This sounds like when Jeff Atwood started that fad that if you didn't have three external monitors (yes, three) then your setup was suboptimal and you should be ashamed of yourself.
No. Just no. The best developers I've known wrote code with tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays. They didn't think it was an impediment. Now I'm typing this on one of these displays, and it's terrible and I hate it (I usually use an external 1080p monitor), but it's also no big deal.
A 1080p monitor is enough for me. I don't need a 4K monitor. I like how it renders the font. We can argue all day about clear font rendering techniques and whatnot, but if it looks good enough for me and many others, why bother?
When I was new and coding was slow, my worries were about so many other things (like how the language even worked) than even what text editor I used, let alone the monitor.
As I became experienced, a lot of newbie problems went away and the next topmost problems emerged, leading to be obsessing over text editor, shortcuts, and even a multi-monitor setup with a vertical monitor.
Then went through a minimalism phase where I was annoyed by how much time I was spending maintaining my tools rather than using them, so gone went almost all of that. Just one giant monitor and VSCode for better or worse (mainly because it does all six languages I use well enough).
I'm now at a phase of thinking, "who are all these people who do so much coding in a day that these things matter?" because reading and writing code is maybe.... 35% of my job now? What I need to optimize for is reading/writing human text. And that's where I currently am: figuring out how to optimize writing documentation/design/architecture docs, given how awful making and maintaining a sequence or block diagram is currently.
My conclusion so far is that I expect my needs to continue to mutate. I do not believe they are "converging" and do not believe there is any sort of golden setup I will one day discover.
Trouble is, people then get used to macOS’s font rendering, so that (a) they don’t want to turn it off, because it’s different from what they’re used to, and (b) start designing for it. I’m convinced this is a large part of the reason why people deploy so many websites with body text at weight 300 rather than 400, because macOS makes that tolerable because it makes it bolder. Meanwhile people using other operating systems that obey what the font said are left with unpleasantly thin text.
The whole discussion starts from a what I would say is an incorrect assertion, and then goes on to describe lots of ways that letters can be made better. If, in fact, you don't need better, then a lot of the points go away.
1. There is a point of diminishing returns, past which you are spending a lot more money for very little benefit.
2. There exists a point beyond which "better letters" are unlikely to contribute much to daily work.
Both of those points are, to some extent, the same point. But either way, the idea that you MUST get as good of a monitor as you can" is, in my opinion, untrue and not worth basing an entire document on.
I'd rather see a discussion of which features of a monitor contribute the most (per $) to how well they function for daily work. For gaming, I want high refresh rate and high contrast. For TV, the contrast (real black) goes up in importance. For daily work, neither of those is a huge contributor to how well I can work.
1. Arbitrary resolutions, great to run old software and games, even better to run new games at lower resolution to increase performance.
2. Arbitrary refresh rates.
3. Zero (literally) response time.
4. Awesome color range (many modern screens still are 12bit, meanwhile silicon graphics had a CRT screen in 1995 that was 48bit)
5. No need to fiddle with contrast and brightness all the time when I switch between a mostly light or mostly dark content, for example I gave up on my last attempt to use flat panel because I couldn't play Witcher 3 and SuperHot one after the other, whenever I adjusted settings to make one game playable the other became just splotches (for example the optimal settings for Witcher 3 made SuperHot become a almost flat white screen, completely impossible to play).
6. For me, reading raster fonts on CRT gives much less eyestrain and is more beautiful than many fonts that need subpixel antialias on flat panels.
7. Those things are crazy resilient, I still have some working screens from 80286 era (granted, the colors are getting weird now with aging phosphors), while some of my new flatpanels failed within 2 years with no repair possible.
