfrotto quality but not in this use type. It's nice to have my horizons broadened.
Force of habit. The film industry values brand recognition of gear highly because reliability is important. There are a lot of cheaper equivalent parts which could be assumed which wouldnt accurately illustrate my point. I spent around $450 just on the hardware to mount the monitors and it is still cheaper than this dell monitor.
Or Fight Club
“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.”
I'm seeing only manfrotto here
I get bonkers annoyed using just two monitors with macos or windows. multi monitor management... nothing behaves how i want it to, apps never open where they should etc etc. I havent tried it on desktop linux enough to know if it's any better - maybe at least id assume have the most configuration control on linux.
How do you do it? I always give up in frustration. 100% would keep the genelecs :)
I can only speak for the Cinnamon desktop environment on Linux Mint, but it’s very simple:
- Apps always launch on the monitor your mouse cursor is on
- Switching the focused window to the other monitor is Win+Shift+Arrow Keys
So if I clicked to open an app, it’s on the monitor I’m already looking at. If I used a keyboard shortcut, win+shift+arrow is super easy and simple.
The fact that it’s a stupid simple rule means I can get way better at just doing things by muscle memory… I don’t have to worry about being outsmarted by the window manager.
Thanks Im going to try it
>Apps always launch on the monitor your mouse cursor is on
...but you can set up rules to force a given program to always launch at a specified position and dimension.
I use AeroSpace on mac os for tiling window management with spaces mapped per monitor so that eg space 1 is my top monitor woth my email and chat and space e is on the left for my obsidian, spaces asdfgh are my center monitor for code and terminals, and spaces zxcvb are the right monitor for browsers. I dont stick to this organization rigidly and when I'm doing odd tasks like cad or developing an app I break the patterns and put things on whatever monitor is convenient. I try to stick to a few common apps in the same spaces however.
For Mac I spent $0.99 a long time ago and bought Magnet on the App Store which lets me move windows and resize using hotkeys. For windows I aggressively use windows key + left/right to move the windows around, with 4 displays you just have to remember their ordering and eventually it becomes muscle memory to get it to snap where you want it. It mostly moves left to right, in my case.
On linux i3 I've bound my workspaces to default to a monitor and my apps to default to a respective workspace. Very very productive
On KDE and things like opening app on active monitor / desktop work fine. Only complaint is that on older versions, the taskbar on secondary monitors would sometimes disappear.
For reference I have 3 monitors (2x 4k, 1x 1080p) and am currently using Debian / Wayland and Ubuntu / X11.
It was a bug. I have 3 screens, and it would disappear on the third. An update, sometime around middle of last year fixed it, if my memory is correct.
But, I still have occasional problems with my monitors not waking up when I return to my desk. With 3, I've never had all 3 fail to wake, and a simple disable in the monitor settings, then choose "revert" usually brings them back.
I really miss kde generator of shift click in maximize window icon. It would expand a window just vertically.
Does windows has anything similar?
Win+shift+up
Better
Double click on the edge on Windows :)
Nice! Just works in top and bottom edge
What fixed it for my was switching to Omarchy and using wayland (what it comes with). I don't bother very much with positioning or window resizing anymore. Give it a shot!
I generally don't close the applications i use on an ongoing basis :)
This way you only have to drag them to the monitor you want them on once on startup. Which on os x at least is not very often.
I'm using DisplayFusion on Windows and am very happy with it. Haven't found anything similar on Linux that works as well.
And you can get at least 10x 24" 1080p monitors for the price of a single 5k monitor.
Being on the leading edge of tech costs money.
That said, your mixmatched PPIs would drive me nuts.
The relative distance of the top 4k monitor actually makes it work pretty well. I use that for chats and email and dashboards that I need to keep an eye on.
That sounds like an ergonomics nightmare.
You should strive to sit with your head balanced on top of your neck, with your arms relaxed at your side and elbows at 90 degrees. wrist rest. good seating position. no donut cushion. etc
tilting your head back to look at a monitor above or to the side will use muscles to hold your body in place and misalign your spine/etc. leads to fatigue/stress/long-term issues
Not for nothing but 6K HDR @ 120Hz is likely a large part of the cost of this monitor.
I don't know if I'd put it on my desk, I got somewhat used to my setup - I had 2x4K 27" 144Hz monitors with very thin bezels (LG or Asus?) that I then traded in when I got a ProDisplay XDR. I do wish for higher refresh, and maybe more screen size.
I was going to comment about the price, but you kind of wrapped it up.
It's like the most popular form of innovation nowadays is just marginally nicer products with a massive premium on them - and I don't get how this is sustainable. Or maybe there's just way more people with massive amounts of disposable income than I realize...
There's no breakthrough of like "here's an amazing product, and by the way, it's for everyone".
This whole culture of scarcity, scalping, hoarding, FOMO, premium, it's so played out I'm literally done with it. This is paired with terrible customer support that takes customers for granted.
Very few companies seem to value their customers, and don't want to squeeze them. Tech, cars, consoles... You name it.
So this is my current stance: I'm out of the market for the foreseeable future, unless something breaks and I need to replace it. Even the "nice to have" stuff is down to almost zero.
I disagree with this take. Particularly because this isn't just a little more of this or that. It's a well-integrated set of features that should have already been on the market in some form, but wasn't really. And it's also a premium setup in terms of each feature individually. It really does feel like the whole is more than the sum of its parts in practical terms.
I don't feel FOMO. I'm thinking more "why did it take this long?"
what's the make/model for the monitors? my setup is getting long in the tooth.
Two PA27JCV and one LG ultrasharp (it was cheap because it was broken and I repaired it) and the 4k monitor is a samsung which I cant recommend. (Open box was cheap though)
I would love to see a photo of that setup.
Like that? https://gemini.google.com/share/3dbf617a1e07
Haha thats amazingly confusing when you look closely.
I'm using baby pin reciever plates on 4080 extrusion with m6 thumbscrews into drop in t nuts. There is only one c stand. The extrusion is actually two parts in a cross. The speakers are on the horizontal extrusion mounted on magic arms. My momitors are angled slightly upward and the bottom is a few inches lower than standard desk height.
Gemini with the Genelecs, nice.
I would pay the premium to have just this one monitor, although I find it too large.
And that’s fine for me: that different people want different setups. I’d never want a multi-monitor setup if I can avoid it, where others say it makes them more productive and whatnot.
Would love to see a picture of this setup and your thought on the brands / models you have. I’m in the market for new monitors / setup and yours sounds very much like something up my alley.
What Genelecs are you using??
Not OP, but I have 2 8020D + a subwoofer.
If I had to do it all over again I would have 2 8030C and no subwoofer.
Why? Just out of curiosity. Is it that you don’t need that much low end for the media you’re usually playing through your monitors or do the 8030Cs have enough low end to eliminate the need for a separate woofer?
I’ve been debating getting genelecs for a few years now but the price jump from something like JBLs or Yamahas is so huge that I can’t justify it. At least not on my current budget.
I currently have the 8020D + 7040A. It's pretty much perfect sound with room correction applied, but the 7040A is kind of big and ugly. I'd be willing to give up some low-end to simplify the setup. Also the sub performs the crossover, so it's a lot of cords: 2 cords for DAC -> Sub, and 2 cords for sub -> L/R. And these cords have to be really long for when I raise my desk because the sub has to go on the floor.
I have the smallest of both: 8010As and a 7040A sub.
I'm sending almost nothing to the sub, and I'm guessing the 8030s would provide most of what I'm using the 7040 for without the inconvenience.
I'm in a small room and going for accuracy, so don't need much bass.
Also have 2 8020D's but I skimped on the subwoofer. Probably a bad idea, since they deemphasize the lows so much, but surprisingly I can crank up them up on my mixer's EQ to make up for it without losing clarity.
Yeah, they are really impressive for 4" drivers.
I sport two klipsch towers on either side of my desk and a small tube amp ^^'
They are the tiny 8010s. I don't produce much with this setup so accurate near field monitoring was all that I needed. I love how crystal clear the high end is with these. I bought them used and they were pretty beat up. I take them traveling so as an anti theft measure I painted them neon green and covered them in stickers to make them look cheap. They are mounted on magic arms to the aluminum extrusion. I also have some random Klipsch subwoofer. I send them a balanced output from a yamaha mixer at 192khz.
Oh, nice! Yea, was wondering what Genelecs, combined with your other gear, could be less than the price of this monitor. Makes sense that it’s the smaller ones!
Interesting, manfrotto's website has a cookie notice with two buttons: ALLOW ALL and ALLOW SELECTION.
