But 1440p at 21" I think would be great. Personally I only use 1080p screens as secondary monitors, and would never go back to 1080p for my primary display.
People who say "Scaling" are a different breed. Some like it because for them smoother fonts are more readable. To others, scaling presents ability map physical dimensions to screen.
Saying this, I agree that OS and software has to support alternative scalings, and ability to make things larger or smaller. I wish we could just pinch zoom apps on Windows and Linux.
But everyone will take more DPI if you offer it.
Nobody is actually for or against scaling itself. It only becomes a question of scaling or not if you artificially lock in a screen beforehand, and that screen is in a certain DPI range. If you used a same-size 8k screen you'd have basically nobody calling for "no scaling", instead you'd have arguments like 2x vs. 3x vs. 4x.
Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.
The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small.
> If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.
Genuinely curious what modern OS's don't have high DPI support? AFAIK Windows, OSX, and all the modern linux distros (and their DE's) support it.
Either way, it's usually not the OS, it's usually random programs that don't want to scale well.
I have a laptop with a 12" 4k screen. I can read it just fine. I do scale it 200%, but that just means I would be able to read text just fine at 24" 4k with no scaling.
It's all preference and how well the OS handles it. I think everyone can agree that the are still issues to work through on the OS side w.r.t. display scaling.
Edit: I misunderstood your last comment. Maybe it isn't the OS's fault when programs don't scale well... but the OS should have an override that lies to the program to force scaling. Hacky though that may be, it would work well, at least for an even 200% scale factor.
Apple was selling these in store until not long ago. Should cover that use case (4 HD screens) fine, but the pixel density is terrible for using at scaled 4K.
100 PPI is what we typically had on good monitors in the late 90s, it’s 20 years later now!
If you use a 21''@4K with 200% scaling text is sharper than a relative bigger monitor at 100% scaling.
At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time.
At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit in the quandrants.
I think what you have now (4K @ 31") is the perfect compromise. It's borderline retina, so while things do get slightly better at a higher density, the improvement is much less noticeable than the improvement from non-retina to borderline-retina.
The density is also such that if you turn off scaling it's still borderline usable, for the once in a blue moon situation you have to run an app that misbehaves while scaled.
I would love a 31" display at something closer to 8K resolution so I can run it at 2x scaling and get true retina.
If you need scaling at 31"... How is your vision? Do you use glasses? Or do you sit further away from the display? I had a friend who thought native 4K at 30" was too small, but it turned out he actually needed glasses, and once he got a prescription he joined my side.
What's the issue with scaling? It exists for precisely this reason.
With 200% scaling you now only have the screen real-estate of a 1080p screen. At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time.
At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit.
Also once in a blue-moon you'll find some software won't scale at all, or has issues scaling. If you only have a 21" screen then you have this tiny microscopic text you have to try to read.
I had the exact same dream, which is why I bought a 4K 43" monitor. Then I found out that it was so big I had to sit further away, forcing me to scale some things up so they are readable again, though not everything (DE settings are still at 100%, but e.g. code font is at ~120% and HN is at 150%).
That said, I'm very happy with my purchase. The only thing I would probably change is to get a different model (sadly, it was the only available 43" 4K 60fps model in my country at the time of purchase).
Benefits: - You get so much screen space. You can fit so many thing on one screen. There is now space for 20 icons vertially on my desktop (not that I use the desktop much, but consider it more of something to compare to). - You move your head more, as you don't have your entire screen in focus. Same goes for multi-monitor setups. - No seam in your 4x1080p screens.
Some caveats: - You'll miss notifications. My field-of-view is not good enough to see the small popup in the lower-left/right of windows. I wish I got more notification in the center of my screen. - If you use it as a windows monitor, you will notice color/blurry reflections of the desk in front of you, making it harder to read the bottom 2% of the screen when you are looking at the center. Usually, this is where your taskbar is. Solution: Move the taskbar to the top. - You will still overlap your windows. Most of the time you will just increase the size of your editors/browsers to fit more content in those. I think my browser is currently larger than a 1080p screen, just because I read it a lot and it is such an important part of the screen. You do however get so much more content in your editors/browsers. - Getting headaches and eye-strain? Turn down the contrast and brightness by a lot. You are starting into an even bigger 'lamp' than usual, so save your eyes. On 1080p I usually work around 40-50 brightness and contrast, while on this 4K they are both on 30.
I still wish I had something smaller though, but there simply are no developer 4k screens in the range of 33' to 38'. I do not want ultrawide, nor pay +2k so I can read my lines of code in the most color-accurate way possible.