That older monitor has some kind of firmware bug or maybe it's a wrong profile in MacOS or whatever, which makes it advertise a maximum of 2560x1440x30Hz or 1920x1080x60Hz to the Mac when connected via HDMI (DP works fine out-of-the-box), effectively preventing me from choosing native resolution at maximum refresh rate. I haven't been able to make MacOS override this limitation in any way using the common OS-native tricks, but SwitchResX can somehow force any custom resolution and refresh rate to be used, and the monitor is apparently able to deal with it just fine, so I've been running this setup for years now with no complaints whatsoever.
Also no manual work was ever needed after display disconnect/reconnect or MacOS reboot. I had problems once after a MacOS update, which required a SwitchResX update for it to be working again, but other than that I'm in love with this nifty low-level tool.
I spend most of my days in a text browser, text
editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving
letters.
So I optimize my setup to showing really, really
good letters.
But for coding purposes!? I don't find high DPI text more legible... unless we're talking really tiny font sizes, smaller than just about anybody would ever use for coding.
And there's a big "screen real estate" penalty with high DPI displays and 2X scaling. As the author notes, this leaves you with something like 1440×900 or 1920x1080 of logical real estate. Neither of which is remotely suitable for development work IMO.
But at least you can enjoy that gorgeous screen and
pixel-crisp fonts. Otherwise, why would you buy a retina
screen at all?
So anyway, for me, I chose the Dell 3818. 38", 3840 x 1600 of glorious, low-resolution text. A coder's paradise.
For purposes of software development, I won't really be interested until 8K displays become affordable and feasible. As the author notes, they integer scale perfectly to 2560×1440. Now that would rock.
> This will make everything on the screen slightly bigger, leaving you (slightly!) less screen estate. This is expected. My opinion is, a notebook is a constrained environment by definition. Extra 15% won’t magically turn it into a huge comfortable desktop
For me a notebook is not a constrained environment, and screen scaling very much makes the difference between "a huge comfortable desktop" and not.
Shameless plug: I mentioned this as my favorite font for code editors in my blog post https://dragoshmocrii.com/my-favorite-tools-resources-for-da...
As mentioned in the article, macOS works best using true 2x integer scaling. Using 2x scaling, a 4k monitor will result in an equivalent workspace to a 1080p display—unusable for productivity and development. A superior option is iMac/LG 5k display results which nets an equivalent workspace of 1440p.
The only options for greater-than-4k displays on the market currently are the 27" LG 5K ($1200, 2014) and the Dell 8k ($3500, 2017). I'm convinced this is due to the manufacturers focusing their attention on the high-margin gaming market which has no need for resolutions higher than 4k.
I'm holding onto my 30" 2560x1600 Apple Cinema Display until I can get something that offers me the equivalent amount of screen real estate at 2x retina scaling.
Finally, I work most effectively when I hold what I need in my head, and find that multiple displays fights against that need.
The only real exception to that is if I'm writing front end code of some sort, having the live updates helps a ton.
Lastly, if I could have a bigger display on my laptop, I'd be up for that!
Font smoothing has never bothered me, but what DOES bother me is this trend towards lower contrast, and "flat UIs" that lack any differentiation between sections in the UI. Win95, while ugly by today's standards, was easy to read and follow. And the black-on-white text is something I miss dearly.
The author also says (they think) that you need the discrete graphics card in a MacBook to take advantage of a 120 Hz display, and that the integrated Intel Iris graphics won't do.
I was actually shopping around for a new MacBook earlier today, and noticed that the 13" MacBook Pros only come with integrated GPUs, and you have to get the 16" MBP if you want discrete graphics. So if you like the portability that a 13" laptop has, this might not be a good tradeoff (not to mention that the 16" one costs $400 to $800 more than the top-spec 13" one).
I totally agree with the stuff they say about rendering fonts on 4k screens, but I don't think I'd be willing to take the hit in portability, or shell out an extra $700+, to get 120 Hz.
I disagree that all available resolution should go to increasing sharpness and detail of text, which, after all, can only improve so much. There's only one metric that really matters for text, and that's reading speed. Any beauty or detail which doesn't serve to differentiate characters (thereby increasing reading speed) is essentially pointless.