However, there's no selections -- there's only a description of hundreds of cookies they store (e.g. 73 in Marketing section), but there's nothing to select, it's only text.
There seems to be grey deny button at top-right on first view but it disappears if you select the details. You need hide the details first if you want to click it.
Thank you. ALLOW SELECTION is still a mystery though.
could you share an anonymized desk photo?
Sorry I don't have any without work stuff in the image. If I do post it one day I will reply to this.
I'm not sure what your point is. This monitor is less than 1/2 the price of Apple's Pro Display XDR with nano texture glass.
This monitor is not aimed at the same market segment as the pro display xdr which values high brightness, accurate color, and higher than normal contrast for hdr content mastering. In my opinion for productivity there are much cheaper setups which provide more ppi and more pixels per dollar.
This has pixels the size of my hand, and it fully covers my field of view. Not my cup of tea.
What I do recommend (having bought one) is the Kuycon G32p, 32 inches @ 6K. Incredible quality and unbelievable value for money (https://clickclack.io/products/in-stock-kuycon-g32p-6k-32-in...).
> This has pixels the size of my hand
This is 128 ppi, which would be considered "retina" at a viewing distance of 70cm (27in).
Are you really sitting 2 feet from a 52" monitor? I'd have to cutout a curve in the front of my desk to sit that close
I literally have this monitor already and these pixels are humongous. Even at 3 feet away. Also the viewing angle degradation is too much, so much so that it irritates to look at the edge of the screen from the center. A very poor monitor indeed.
Curves in the front of desks is a thing.
https://www.upliftdesk.com/curved-corner-standing-desk/
> This is 128 ppi, which would be considered "retina“
If by “retina” we mean “pleasantly sharp”, not by me. I’m never buying less than the 218 ppi of my Apple Studio Display unless I absolutely have to. I’m totally spoiled.
I think the point was that people care about ppd, not ppi. 218 ppi would be too low if the screen is 1 inch from your eye or too high if it’s 100 inches from your eye.
Retina probably means 60 ppd.
Sure, but I can’t see myself sitting significantly further away from any desktop monitor than I do now.
I have the Apple 6K 32” Pro Display XDR and a Kuycon 5K 27”. Both are great. Apple was $6,500 and the Chinese version was $400 on EBay plus the $100 stand. Kuycon has more types of input, and a remote. Frame and display quality are on par for a dev.
They aren't even close in comparison? Like 600 nits brightness vs 1000 (1600 peak) for one. Contrast ratios are very very different. It only supports HDR600. They are very different displays in person. Perhaps at low brightness on text they are similar, but outside of that they really aren't very similar.
Developers mostly care about text resolution, so anything 220+ is great
yes, I couldn't tell the difference. What matters to me is to not see the pixels, and the size of the canvas. I am running the XDR at 60% brightness.
$400 where? The cheapest I've seen the kuycon 5k is $800 before shipping, and the QA has been hit and miss with users having to pay to ship it back.
It's not to say it's a bad option, but it's definitely not $400 out the door.
Ebay so likely used.
yes, someone got it from a family member, and had no use for it, and sold it to me as is. It was brand new, unopened and in original packaging.
Reviews are saying the Asus has an aggressively matte display, causing the text to look a little blurry.
If you just want 32 inches @ 6K there are cheaper options around, such as the ASUS ProArt PA32QCV: https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/pr... ASUS is a more well known brand. It doesn’t imitate the Apple aesthetic.
(It does seem like the resolution differs: 6016×3384 vs 6144×3456.)
I bought this right after it’s available, I like the screen but the Asus OSD is barely tolerable and I have to grow my patience because of it
Can't you avoid the OSD if you control it with DCC?
OSD ?
On screen display
thanks (and i should have thought of that...mea culpa)
I recently got this after getting three copies of the LG 32U990A, which had serious light banding and uniformity issues. Loving the Asus.
In EU, have not seen PA32QCV ever in stock anywhere.
B&H has same-day pickup in New York.
Amazing, checked just now and seems that these are now in stock in many places. When I checked last week, they weren't, seems like some stock got released for EU then.
New York isn’t in the EU…
That has a lower resolution though. Not by much but it’s a weird panel.
Same resolution as Apple’s 6K panel.
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For context - this 51" monitor has 22% less pixels than the 32" Apple Pro Display XDR.
good deal considering it's much smaller and twice the price
Not really. The Dell is 6144x2560 @ 1x while the Apple is effectively 3008x1692. The Dell can fit much more content on the screen.
macOS can specify regions of the screen to be 1x. If I'm using Capture One or Lightroom, my photos are at normal resolution while the UI elements are "retina/2x".
So you can see more detail but you aren't fitting more photos on the screen.
You can configure macOS to scale everything more or less, just like you want it. Same for Windows and Linux. And you keep the crispness of the full pixel resolution for text and images.
Yes really. A pixel is a pixel. This dell monitor has pixels the size of boulders. Apple Pro Display XDR has 4.6m more pixels in a significantly smaller area creating a much denser display.
Denser pixels are worth less because you can't see them; in this case 3x-4x less.
You CAN see then, you CANNOT distinguish them apart without a closer look.
It would be a really ineffective monitor if you couldn't see the pixels.
But those are retina pixels right? Like what is the max resolution of that display?
Retina pixels what? Pixel is a pixel, density _of pixels_ is what you're looking for
"Retina" is Apple's marketing name for high PPI displays.
Exactly. Retina is not "pixels" though or type of pixel
I think they mean "but those pixels are very small, right?"
6016 x 3384.
Dell monitor is twice the surface area with 3/4 the pixels … or in reverse: Apple display is half the size with 30% more pixels.
(edit: corrected dell pixel %)
What is going on here? Why is everyone in this thread using 'pixels" to mean ppi? It seems unnecessarily confusing or even misleading. I mean blatantly a 6K monitor has more pixels than a 5K or 4K one, regardless of the pixel density.
Yeah, nobody’s saying a 5k monitor has more pixels than a 6k.
I think what people are trying to communicate, but struggling to, is that high pixel count on a huge display can be deceptive.
I think grandparent was trying to say “comparing a low-poi display to a high-ppi display is not a direct comparison.”
16:9 60Hz kinda sucks though :/
Yes I realize the Pro Display XDR has those same specs. 16:10 or 3:2 120Hz or 144Hz would be ideal to me.
I posted about the new Kuycon 28” 3:2 aspect 4.5k monitor I discovered recently today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647190
I've got an eye on the CES Samsung Odyssey offerings at 32" 6k 165hz. I'd prefer 16:10 and currently run two 16:10 30" displays, but nobody making them.
You must have really tiny hands considering the pixels are smaller that .2mm by .2mm
Lg has a similar model: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lg-ultrafineevo-32-6k-nano-i...
The LG only has 60Hz refresh - this Dell has 120Hz and so seems to actually take advantage of the extra thunderbolt bandwidth.
Some people are complaining the matte finish on the LG ruins part of the experience.
First time I hear about this Kuycon, the pricing seems phenomenal and the quality as well. I will probably buy one by the end of the week.
It's odd that we don't get to see a lot of high quality OEM monitors.
> the pricing seems phenomenal
I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).
To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D
Germany, also seeing $1699 on there...
Is there a significant benefit for programming in going from 4K to 6K on a 32" display? I'm currently on 27" 1440p and looking for more screen estate for my neovim setup.
If you make the fonts smaller, can you no longer read them because they are too small? Then you need a bigger monitor, not a higher resolution.
If you can no longer read them because they are too pixelated, you need a higher screen resolution.
On macOS: crisper text.
That’s on every operating system.
My understanding is that HiDPI mode on Windows requires each app to specifically support it, no?
On macOS too. On both operation systems 99% apps do though. Maybe its 99.9% on macOS vs 99.8% on Windows. But I'm using HiDPI on both and it was a long time ago that I encountered an app that didn't support it.
Is this some kind of OEM Apple display? Or did they just put all that effort into machine out those spheres in the back of it so it looks like one?
clickclack?? sounds like a shady referral link. will not click.
On the official Kuycon site, it says "Since 2023, Kuycon has partnered exclusively with ClickClack.io to bring its innovative line of monitors to customers outside of China[...]". I'm seriously considering getting one of these.
i bought mine from there
Those look like the monitors used on the F1 movie, which is strange, considering it was an Apple production and they maybe should have used apple monitors for product placement . I guess it is a testimony about Kuycon from Apple.
You should look at pictures of Apple's Pro Display XDR. The Kuycon monitor is an obvious rip-off of that in terms of styling, especially the ventilation on the back.
LG has a 6K 32 inch also, although a few hundred dollars more.
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> pixels the size of my hand
Sometimes this is refreshing. (display joke there, heh)
this is a big monitor.
Many UIs don't scale particularly well with very high resolution. So you get UI elements with super-fine text or icons.
Some linux console fonts are almost unreadable with just 4k, though recent releases seem to be addressing this.
also old games.
for comparison, I think this is basically the dell 43" monitor with pixels on each side (16:9 -> 21:9)
the height of the panel is similar, the width is higher (plus curvature)
There's an awkward zone where scaling doesn't work well. But if you have a screen that can do nice high levels of detail, then you can run older UIs at exactly 2x and they will look just as good as they ever did. An Apple Pro display is a good fit here, offering 218 pixels per inch compared to a "traditional" 96.
Is this a grey box replica of the Mac 32in? Because I’d interested if it is.
I wish they had an ultra wide with the higher resolution.
this looks like a rip off of another monitor that I can't quite put my finger on...
And no extra charge to have an adjustable stand! How do they make money?
By having fewer pixels, lower quality screens? Crazy what you can do when you cut corners.
This screen reminds of when I did tech support in high school and I helped a guy who bragged about his computer monitor, it was a TV running at 720p (if not lower) and a massive screen. The windows start bar was hilariously large (as were all UI elements), I had to just smile and nod until I got out of there.
Sure, your screen may be bigger but it's blurry and everything is scaled way too large.
> By having fewer pixels
I thought samdixon was referencing the Apple Pro Display XDR? If so, Apple has fewer pixels.
Apple Pro XDR: 6016 x 3384
Kuycon G32P: 6144 x 3456
> everything is scaled way too large
The HiDPI/Retina bullshit is just bullshit. I've been running a 4K 43" 4:3 display at 100% scaling since 2018. It is neither blurry nor scaled too large. It can, however, comfortably fit 10 A4 pages simultaneously. Or 4 terminals + a browser + a PDF reader.
My arithmetic nodule is having a konniption fit. Does not compute. If this is 16:9 and you mistook your aspect ratio I can breathe again. √2:1 says 1.41:1 isn't 1.33:1
10 A4 pages do not fill a 4:3 or 3:4 aspect ratio box. They don't fill a 16:9 box either but it's more plausible, the wastage is different.
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My comment (or at least that quote) was specifically about someone using a 30"+ TV at 720p as their computer monitor.
No need to recoup R&D costs.
its probably a charity, no money there.
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1. I don't think I'll ever buy Dell again. My current monitor is a Dell S3221QS 32" screen and it has vertical lines and starts flickering on both the Macbook M1 and the Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip after some time, which is a known issue[0][1]. It also defaults to YPbPr colors rather than RGB/SRGB, so the colors look off. I'm using HDMI to HDMI connectivity currently.
Part of it is also my fault as I thought a monitor would work with any computer.
2. That aside, what are you all using for window management on these large screens? I'm currently using Rectangle on Mac, but I was wondering if there's a better way.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/1221mz2/dell_s3221qs_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/n8ei34/dell_s3221qs_f...
I've gone the other direction - and after having struggled with other various monitors (the worst is easily the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - both cruddy capability (should have noted before buying it has no Power Delivery) as well as easily some of the blurriest text ever) - I've decided I will only ever buy Dell Monitors. Every one I've purchased (5 of them) in the last 15sh years has been a flawless performer - no hardware failures either.
Every monitor on every desk at work (around 3000 desks) is a Dell U3821DW - no broadscale systemic complaints that I've ever heard of.
I'm currently using my 4K 27" Dell P2715Q that I bought for $400 back in December 2017, and I've carried (physically) with me from office to office from Michigan to the Bay Area - thing runs for 10+ hours a day (minus weekend) for 8 years running. Eventually it's going to have to give in- and when it does - definitely going to buy another Dell (probably the U2725QE 27" 4K)
Yap I can confirm, Dell's P (professional) and U (ultra) lines are excellent and work flawlessly. The S (standard?) line not so much.
I'm kinda the same. I have a Dell monitor and a Gigabyte monitor side by side and my mac constantly loses the connection to the gigabyte monitor. At least once per day I have to unplug my video link to the gigabyte monitor to get the mac to rediscover it, this never happens with the dell one.
Counter-anecdata: I have 2 Dell U2720Q (Ultrasharp 27") bought in 2021 and they've been great.
That said, I've always stuck for Dell's upper-range Ultrasharp (U prefix in models) monitors, being slightly wary of their cheaper series which the S in your S3221QS implies.
I have a 13yr old 27" Ultrasharp still going well.
+1 to only buy Ultrasharp if buying from Dell. The others can be junk.
I'm using 2x Dell U3011s, one I purchased around ~2013 probably and the other I got used recently for $100. My only issue with them is that they have PWM coil whine that only goes away if I crank the brightness to ~90%, which seems to produce an immense amount of heat and probably power consumption. I'd love to find a viable alternative solution for this, because these are my favorite monitors for now.
The model appears to have been released 16 years ago.
I haven't yet found a monitor that makes sense to replace them with either.
I think there is a slightly newer version of these, but I have the same set up. I haven’t been able to find anything that has the vertical space that these monitors do. Even Ultra Wide monitors just aren’t tall enough. If I got this 52 inch behemoth that would help, but I would actually lose horizontal space.
> I think there is a slightly newer version of these, but I have the same set up
Ya, I've tried at least one of the newer versions and they were great too. 16:10 or almost anything else than 16:9 please
I’ve been a big fan of the big dell curved displays. The U4025QW has been a solid single monitor
Yes, the flickering problem is definitely an S-series issue.
I have the 27" from that series. In my experience, after I fixed the RGB issue, I also fixed the flickering issue. And to fix the RGB issue, I used BetterDisplay[1], controlled by a Hammerspoon[2] script[3] that calls its CLI on the appropriate display events.
The free version of BetterDisplay is sufficient, I really don't use any of its other features.
The flickering seems to be gamma related, and is triggered by Nightshift or Flux for me.
[1] https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay#readme
[2] https://www.hammerspoon.org/
[3] https://github.com/wlonkly/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.hammer...
For window management, Aerospace has been a game changer for me. I could never work with multiple monitors before that.
I bought a brand new Dell monitor through Amazon’s Dell Store (i.e. fulfilled by Dell themselves and shipped to me directly from their warehouse). The HDMI port broke a couple months later as it was sitting undisturbed on a desk, which was a common problem mentioned in its reviews. Dell flat out refused to replace it, saying that their database showed a different owner than me. Remember, they themselves shipped it straight to me. Amazon did right and let me return it even though it was already past the return period.
I will never, ever buy Dell hardware again. They’re dead to me. And when the IT department at a previous job reported to me, and a Dell rep cold called me to offer us a business plan, I politely explained why I’d rather gargle broken glass than risk my reputation on a vendor who doesn’t understand what a warranty means. That felt pretty good.
Are you referring to this store - https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dell/page/9B75DD0E-9F42-4B9B-A... ?
I think so.
Not all of those have "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" below the shipping timeframe line. It changes depending on inventory stock. The first monitor in the "plus" list says "Ships from and sold by computersale". Some third party sellers can register a device's sale with Dell.
The invoice on my order history says Dell was the seller, and I specifically remember that the label on the unopened box showed that it was shipped directly from Dell’s warehouse.
I went through this like 100 ways when it happened. I bought the monitor from Dell. They shipped it from their hands straight to mine. And when it broke, they refused to make good on it.
I had a strange problem with Dell P2720DC (27'' 2560x1440) - the whole outer edge of the screen would flicker if I used dark background with a lot of dim colours (like dark mode in IDE, or default Grafana theme). It wouldn't happen all the time, but it would happen on a weekly basis (I most often seen that on Sunday). I've RMA'd it, got another monitor, which also started showing the same problem. I gave it to someone who doesn't use dark mode - no issues.
So, I'm not getting another Dell until I'd be sure this issue won't happen again :)
Have you tried disabling GPU temporal dithering via BetterDisplay or StillColor? I had a similar problem with a different brand of monitor, and this has been the only reliable fix.
Thanks, StillColor seems to do the trick!
This helped with my S2722QC.
Also: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000331897/apple-m-p...
Spectacle for Mac and power toys for windows.
I’ve been using a single large monitor for a while and it’s been great with window managers. The biggest downside is when playing games full-screen.
One of my Dell's would randomly decide that the mini DP connection has no signal, and rebooting the MacBook Pro was the only way to restore it. HDMI would work just fine.