A better reason to get a better monitor is to fit more text on it. While coding or learning, there might be one or more editors, terminals, browsers, chats, etc. Can all this be behind tabs or in virtual desktops? Of course. But the value of having it all available at a flick of the eyes is so much higher! Even if you turn off all the animations, flipping virtual desktops or tabs requires a much more severe context switch than casting a glance to the right, left, or (slightly) up or down. I'm currently using a 5k2k monitor at its native resolution, and it's pretty awesome.
I have been hoping for two decades that VR would solve this, allowing me to have a truly vast workspace that moved and zoomed just via eye movement, but not only is that day still far away in eye-tracking terms, VR goggles have so far all been much worse for text than high DPI screens, in my experience. I appreciate that there are VR workspaces in development, though, like Immersed, for the day when the hardware is good enough.
Have to say though, taste is subjective, but good lord those monitors are about as elegantly designed as a Rockstar Energy drink.
The perfect 27” monitor for me would be one that has 5K@120 because at 200% scale you’d get a desktop that looks “1440-size” and when gaming you can run half resolution at 1440@120 with a decent graphics card.
These don’t exist though, at least not as IPS I think, so I’ll stick with my 1440@144 for a while longer.
> Times of low-resolution displays are over. High-resolution displays are a commodity now.
I reject that premise. 4K is basically the maximum number of pixels you can get for less than $1K, and that's only a handful more pixels than a 16" MBP screen. It does not make sense for most people to shell out the $$$ just so that they can see the same number of pixels from slightly further away.
It is absolutely not the right time to upgrade your monitor. Wait until 5K+ becomes affordable again[1] so you can actually get the benefits of an external monitor (more usable screen space) without having to sacrifice the sharpness and quality of retina.
[1] https://tidbits.com/2018/11/16/what-happened-to-5k-displays/
I wrote an essay about resolution independent graphics back in 2012 here https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...
HN commentary on this happened on two occasions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639616 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236429
I saw some discussions about multiple monitors; I am a heavy user of multiple monitors, 2 most of the time and 3 when really needed; I don't have space on my desks (home & office) for 3 monitors all the time, so it depends on the needs and not on coolness. What I plan to do now is to get an asymmetrical configuration at home with one regular (1080p) monitor for some work and gaming (the CPU is an i3 7100, so I don't do much gaming) and a larger and better one for work only cases where a lot of information needs to be on the screen at the same time. As the article did not mention multiple monitors and buying 2-3 monitors that are 120 Hz/4k resolution is extremely expensive for a home setup, I think it is worth mentioning this kind of compromise of mixing size to have one of each. Not having OCD the different size is not such a big deal, while the extra functionality/productivity helps.
> Why is it 119.88 Herz, not 120 Herz? No idea.
The short version of this is that TVs generally have framerates that are a multiple of 59.94, because NTSC is actually 59.94Hz (rather than 60), for various historical reasons -- basically, for color TV to become a thing, without obsoleting every single B&W TV in existence at the time, they needed to slow the framerate down by 0.06Hz[1]
There's still plenty of TV-targeted panels out there that only do 59.94Hz, and not 60Hz. Some of them are even in computer monitors! I imagine likewise that there are a lot of panels that do 119.88Hz (59.94Hz * 2) and not 120Hz.
And just to be confusing, a number of things (both hardware and software) tell you that you have a 60Hz signal when you actually have a 59.94Hz signal! A really good example is windows -- refresh rate settings in the OS get quite interesting, showing 59.94 in some places, and 60 in other places![2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Color_encoding
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2006076/screen-refr...
It is fine on HIDPI displays though because it isn't as prominent there and the effect actually works.
Instead of high resolution pick a display with a decent aspect ratio. 16:9 is a joke. 16:10 is superior but not exactly a game changer. 3:2 is very rare, especially for desktop displays, and 4:3 is pretty much dead. We do not talk about 5:4.