I bought a refurbished P24-something, basically the last 4K monitor I could find that was 24” or smaller — 4k @ 27+ looks bad for me. That Dell has been amazing. Just a counterpoint :)
I just setup mine today, and I am not sure I recommend it.
I went from a 40" to a 52", and I'm just moving my head waaay too much and my shoulders hurt. It is curved, but very little imo, it's almost like it's flat. I'm going to try it for a week before making the call on whether to return it.
I feel like this needs a workflow where you do work in the middle and use the fringes for other applications that you rarely look at. Otherwise you're moving your head waaay too much and squinting a bunch.
Based on personal experience, I think the upper bound for comfortably useful size at normal sitting distances is probably about 32", and even then I think there'd be better returns on adding vertical pixels to a ~27" monitor. A modern equivalent to the old 16:10 30" 2560x1600 monitors (ideally 2x scaling 5120x3200) would be great for example, but one could also imagine a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor with the same width (~23.5") as current 16:9 27" monitors.
I'm still rocking a couple of 30 inch dell 2560x1600 monitors. They're about the perfect size and not dealing with scaling in Linux is nice. I'd pay a ton of money for a modern equivalent.
Same! My employer offered a choice of 32-inch and 40-inch monitors. I “upgraded” from 32 to 40 but I regretted it. I just don’t make use of the extra horizontal space effectively.
I run a 42” 4k at 1:1 pixel ratio and I agree. It’s a little too big, but it does nice double duty for gaming and watching tv.
5120x3200 in 30” would be awesome.
That was my issue with multiple monitors years ago - I'd be cranking my neck over too often (looking at logs, etc). I vastly prefer an ultrawide where I can put logs / monitors on the side flexibly.
I have a 34 inch now, and feel like I could use more space - but it's nice to know there's an upper bound. Do you feel like there's still room to go beyond 40, or is that the sweet spot?
3x27” high-PPI displays in portrait orientation is the winner and no one does it
The center display is always actually centered. The short edge of a high-PPI 27” screen is wide enough for actual normal width browser or IDE usage, but now you get much more vertical real estate on that window.
Not nearly as much neck movement as an ultra wide and since the entire array is pretty square, the neck movement is way more balanced.
I went from 34"(3440x1440) which felt a little bit small to 38"(3840x1600) and it is nearly perfect. I can have my main window in the middle and 2 or 4 smaller windows (logs, chat, youtube, etc) on the side.
The only thing I want now is double pixel density.
I honestly think 40 is the sweet spot.
When I owned a 40" monitor, I had to get a deeper desk and sit pretty far from it. Even then, I couldn't game on it, because games shove the HUD and minimal into the corners, and they were too far to the side to keep an eye on.
Can't picture a 52" being usable as a PC monitor, really.
I sometimes think that my 40" is too much because the extra space just ends up hosting distracting junk like Slack.
I also have a mild take that large screens make screen real estate cheap so less thought goes into user interface design. There's plenty of room just stick the widget anywhere!
It'd be pretty interesting to compare how much the amount of information one can cram onto their ~27" screen has changed between 2005 and 2025, with the comparison points between between a Mac running OS X 10.6 and a Mac running macOS 26, which I think is a particularly salient and apples-to-apples comparison since Apple was selling 30" 2560x1600 displays back then, which are close cousins to modern 27" 2560x1440 displays.
My gut feeling is that the difference would be around 30-40%. Information density of the UI of OS X 10.6 and contemporary software was much higher than today's tabletized "bouncy castle" style UI.
It would be interesting but I don't think that information density necessarily makes a good interface.
As a personal pet peeve example, developers love to cram a search bar (or browser tabs) into the top of the window. It's more dense but it's also harder to use and drag the window.
True. More accurately, it's a combination of high density, judicial allocation of whitespace, and layouts that have been thought through. The 2000s versions of OS X were better in those regards too, though.
This is why multiple monitors win: put the distractions on a whole other screen.
I've been using a 49" monitor for almost four years. I have the center window taking half of the screen, and on the sides I have my email, messaging clients and other things I like to monitor from time to time.
Kinda like this: [ | | ]
I am on mac and I use an app called Magnet to manage the windows. I will only change this setup for a larger monitor.
Seconding this. I have one for my work desk, where (surprisingly enough) it made a lot of sense. The DPI isn't as big of an issue as people make it out to be if your workflow doesn't depend on high density, but the curvature definitely could benefit from being a bit tighter. You need a fairly deep desk or a keyboard tray if you don't want to be turning your head a bunch.
That being said, having this in combination with PowerToys FancyZones has been fantastic. At any given time, I'm usually running 1-4 main working windows plus Signal, Outlook, and an RSS reader. This gives me more than enough real estate to keep them all available at a moment's notice. I have roughly 40% of the screen real estate dedicated to Signal, Outlook, and my RSS client, with the interior 60% being hotkey-mapped to divide in different proportions. Compared to my old setup (one ultrawide plus two verticals) it's been awesome.
You'll get used to it. I have 3 24 inch monitors side by side. Center one is usually the editor, right one documentation or more editors, left one browsers with info.
Let me ask you ..Would it work better with a standing desk? It seems like moving around would feel more natural standing up.
I have one and while it makes you generally more movable, you shouldn't stand all the time; it's just as unhealthy as permanent sitting.
A chiropractor told me, "your best position is your next position".
Meaning to avoid staying in the same position for too long.
Maybe it's a head turner vs eye mover thing. It's a lot less fatiguing moving eyes, which might not be option for glass wearers. I sit 2 feet away from my 50 inch OLED and moving eyes is much less work than windows management. Otherwise it is very workflow dependant, i.e. working on visuals or schematic diagrams.
Yeah, I'm on a Lenovo 5k2k 40" UW and it's never occurred to me to want something wider. Though I will admit I definitely noticed the loss of total real estate vs my old 3x 27" setup.
hmm, good to know. I have an lg 40in 5k2k that I rather like but this tempts me
> it's almost like it's flat
It is almost. 4200R means the circular radius is 4.2 meters for the curve. That’s too big a radius for using as a desk monitor that large imho.
I purchased this as soon as it was announced, I was surprised they had it ready to ship on the day of the CES announcement.
I do enjoy it, with Fancyzones, I can set up Unreal Engine Editor, Rider, discord/teams and a small corner window for searching and/or youtube watching on the side. At first I thought the pixel count was going to be too low but from my position it 'feels' retina at 125% windows scaling. Yes you can do the same with multiple monitors but I don't get the fatigue of turning my physical head, it's the perfect size to sit in middle and use your eyes to adjust/focus if that makes sense..
120hz and fast motion helps a lot. DCS World looks amazing on this, it feels like it's your full fov when playing games. Granted this isn't an OLED panel, I wouldn't play anything competitive on here but EU V and/or RTS games are very nice at 6k/52.
This replaced my dual 4K 120hz monitors. Recommend if you're not gaming.
I've found ideal monitor size and resolution depends greatly on viewing distance and relative position. I use a 38" ultra-wide and it's almost too wide - but I have it 'floating' on an adjustable monitor arm so it's only about 24" from my eyes and a bit higher than most monitor stands would allow. The monitor arm is key because once I put a full ergo split keyboard at a comfortable arm-rest distance, a normal monitor stand sitting on the desk would force the monitor to be too far back.
For the full breadth of a 52" monitor to be comfortably viewable for detail work, I'd have to be farther back enough that the difference between 4K and 6K wouldn't be meaningful. It's kind of like how 8k resolution can provide meaningful value in a head-mounted display two inches from your eyeballs, but 8k on a 65" living room TV seven feet away from your couch viewing position is pointless because even those with 20/10 vision can't resolve the additional detail at that distance.
For detail work I find my best ergo seating position is up close with my legs tucked well-under the desk and my stomach almost touching the edge of the curved desk inset. This allows my forearms to be supported comfortably on the desk. I also have my desk surface a little lower than most and my Aeron chair a little higher, putting the top of my legs almost touching the underside of the desktop.
The smaller sizes would be nice if they had a 16:10 option. 16:9 just isn't a very nice aspect ratio imo, the extra height on 16:10 is much better.
Yes, I will never buy 16:9 again. On laptops 16:10 is already quite often and sometimes even 3:2 (Framework, Surfacebook).
For my desktop I am looking forward to getting a 3:2 monitor like the Benq RD280U
https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html
To whoever needs to hear it, I will never buy another 16:9 monitor. Vastly prefer the 3:2 on my Framework and also liked an old 4:3 I had. Also great in portrait.
Yep. I have a MacBook air 13 and a Framework, and miss the extra vertical space when I'm on the MacBook.