Personal sweet spot me in terms of pleasant readability is: 4k 24" @ 200% scale (so same screen estate as 1080p) or 5k 27" @ 200% scale (same screen estate as 1440p).
Since there weren't any suggestions for linux, this is what I did for Ubuntu 20:
* 2x scaling
* Downloaded libfreetype, enabled subpixel rendering option, replaced existing libfreetype.so
(I think Ubuntu 20 might already have this enabled, but just to be safe I did it manually)
* Turned off all hinting options in font configuration
* Turn on lcddefault filtering
(necessary if you have subpixel rendering enabled)
* Specifically set 158 dpi in Alacritty terminal config
(Not entirely sure that's necessary?)This is related to one reason why I'm not so crazy about 4k: At most of the usual screen sizes, they occupy an unpleasant middle ground between a traditional screen (~100 dpi) and a 2x hidpi/retina screen (~200 dpi).
Ever since old TV standards moved from black and white to color within the US, the timing has been "frames per one and one onethousandth of a second". So 120/1.001 = 119.88.
Was a neat trick in the analog days to maintain compatibility with the older black and white TV sets. Fastforward to the digital age and that fractional timing difference makes keeping audio and video sync an absolute nightmare.
> According to my research among programmers, 43% are still using monitors with pixel per inch density less than 150
OK...
> Let's take Consolas [...] at 14px, which is default in VS Code
A 14 pixel font at 150 DPI is a 6.75 point type size in real world units! Good grief, I can't read that anymore. Frankly I doubt I could have read it in my 20's. I certainly never would have wanted to code in it under any circumstances.
I had to go through a similar exercise recently. The DisplayPort / USB-C / Thunderbolt story is just insane. I was looking for a monitor to use with both MacOS and Windows. HDMI can't do 4k @ 60Hz, DisplayPort cables never tell you which version they support.
I ended up with LG UHD 4K 27UL650, which I'm very happy with, but switching between Mac and Windows is still difficult, because this monitor only has 1 DisplayPort input. I've settled to using HDMI for Mac and 30Hz instead of switching cables all the time.
Improvement in experience is very subjective but I agree with the author on everything except maybe the 120Hz.
Quite an argument.
19", 1280x1024, 75 Hz.
It was a freebie from a folded startup.
This exactly matches monitors I used in the more distant past, like NCD X/Window terminals: 19", 1280x1024.
This form factor basically determines what is the ideal pixel size for most work.
Basically, 1280 is about the right number of pixels for the angle of vision subtended by the display when viewed at the intended distance.
Sure, if I get within 12 inches of the screen I can start to make out the pixels. But even then due to sub-pixel rendering it's hard to make out individual pixels at a foot if the contrast isn't too great between the text and the background.
That being said interestingly one of my screens, a newer Asus that's precisely one model version higher than the other, handles high-contrast sub-pixel text rendering quite a bit worse than the other :|
https://github.com/graphitemaster/breaking_the_physical_limi...
The trade off is this monitor is very low res, about 100ppi. I don't know anything about how the various OSes render text. But I have found that by far, Ubuntu renders the text the best. Text in both OSX and Windows looks absolutely dreadful on this monitor, but Ubuntu is really quite pleasant. Which is not at all what I was expecting.
I'm guessing it's 119.88Hz because that's an even 5x multiple of the conventional "24Hz" of TV – which is really 23.976Hz.
I don't think as programmers we need anything more than a 27' inch 1080p. What am I missing? I don't think it's worth the expense.
On another note, that mustard yellow as the background color is an eyesore.
It's clear that many of the people who think they disagree are Linux users who have (for good reasons) not yet had a period of time to try it out with good OS support. At least, not on their laptop screens. I really hope good Linux support for laptops with high DPI displays emerges, if it has not already (I've read mixed reports).