I ordered this within 30 minutes of learning about it. I've been waiting for something like this. Here's why:
- My eyes are getting older, and I need a better visual connection to my work.
- We spend much of our lives in front of these devices. Optimizing this just makes sense.
- It is more than just a monitor with some features. It's a well-rounded kit with good software support.
- I previously used multiple 4K monitors and external KVMs. The built-in KVM and management software that works with the display makes multi-system use as easy as it could possibly be.
- The resolution has _more than_ overcome the issues I had with font rendering on lower resolutions while trying to have more visual workspace.
- The thunderbolt hub has vastly reduced multi-system USB/wiring/speed clutter and confusion.
Yes, it was expensive. Yes, I'm very happy with it. Within this week, it has drastically improved my sense of comfort and utility, and I got rid of all the other monitors.
Ok, for the gripes:
- The curvature is a bit minor compared to what I'm used to. Given the spatial density I want, the optimal distance is less than 30" from the display, and with my aging eyes at this distance, looking from center to edge changes my focal depth by more than a small amount. That said, the off-axis views are quite good. Essentially, looking at this display from a longer distance wastes much of the effective ocular resolution.
- The software is great, but if you want something more tactile, reaching to the sole multi-purpose menu stick is not that great. It wouldn't have hurt for them to provide a USB-connected desktop switch. I hope they still do. This monitor runs its own "OS" of sorts, and can be extended with new functionality should they choose to.
- Finding the improved dynamic range took a bit of learning. The way it works feels better (less of a special case) for me, but I had to go adjust the settings to tap into higher resolution per color plane.
If anybody has any specific questions, I'll be happy to answer them.
The pixels per inch (ppi) density is 129.
Some other specs: refresh rate, 120Hz; brightness, 400 cd/m².
That's decent pixel density considering the size of the monitor. A 32" 4K monitor has slightly higher PPI at around 138.
I have a 40in 5k (32in 4k, but wider). IMHO, 138ppi is the bare minimum, but it really depends on a person's eyesight and preferences.
I would love a large-ish ultra-wide with > 160ppi. One day, maybe, that being said, by that time those things will exist and be reasonably priced, my eyes might not be able to appreciate the difference.
I'm using three 4k 32" screens arranged vertically, for 6480 x 3840 desktop size.
The only real monitor upgrade I'm willing to entertain is a ~50" 8k curved screen (basically a curved TV-sized screen), which has not been made yet AFAIK. I'm not into "ultrawide", for me it has to be "ultrawide" and "ultratall". I want all that screen real estate in high PPI.
I tried test-driving a 50" 4k TV for a week and the flatness of it was not what I wanted, it has to be a curved screen for workstation use.
100% I used to have a 43-inch 4K "monitor" (16:9). The lack of curvature meant that at the sides of the screen, there was noticeable color shifting due to variations in viewing angle. That's with an IPS panel.
Your dream is probably a ~50in 8K TV (with RGB pattern if you are on macOS), but curved. I don't know if that will ever exist.
Personally, I found that with a bigger 16:9, I would not use the top and bottom of the screen. When I "downgraded" to a 40in ultra-wide, there was not much difference in the space I was using.
I use all of the screen, top, bottom, everything. I need the space. An ultra-wide just will not do for me, or I would have bought one already.
It’s a fraction of what most Apple customers are used to.
The freakin stand alone is $1300 CAD.
What planet are those people on? That's Gucci bag territory. They can take their res and shove it, that's almost NINE GRAND (granted, Canadian pesos) for a freakin display! Who is this for, just Pixar employees?
It's a halo status symbol for price insensitive people. Lamborghini makes compromised overpriced vehicles but they have a market.
> The freakin stand alone is $1300 CAD.
We're not just talking about Apple's stand-alone display, but even their laptops are high-ppi. 13" M4 Apple Air:
> 13.6-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology;2 2560-by-1664 native resolution at 224 pixels per inch
* https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-air/specs/
And how much do you think the Humanscale mount costs that you would otherwise use? The Pro Display XDR is too heavy for a $30 Amazon Basics mounting arm or anything similarly cheap.
The Pro Display XDR is 7.48 kg and a $199 Ergotron LX Pro is rated up to 10 kg, so that's a fifth of the Apple stand's price.
And looking at Amazon.de listings, it's definitely possible to buy a cheap arm that's good for 7.5 kg. A "suptek Monitor Mount" is good for 10 kg according to the listing: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0833NQ8CR
If you’re suggesting the only way to mount a display of that weight drives you into that price territory, that’s just ridiculous.
There’s huge monitors from other companies that come with mounts that handle more weight than that. Granted, it’s not some art deco CNC monstrosity.
I think the sibling comment nailed it: this is just a status symbol.
In terms of pixel count it's between Apple's 5k and 6k monitors, and its pricing is between the two. It's also far lower pixel density. So, not really.
I'm an Apple customer and I'm used to 109 PPI. I imagine it's not that rare for Apple customers to buy monitors not made by Apple.
Interestingly it has Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb), 6K typically saturates 30-31Gb, which leaves less 10Gb/s which isn't a lot especially assuming 2.5Gb network. Looks like a perfect case for TB5 and given its price.
I really want more monitors that are taller and have 3:2 aspect ratio.
I use the BenQ RD280U. It’s as wide as a 27” 16:9 and as tall as an 32” 16:9. I really like the aspect ratio and I’m using two of them.
Eizo makes a square 1920x1920 monitor:
https://www.eizo.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/
... available on Amazon last time I checked ... they also make a square 2048x2048 monitor for ATC:
https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/atc/sq2826/
... although I think it costs $5k or so ...
The radius is too big. This monitor is R4200, 4.2m. I have a Samsung odyssey something 49” monitor and it is glorious. It is R1000, and since my head is about a meter from the screen, it works: even the edges are usable.
I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.
The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.
My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
I have the 40" (5K) and it's perfect. Replaced a 27-32-27 setup (the 27"s being portraits, the 32" landscape). For my coding and office work, absolutely no reason to go wider. Highly recommended.
Note the 40", and probably this one too. support MST which makes the display appear as two monitors to the OS and is great in terms of window management without going too fancy with custom software.
Likewise. I've had the 40" version for about a year. Higher DPI than the 52". It replaced 2 x 27" monitors and I'm glad I made the switch. I generally have 2 apps running side-by-side just like before, but with the ability to go full wide-screen for movies or gaming.
This monitor really does everything. It's crisp enough to read text on all day, unlike many gaming monitors. But the 120Hz is decent for gaming whereas most 5K+ monitors are only 60hz.
Interesting, I'm on 3x27" 2K monitor (same setup as you, portrait, landscape, portrait) and while it works very well for me, I'd like to replace it with just 1 screen (or 3x 4-5K monitors but that is less interesting to me). I already have custom window management software that I use so it wouldn't be hard to switch to sub-dividing 1 monitor to get a similar experience (I think).
Maybe I should look into the 40" 5K monitors, thanks!
Losing the bezel is great, and the Dell 4025qw that I have has also an IPS Black panel which is a vast improvement over what I had before - Dell U27-something (4K IPS), 3219Q (4K IPS). And it's 120hz. I really enjoy it.
I’ve been using a single 24 inch 1080p benq usb c monitor after realizing 4k 27 inch scaling is just terrible and 5k 27 inch is just too pricey. It’s a budget monitor but it’s surprising what 140$ can get you these days cause the quality of the panel is really good. It supports daisy chaining so I can add another monitor to my m1 air (which I can’t otherwise I think). If it was 4k 24 inch I’d buy two as I find that size kinda perfect.
Personally I’ve found that a single monitor is enough 90% of the time while coding. It’s when I need to do something nitty gritty that I need a second monitor.
That being said working with only a laptop is painful and extremely uncomfortable for the posture. I don’t think I can get anything real done without a monitor keyboard and mouse. Going down to an 11 inch iPad sounds impossible.
For some reason nobody makes 2K 24"s anymore -- that was my sweet spot. But now to get the pixel density you have to go way bigger :/ dreading the day the old monitors I have cease working. I like the 24" size but 1080 is just so annoying. I was using 2048x1156 20" monitors back in 2010 and they had better density!
we have become used to retina displays these days so 1080p 24 inch looks 'pixelated'. I sit about 18 inches from the monitor and it looks okay. I find this distance and size most comfortable for me. The 27 inch 4k was too big for my setup and the scaled 2560x1440 is something I would not recommend (was warned about it but didn't listen :P).
I always plug in a keyboard and raise the laptop up 3-5 textbooks high. Can't work at a desk and just a laptop, too old for that.