IMO you're better off grabbing something like a 25" 2560x1440 monitor. You can comfortably read text at a few feet away, even small text with not the best contrast.
If you start scaling to 150% or 200% with your 4k display you'll end up with the same screen real estate as a 2560x1440 or even a 1080p monitor depending on how much you scale up and you'll end up paying a lot more. For example a really good 2560x1440 monitor will run you about $300-350 (IPS display, low input lag, good color accuracy, etc.). The first 2 monitors in OP's post are $1,500 to $1,730.
I did a huge write up on this at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo... if anyone is curious. I evaluated a bunch of monitors and ultimately picked a 25" 2560x1440 since it's the sweet spot for PPI at normal viewing distances while having normal vision.
For programming, having a 2560x1440 1:1 scaled display is going to be a huge win. You can easily fit 4x 80 column windows side by side in most code editors. After using that set up for years, there's no way I would ever want to work on a display that's less than an effective 2560x1440 resolution again.
I do also have a separate workstation with a 4K 43" monitor that I use exclusively as a standing setup. The monitor is fairly far back, but still requires me to move my head slightly to view the extents. This is the workstation I typically use for daily stand-ups so that I can have a ton of relevant information up all at once. I will also do some large-scale codebase reorganization efforts on this setup as I can have 3-4 solution explorers side-by-side and still have 90% of my monitor remaining for code editor windows, debuggers, explorer windows, browsers, etc. That said, this setup is tiresome if you are trying to laser focus on a single area of the codebase for an extended duration.
I will typically alternate between these setups throughout the day as appropriate.
Also, I do appreciate the color accuracy of the 4k 43" monitor (IPS/8-bit). I don't do a lot of artistic work, but when I am trying to see if a certain shade of grey makes sense for a element relative to its contents, having an accurate monitor really helps pick a good color code. With TN you get much more 'coarse' results and its hard to find a good middle point.
I like this idea in theory, but I disagree with it in practice.
I use two vertical 4k displays (specifically: Dell U2720Q) and I use them at the native resolution.
This is because I want IntelliJ to take up an entire vertical display where I can see a lot of code without having to scroll. I can also divide the other display into two halves (horizontal line, one window on top and one on bottom - I use a third party app from the macOS app store called magnet for this).
I can appreciate the smooth fonts, but the screen real estate is more valuable.
I guess all of this is to say that the best option for me would be an 8k display at 2x scaling. A 4k display at 1080p though isn't worth the trade-off (I'll take lower quality text for the additional space).
They do say right after that that using the 4k display at native is also fine, so maybe it's not an issue?
LG now has a 48" OLED TV [3] that supports a 120Hz refresh rate. I'm looking forward to trying that out. Either that or the new Samsung Odyssey G9 ultrawide [4] which is about the same price. It's also 240Hz but with VA pixels (which apparently aren't that bad). The G9 will be better on the vertical axis (not too tall) given its size. The extreme curvature is also interesting - not sure about that yet.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sony-KD43X720E-43-Inch-Ultra-Smart/dp...
[2] https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling
[3] https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled48cxpub-oled-4k-tv
[4] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--ody...
- 1440p
- IPS panel
- size between 23 and 27 inches, ideally 24 or 25
- flatscreen, 16:9, normal monitor, no "gamer" or other weird stuff.
- reasonably priced
I don't live in a rich country so there's not much variety. I got tired of searching for it. All monitors with more than 1080p I've found are either "gamer" (which cost 5x as much because of the gamer tax and other features useless to me, like 144hz, gsync and "3ms response times") type of monitors, curved screens, ultra wide screens, etc.
I'm just going to stick with my 1440p 27" monitor until someone can sell me something better.