I didn't know you could do multimonitor setup with m1 air. Can you share what your setup is?
https://youtu.be/pcz0R6eEWNA?t=345
I think it's called Displaylink. yet to try it with this particular benq but I know it can be done. The total output pixels are limited though so I doubt what the limitation of the Air is. but 2 24 inch 1080p should be doable.
I've got big monitors, that I hook up to my work laptop and my own laptop. I make it work with a kvm hub. It's really sweet, for my use.
I keep a browser, an IDE, and a terminal pretty much side by side on the bottom one. I keep slack, email, and a clock on the top monitor. I also place pullout tabs from my IDEs on the top one.
Thing is, no matter the cost range, I generally have to replace the KVM hub about once a year. I've just come to accept that as a part replacement cost. <shrug> This thing has its own KVM hub internally. Maybe I'm just rough on my KVM, but if someone puts significant wear and tear on this monitor, I'd imagine that part would wear out, which seems like a potential money sink if you have to keep calling the warranty folks.
For me, it's too much of a risk, but YMMV.
If it’s at all representative, I had to replace 2 of the dell ultra sharp super ultra wides due to failing USB C hub / PD parts. I gave up at that point.
My 49 inch Dell ultrawide is failing too. One USB port is already dead, and the other ports have just now started to develop intermittent issues as well.
On the other hand, I've had one for 5 years and it's still going strong.
Will definitely buy again.
I never got into the ultra wide thing. Where the 8K monitors at?? We've been stuck on 4K for ten years!
I have a Samsung neo g9 57" which is like 1/2 an 8k monitor (or 2 4k monitors side-by-side) which is sweet since I use picture-by-picture mode to have my work computer on one side and my personal computer on the other side.
I have the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - but despite spending literally dozens of hours - I was never able to get text to work clearly on it - either Mac or PC - tried both the DisplayPort, HDMI - tried all the (many) HDMI cables I had at home, and a couple expensive Monoprice cables, firmware updates, monitor resets, every setting I could figure - no luck. Text is just ... fuzzy in a way that it isn't with any other monitor I've ever owned - kind of a deal breaker when I spend all day in tmux.
Is it an oled display? It’s likely that the subpixel rendering does not match the physical display, so the subcolors are in the wrong location making the text worse instead of better (in the case of macs Apple entirely removed subpixel rendering some years back so there is no solution whatsoever, Apple on standard density always looks like shit).
they’ve been around for a few years, as well as 5K and 6K
Sadly they're not super common which makes them expensive, and I don't think I've seen any that wasn't 16:9. The world has decided to go with refresh rates rather than resolution.
Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.
Past 2880p on most desk monitor viewing distances or past 1080p on most TV viewing distances, you hit steeply diminishing returns. Please, please let's use our processing power and signal bandwidth for color and refresh rate, not resolution.
This is also why I think every console game should have a 720p handheld 'performance' and 1080p living room 'performance' mode. We don't need 1080p on handhelds or 2160p in the living room. Unless you're using relatively enormous screens for either purpose.
> Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.
If you can’t resolve that kind of DPI at that distance you need to get an appointment because you require glasses. The low end of normal vision stops differentiating around 175 dpi at 50cm. The difference is very noticeable (and disturbing) on contrasted detailed features like text without subpixel rendering (or when the subpixel rendering does not match the physical structure of the display).
But if I, by accident bend forward, I don’t want to accidentally be able to distinguish individual pixels!
>Which is the right choice
No damn it, it's not!
Everyone I know can immediately see a clear difference between 120 ppi and 200 ppi, but I've yet to encounter anyone who can reliably tell 120hz from 200hz. We have monitors that render lego-sized pixels at 500+ hz now, it's enough.
Gamers have been gaslit to believe they have the reflexes of spider-man and are a lost cause, but their preferences have been listened to by monitor makers for 30 years. Enough already!
Millions of office workers are working all day reading text on screens optimized for playing games at low resolutions. It's just sad.
Steve Jobs showed a decade ago that 4x resolution could be sold at great profit for normal prices. Text on screens can be as crisp as on paper.
Sadly it only became the standard on phones, not on productivity desktop monitors. It so easily could be, and it should be.
I've recently gone from 60hz to 240hz to 480hz. Refresh rate in games is not just about what it looks like. It completely changes game mechanics, like movement, recoil etc. It is such a big difference between 60hz and 240hz that you're not really playing the same game. There are things you can do at 240hz that are impossible at 60hz. At 480hz, there's also so much more time to react, so you really don't need fast reflexes to take advantage of it.
I'm guessing you play FPS competitively and are in your 20s, and for you it might be true, I won't argue that.
The issue for me is that even if your experience was true for all gamers in the world, that would still be a tiny minority compared to all people in the world who use monitors to read text, day in and day out.
A low-res monitor cannot show a high-res image, but a high-res monitor can show a low-res picture, so both sides can get what they want here.
I run 8k/60 but my screen can also do 4k/120. If it could also do 1440 at 240hz or 1080 at 480hz wouldn't bother me, but that the industry spends all effort on making 1080/480 and basically NO effort on 8k does.
The industry should throw everything below say 200ppi on the scrap-heap of history where it belongs. It would harm nobody and benefit everybody.
So much more time? The difference in frame time between 480 hz and 240 is 2 ms.
Right, that should be imperceptible. The 240hz monitor was also 15" while the 480hz monitor is 27". I'm sure that contributes as well. My subjective experience is that I now just have a lot of more time to react.
Maybe this is the living room dumb-TV that I was waiting for
It has pretty poor HDR performance compared to similarly priced TVs.
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/u3225qe
It's a shame that this 6K tunderbolt hub monitor does not support the latest thunderbolt 5 standard. Otherwise you can connect and daisy chain two of these 6K displays together.
I was hoping that 8k tvs at ~50inches would become widely available.
They were high enough density and tall enough for coding applications, but as first versions they had some rough edges (text rendering not great by default).
Instead they just disappeared from the market :(
I think Aliexpress has no brand panels, but at $600 it is a non trivial gamble.
$2900 seems pretty reasonable to me considering the size. Works out to $416/sqft, which is much cheaper than Bay Area real estate.
I never understood the draw of these huge monitors until I had to do CAD for work and now I understand. Giant monitor + SpaceMouse is a gamechanger. My current monitor is 36” and I could easily use more width.
I can recommend the 45-inch LG Ultragear too. Nice OLED. 5120x2160 resolution. Perfect curvature for me, coming from a G9.
Just don't be an idiot like I was. I connected my monitor to my dock with both DisplayPort and some random USB-C cable. Worked fine initially. One day, cleaning my office, I swapped out that USB-C cable with a higher-quality one. Took me a bit to realize that the consequent Wayland post-resume resolution flakiness came from a race condition enumerating the real-DP and USB-C-alt-mode "separate" monitors that my machine thought I now had.
It's not often that downgrading a USB cable fixes a problem.
My desk has 2x 27" and 1x 43" Dell monitors. Unfortunately the new work MacBook only supports two external displays so one of those 27 sits idle.
What used to be nice is now a case of constantly shuffling windows, not made easy by MacOSs janky window handling.
I've been looking for a second 43" to replace the 27"s but the high price and sub-par quality of the 43 is making me wait.
I am also finding it difficult to find monitor arms that will carry such large and heavy screens. The 43 is already at the limit of the one reasonably priced arm I found and a definite struggle to mount.
Nice. I have the predecessor 40" U4025QW and it's outstanding.
I second the U4025QW. It's fantastic and the built in KVM is great.
Looks slick! In the >50" category, I've recently upgraded from the Samsung Odyssey G9 49" (with res 2x1440p) to a Samsung Odyssey G9 57" (2x4K). With a tiling window manager and workspaces it's really a pleasure to use, and contrarily to some beliefs, I do more focused work that way because I don't have to switch workspace to find the information I'm looking for – less risk of distraction.
I have a 34" ultrawide and it is huge. I can't imagine a 52" - the edges would be so far away that it must be hard to read text without physically moving left/right
Since well before the pandemic, I've have dual 28" 4K screens on my desk. When ordering them, I liked the fact that they had the same pixel pitch as my 14" 2K laptop screen. One monitor was like a borderless 2x2 grid of those laptop screens.
I found myself repositioning things so that one is in front of the keyboard as a primary screen and the other is further off to the side as a secondary dumping ground. I found myself neglecting the second display most of the time so it was just a blank background. Eventually, I noticed I wasn't even using the entire primary screen. I favored a sector of it and pushed some windows off to the edges.
Ironically, with work from home, I've started roaming around the house with the laptop instead of staying at my desk. So I'm mostly back to working in a 14" screen with virtual desktops, like I was 20 years ago. I am glad that laptops are starting to have 16:10 again after the long drought of HDTV-derived screens.
Do you... usually read content in a full-screen window on that thing?
I only have a 27" monitor and sit about 2.5 feet away from it and I move my head _slightly_ to focus on different windows. But that's the reason I have a larger monitor, so I can have a bunch of normal-sized windows open at once.
Their point may be about viewing distance.
If the edges of the screen are further from your eyes than the center, the content and text doesn't appear at the same size. If you wear glasses, the edges might even fall out of focus unless you physically move closer.
I like having three columns of code open in my editor, but the left edge of the leftmost column (since code is left-justified) gets pretty far away from my face. Or I need stronger glasses, one of the two.
I think it depends on vision. I have a single 27" 4k monitor with vscode set to about 80% zoom.
But I'm getting older, so I might have to make it a big bigger soon.
I used to use a 40" 4k TV.
Now I use a 38" ultrawide, which is roughly the same width (in pixels and in inches) but doesn't require my head to move up/down as much.
I could imagine using a 52" ultrawide if it were placed further away from me (i.e. deeper desk). The extra pixels would make it effectively a retina display.
I have a 42" 4k TV that I use as a monitor (in gaming mode). Not sure I would want anything shorter than that. (Of course, I have an eye issue, so the side-to-side is even more pronounced for me.
52" at that aspect ratio isn't just wide, it's also >50% taller than a 34" ultrawide.
It's akin to a 55" TV - basically the same width, but only 70% of the height.
I think you would have to sit further back, almost tv watching distance.
And that would strain your eyes or force a bigger font. At that point, you'd be wondering, like me, on why I spent $$ to buy a bigger screen in the first place.
I got an open box lenovo 24 inch QHD monitor for years and it just works solid across windows, mac and various docking stations. I could imagine upgrading to a 27 or 30 inch but beyond that is just too much IMO.
Maybe taller, more square could be of more use than wider.
I have a 57” ultra wide and it absolutely requires you to look around
I had a Dell thunderbolt hub monitor (not sure if that was the exact name for it but functionally the same thing) in idk 2018? 1440p. Loved it. It played so well with my 2016 MBpro too. Even had HDD’s running through it. It worked fantastically from top to bottom.
For 2 years.
Obviously this is not the same product and it has been a long time. But man I hadn’t thought about that in years and now I’m all bitter about it again ha
So I use a 49" Dell U4919DW (5120 x 1440 @ 60Hz) with an Anker 777 powered Thunderbolt hub to support a MBP, but also use it directly with a lab Windows box. I can't see spending $3k on a monitor because this one was $1100 + $157.29 tax and shipping in 2022. I threw on a 4 port USB-C hub that clamps on the front bezel, so it has reachable ports.
I guess this almost replaces the Anker, but lacks Ethernet.
I use 2 32" 4K which cost about $800 for both monitors. The small gap between the monitors is annoying but I can't really justify paying $2k more. Also there is a samsung dual 4k that is about the same price as the dell.
Moving my head to see everything doesn't bother me. I also have a setup with 3 32" 4k which I find a little too wide but in that setup 1 monitor connects to different computer.
I don’t understand the point of these ultra wide monitors.
On windows 11, you can only have 3 verticals columns with a monitor this wide. If I had 3 regular width monitors, I could have 6 columns overall.
I’d also imagine it looks awkward when you have one window in full screen, but I’ve never used one in person.
Too bad it's not using IPS Black 2 (https://www.lgdisplay.com/eng/product/monitor-display/ips-bl...) like the U3225QE/U2725QE or iiyama's new ProGraphics.
Looks nice enough. But seems pretty steep. The 42" TV I bought five years ago for $260 does basically the same thing. Slightly more vertical space (albeit at a lower DPI) and somewhat less horizontal. But it still supports four 80-column text windows without a sweat.
Late stage FAANGery is watching 20-somethings try to find ridiculous junk to spend money on.
My old crt can show letters and numbers.
I refuse to buy a dell monitor again because I found their quality low and their warranty process onerous. Took hours of my time to get a replacement sent and it had I failed in a different way soon after.
For a cheap throwaway monitor maybe. For anything premium no way.
Even though apple, asus and samsung have some top-notch models, premium monitors is actually where dell excels. At least the different models I’ve bought through the last decades. Cheap crap hardware are not welcome in my home.
I run a pair of the 43" model listed on the page (U4323QE). Coming from a desk full of 24" 1080P screens which I used with no scaling, the selling point for me was that the DPI was similar (~114, no scaling needed) while the total real estate was larger.
This 6K panel seems like it would scratch a similar itch.
Is the PPI not too small with the 43"?
I have a 4k 27" which has nice PPI and I was considering this 43" as a replacement but the pixels looked quite prominent in youtube reviews.
The PPI is small, but this is what I wanted because it better supports native resolutions with no scaling on legacy apps I run.
To preserve the PPI you're used to, you'd want 8K resolution as you approach 50".
RTings has a very in-depth review[0] on this product line, ranking it tied for #6 for "best office monitor".
0: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/u3225qe
That’s the 32 inch, not the 52 inch.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out - I should have said it explicitly. It's why I said "product line" rather than "product". I thought the 32" vs 52" distinction would be clear for anyone who clicked through.
I also didn't realize that at the Dell store webpage, clicking the "32 inch" option actually slightly changed the product line - from U##26 to U##25 (as the 52" option is the only model associated with 2026), and generally I only consider UltraSharp's of different sizes to be "approximately equivalent in quality" if they share the same model year - and nothing yet shares the 2026 model year with this 52" option.
Their best office monitor is actually another Ultrasharp....
Interesting! If you sort their monitor reviews[0] page by "Office Rating" the top monitor is the ASUS ProArt Display PA27JCV with a score of 9.0
But their "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026"[1] lists a Dell Ultrasharp in the #1 rank and the Asus ProArt does not appear in the recommendations at all. The info cards imply that the recommendation rankings might result from a weighted blend of "Office Rating", "Text Clarity" and "SDR Brightness". However, the ProArt outscores the Ultrasharp in both "Office Rating" and "SDR Brightness" while exactly matching the Ultrasharp's score in "Text Clarity".
So the "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026" appears to be a somewhat subjective list, rather than purely a result of objective measurements.
0: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews
1: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/busines...
In the end of the day everything is subjective. A choice of what objective measuremetns to make is already a choice.
I think the reason for their list not having that 9.0 monitor is that it is 50% more expensive, and doesn't really add that much more. One might say it is superfluous. They should probably add their justification to the article though. Personally I am in agreement, I wouldn't buy a 5k display for my office staff because I really don't think it adds anything over the 4k display to their productivity, but I could definetly justify a 4k display over a 1080p display.
I love the Dell Ultrasharp series, interesting they went with Thunderbolt though I had issues with it not working when trying to use another dock with my Thinkpad.
I'd rather buy the USB-C one so I know it will work with the Steam Deck, etc.
EDIT: Oh, only one port is Thunderbolt.
Dell has a shitty habit of down-rating monitor model numbers over time. The very expensive monitor your internet buddy waxed poetic about six months ago is now half the price and also half the monitor. It's not worth the trouble.
Very large monitors are amazing. I’ve been rocking a single OLED 48” monitor for my MacBook Air M3. It is killer and I can not go back to smaller screen sizes. I just wish it was 6K or 8K instead of my current 4K. And if I do upgrade it will be to a 52/55”.
How far are you sitting from that monitor then?
I'm only like 2 feet from my monitor so it doesn't make sense to go any bigger than 30"
I use a 49-inch LG ultrawide. 5120 X 1440, at 60Hz. Had it for a number of years. I think it was about $1,100, when I got it.
It seemed too big, at first, and I split it, but got used to it at full width.
I don't really care that much about pixel density or super-high framerate. I'm old, and don't really game. For software development, it's great.
Yes, but there's got to be some point at which it makes more sense to switch to a VR headset.
Is 130PPI useable at a 1:1 pixel ratio or would this monitor need to be run at a 2:1 ratio
I wonder if this would work for me. I sit 36" from 43" 4K TV, I run it scaled at 125%
I think I'm already at the edge of how big of a monitor I could use without spinning my head all around. But the curvedness of it might make up for it.
I have dell with similar resolution and 32 inches. It is a decent matrix to work with code. But increasing diagonal without increasing resolution just makes it expensive tv and not something where you read text
Do product companies visit their own websites? You have to click on three (!) overlays/popups if you visit the website - cookie notice, another popup telling me that I am not from the US and can visit their european website, and an AI alert overlay telling me about their new AI features. Only after clicking away all three I can actually see the product content. Madness.