1. Buying 4K TVs as large PC monitors is a dangerous game, despite all the sweet lies about “convergence” supposedly enabled by HDMI. You have to make sure the TV has a true “PC mode” with true 1:1 pixel mapping and no “subsampling” (if it exists, it is usually enabled by labelling the HDMI input as “PC“), that you weren’t conned with an RGBW pixel format (or any non-RGB pixel format for that matter), and that the panel can display 6500K colour temperature in "PC mode". Also please note some TVs with IPS panels have a pronounced chevron pattern in their subpixel layout instead of the traditional 3 vertical stripes, which makes ClearType look slightly different even in true "PC mode" (I personally find it cute and inoffensive, your mileage may vary) and that all 4K VA panels have bad horizontal viewing angles.
2. Make sure your RGB levels match. That is, use “full range” for RGB 0-255 displays (PC monitors) and “limited range” for RGB 15-235 displays (TV monitors). Sometimes the drivers don’t get this right. If it’s wrong, and you get “limited range” on an RGB 0-255 display, you will get washed out blacks instead of inky blacks.
This week, one of them failed. While looking for a replacement, I was expecting the range of 24" "retina" displays to have improved somewhat. Surprisingly, it seems the opposite has happened. Dell no longer make an Ultrasharp range 24" monitor with 4k, everything is now 27".
Although they do make a 'P' series equivalent, it's an old model released around the same time as my original ones, with similar bugs and early hardware (no 4k 60hz HDMI)
27" is sadly too large for me to fit two side-by-side on my desk (and even if they would fit, 27" is too large for my liking).
Now I'm left struggling to find a replacement, I may have to live with downgrading to something like 120 PPI with a 2k (1440p) 25" display.
It's sad that retina really hasn't caught on much in the desktop monitor space, we should really have 3k as a standard resolution for smaller desktop monitors.
I find that at 4K, my code starts spreading out -- horizontally and vertically. That's fine when you're writing it, but when you come back to it months later, it's so hard to comprehend that much information all at once IMO. It's weird. And I might not be explaining it properly.
If you were to write your code on an 800x600 display, you would make sure that every function did not go over 800 vertical pixels. It would probably give you a headache if you did.
I can look at code and almost immediately tell that it was written on a 4K display. Oftentimes, everything is spread out and chained obtusely.
Completely different game for web dev though -- having the browser side by side with your code helps.
...
Also, 4:3 is awesome for code. All I need is two, side-by-side panes of 80-column text :)
16:9 has me glancing left to right too much.
I wrote a lot of code on Mac classic format (512x342) using Monaco 9 -- it was great; next step was 640x480, and 800x600, and then (for a rather long time) 1024x768.
It was still perfectly fine, as (at the time) Apple screens were some of the best, nice crisp, clear with good contrast. I didn't feel particularly handicapped because of the screen real estate, you just adapt to what you have.
Now my main machine is Linux with 2*32" 4K screen side-by-side, and about 60cm from me. I use Liberation Mono 17pt as a terminal font, and 9pt is just microscopic on the screen.
And guess what? I still wish I had a bit more screen space sometime! :-)
One thing I always tell more junior developers who ask me about what the most valuable piece of information about programming in my whole career is: Get a good SCREEN, get a good KEYBOARD, and get a good CHAIR, the rest are just details.
Oh, also, make sure the screen(s) are perpendicular to any window, and watch that posture!
</walks off waving is cane in the air> :-)
The author seems to know a lot about font rendering but he doesn't seem to know that much about monitors despite having VERY strong opinions about them.
I suggest people wait till the new year before a big monitor purchase. EVE Spectrum is slated for Q4 of this year. If it delivers on its promises, it'll be the best value for what you get. And if it doesn't, you can fall back on the ROG XG27UQ or its contemporaries - assuming your GPU can support DSC, 4K, and 120hz.
Somehow I went for years without realizing that I just needed glasses. I could read everything before, but after getting the glasses everything was suddenly unnaturally crisp.
If you want a monitor that can do all of the cool things at once (2160p, hdr, 120Hz+, freesync) without using hacks like dual cables or realtime lossy compression, then you need both a video card and a monitor that support hdmi 2.1 or displayport 2.0.