4200R is very gentle curvature. Wouldn’t it have been better to curve more aggressively, like at least 2000R for such a large screen if the purpose is a desk monitor?
Could almost get 2x Apple Studio Displays for that $. Then you got 10240x2880. The Dell is only 2" taller and yet 320 less vertical pixels.
I had the UltraSharp 40” similar to this, I loved it until I went to readjust it, apparently tilted it wrong, and the screen blanked. :(
Sure it would be cool, but I don't think not having 6k is my limiting factor (I have an ok 4k 42" monitor)
This size just doesn't make sense due to overwhelming evidence that ergonomic viewing angles matter.
Still would love a true AMOLED monitor that's decently large. Doesn't need to be this big. One with perfect contrast ratio.
I have a smaller version of this and it's pretty good as a display.
I'm somewhat disappointed with it as a hub/KVM. It's better than having to swap cables, but just barely. It can't handle any high bandwidth USB devices I've tried (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, a DSLR via capture card DSLR and a Logitech webcam). The downstream USB strangely isn't even sending down a keyboard and mouse to a PC, I ended up having to get separate dedicated KVM for those. It worked fine with a Thunderbolt to my Macs, but that's not surprising. I'm not sure how it would work with two Macs (one would have to be HDMI or DisplayPort and use that downstream USB port). I could try that but it's not my use case.
Yeah… Not sure of your model (I have the U4025QW), but mine is so close to perfect as a KVM between a Mac and 2 PC’s, if only the KVM had one more USB output port.
It takes 3 video inputs, but only 1 dedicated USB output. But oh, one of the video inputs is really Thunderbolt, so you get USB over the same cable and it works… but only if your machine supports this (for many laptops this is fine.)
But that’s 2 machines max in the KVM, while the monitor has 3 selectable inputs…
It would have been nicer if they could’ve added one more USB output, so you could have KVM match the display input for 3 machines with a single toggle.
(I have a Mac, a work desktop, and a gaming desktop, and I can toggle between the Mac (thunderbolt) and one of the PC’s, and the kvm input will follow the display’s. But I have to pick which PC I want to plug the downstream USB cable into… so I bought a little $15 USB A/B switch to help. So Mac keyboard always works, but when switching between gaming PC (hdmi) and work PC (DP) I just have to remember to toggle the A/B switch along with it to make the keyboard go to the right host.)
Size and pixel density concerns aside, one downside of larger monitors is the power draw. This burns 64W, which adds £3 to your monthly electricity bill if used for 8hrs every weekday. It's not a terrible amount, but I can run 3 micro pc servers 24/7 for that cost.
Imagine living in a so-called "civilization" in which your productivity is limited not by time or tools but by how much it costs to buy photons to shoot into your eyeballs.
I have a 39" (almost 40") LG ultrawide, and it is the perfect size. Can't see how a larger monitor would fit a normal desk...
BUT.... this is perfect for folks that want to use one monitor for both work, and as/for entertainment /just normal tv watching in a living room.
Exactly what I had via sunshine and moonlight in my Vision Pro ...
Is HN the last refuge of real internet discourse? While some of the replies are very Reddit m-coded, it still feels like real humans. I wonder how long this will last before the agents take over.
Would the latest Mac minis work with this?
Yes.
Expansive and expensive at the same time!
Am I the only one who thinks 120Hz is still low for a display of that size?
My 38" LG goes up to 144Hz. I would have figured something larger would be at least that much.
dont believe them - this only has 1 thunderbolt port, not 52
I got both of my 4k dell 27" monitors for like $450 each and it's amazing. I would never pay this much. I'd just buy a 48" OLED. But that was too big. This is just silly and overpriced.
another meh display from dell.
if you truly want a great display for productivity, I can't recommend the Samsung 57 enough. 240hz, 2x4k in one panel. it's great.
The scroll hijacking on this page is horrendous. I could almost not close the page anymore on iOS because of everything going on.
Any display that is <200ppi is garbage and manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves for pricing them above $800.
is there something special about it to make the front page?
At 52" I now believe that there is a limit to the size of a monitor. This might have crossed it.
> "Unlock unparalleled productivity"
LOL
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Abysmally low pixel density. :(
No scaling required? Great!
Spot the Linux user ;)
More accurately, you have spotted not a Linux user in general, but a user of certain Linux distributions, which in my opinion have inadequate display configuration settings.
I am also using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, and I have never used any display with a resolution less than 4k, for at least the last 12 or 13 years.
Despite of that, I have never encountered any problems with "scaling", because in Linux I have never used any kind of "scaling" (unlike in Windows, which has a font "scaling").
In the kind of Linux that I have been using, I only set an appropriate dots-per-inch value for the monitor, which means that there is no "scaling", which would reduce graphic quality, but all programs render the fonts and other graphic elements at an appropriate size and using in the right way the display resolution.
I configure dots-per-inch values that do not match the actual dpi values of the monitors, but values that ensure that the on-screen size is slightly larger than the on-paper size, because I stay at a greater distance from the monitor than I would keep a paper or a book in my hand (i.e. I set higher dpi values than the real ones, so that any rendering program will believe that the screen is smaller than in reality, so it will render e.g. a 12 point font at a slightly bigger size than 12 points and e.g. an A4 page will be bigger on screen than an A4 sheet of paper; for instance I use 216 dpi for a 27 inch 4k Dell UltraSharp monitor).
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.
Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.
I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.
The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.
If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor, so it uses a DPI value that corresponds to the obsolete VGA monitors.
A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.
Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.
In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I've tried most of the fonts here, but none of them really do it for me: https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads
But if you want to keep going on with the pedantry, have at it. Were you around in the Usenet days?
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.
Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.
The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.
While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.
In the limit, as pixel density increases, regular, unhinted floating-point-x text looks just like it would on a printed page. How can you get better than that? With enough resolution, you free yourself from all the hacks we've devised to make text on a computer halfway tolerable. Shouldn't doing so be the goal?
If you want that blocky-font retro look, you can use vector art to make squares.
Yes, me too... also don't need GPU card, CPU integrated will do fine (at 120Hz). (I have 32" 1440p ... 1600p would be better, but that's it).
plasma 6 for example has really good fractional scaling, i'd argue it works nicer than windows, where some old apps do not get rendered in higher resolution, some apps do not properly take advantage of it.
Eh, it's about the same as a 4K display at 33".
4k at 33" is awful too. 5k text is visibly better than 4k at 27".
I mean, sure, but you're basically saying "anything other than the absolute top-end displays are absolutely awful". 133 PPI is going to be higher pixel density than >99% of desktop monitors that people are actually using.
e.g. The Steam hardware survey only goes down to 0.23% usage, and doesn't have any >4K resolution listed.
It’s a $3000 monitor, so yeah, other top end monitors are what I’m going to compare it to.
You said 4K@33" is "awful". That's not $3k territory, that's what you get for $300.
4k@27" is borderline too coarse. 5k@27" is preferred.
Which is a poor pixel density.
If compared to a smartphone, maybe.
No, it is a poor pixel density when compared with a printed book, which should be the standard for judging any kind of display used for text.
At the sizes of 27" or 32", which are comfortable for working with a computer, 5k is the minimum resolution that is not too bad when compared with a book or with the acuity of typical human vision.
For a bigger monitor, a 4k resolution is perfectly fine for watching movies or for playing games, but it is not acceptable for working with text.
Compared to a smartphone it's not just poor it's complete dreck. Smarphones are in the 400s.
Do you hold your 32" monitor the same distance from your face as you hold your smartphone?
I fail to see how that is relevant as I neither introduced nor advocated for smartphone pixel density?
Then what was the intent of your comment? There's no point to making a 400dpi 32" display (even if that were remotely physically possible).
> Then what was the intent of your comment?
Pointing out to the other guy that their reply made no sense?
> There's no point to making a 400dpi 32" display
Thank you captain obvious.
You do know that there are densities between 130 and 400+ though, right?
Exactly, that’s the point
That’s not a point it’s nonsense thought termination.
There’s a gulf between 130 dpi and 460 dpi, and in that gulf there are densities which stop being poor at monitor viewing distances.
That smartphone densities are excessive for that purpose does not make middling standard densities good.
I have an LG OLED C3 as a monitor, 42". I may be able to distinguish separate pixels if looking at a '.' or something like that (a stuck pixel happened for a few weeks, which I could notice on a white background).
But the density is definitely enough for text for the distance required for such a screen size. At least when using grayscale AA, because OLED subpixel...