Currently there are very few monitors that support the newer hdmi/dp standard, and there are no video cards that do. However both of the new consoles scheduled to be released later this year (xbox series x, ps5) will support hdmi 2.1. This also implies that upcoming discrete gpus will support this as well.
This means if you want a monitor that can do everything, right now there are only a tiny number of screens, and no video cards. Barring any delays, the situation should be very different in a few months.
Even my old laptops with IPS panels look better than newer ones. I was in the market for a laptop last year and returned 3 different laptops with IPS panel displays from 3 different manufacturers because every single one of them had backlight bleed that was so bad that it was plainly visible even in a well lit room. The last company pushed back trying to claim that that level of backlight bleed was considered "normal" but eventually refunded my purchase once I threatened to do a chargeback through my credit card company.
Do there actually exist any companies anymore that produce decent monitors with minimal backlight bleed?
At work, we have these 5K, 27" LG monitors: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMUB2LL/A/lg-ultrafine-5k... . Don't get me wrong, they're great, but... I don't feel like I'm missing anything when I go home and use my Dell U2412M (1920x1200, 24"). And working from home the past three months hasn't tempted me to upgrade my monitor, either. 1920x1200 gives me a good amount of real estate at 100% scaling, and that's the main thing I need.
Now it is true that if I look at the font in this text box in Vivaldi, the rendering kind of sucks; Firefox is a bit better. There was definitely a time, around when I switched to Windows 6.x from 5.x, when I was passionate about this, and dislike for the Windows 6 font rendering was one of the reasons I stuck with XP as long as I did. Maybe 4K would help with that, but by this point I've adjusted. And even so, spending $900 on the monitor the author suggests is not the most appealing option. That's a lot of GPU upgrade you could get relative to the $300 I spent on my current monitor in 2011. Or I could double the RAM in all my personal systems and get a nice microphone (which would have more of an impact on my working from home experience). Or I could built an entire Ryzen 7 3700 desktop for that price. There are just a lot of things I'd rather prioritize.
I'm also find the proposed productivity benefits dubious. As long as the fonts are acceptable enough that I don't find them actively distracting (and as mentioned, with bad enough font rendering that can be the case, so perhaps the author is simply more sensitive to that than I am), how much I can focus is going to have a lot more impact on my productivity.
I do somewhat fear that this might re-ignite my former font pickiness, though...
* Correct color gamut. * Minimal resolution of 1080, better if is 1440. * Minimal refresh rate of 60hz, better if at least is 75hz.
This push me to get a LG IPS monitor like the ultra wide main screen that I have now.
(why that HP screen? First thing on Wirecutter's 'best monitors' list, which I think was how I chose the one I'm looking at right now.)
I guess it'd be nice to turn off Illustrator's glitchy anti-aliased previews for good. But this monitor still works perfectly fine. Call me when I can get a color e-paper display with a 60hz or better refresh rate, I'm increasingly tired of staring into a giant light all the time.
All told, that's the total price of the laptop just in periphery. I ended up going with a $30 usb-c adapter and some ~$100 dell 1080p screens, and I'm happy as a clam.
However the recommendation to reduce the resolution scaling option is a no for me. The text is wayyyy too big for me and I lose out on the screen real estate.
I was an early adopter. Didn’t happen voluntarily though, my client wanted me to develop embedded Linux software that drives a 4K HDMI output, so I was kinda forced to upgrade. Never looked back. When that monitor broke just after it’s 3 years warranty expired, I’ve bought very similar one with the same specs from another brand, 27” 4k IPS.
However, I think 120Hz is overkill for programmers. The price/performance proportion is not great either, my current BenQ PD2700U is offered for just over $500 in the US, while the monitors recommended by OP are above 2 grands.
I've generally found that all the IT vendors have an incredibly lazy and sloppy attitude to imaging of all types, not just display scaling or font rendering. "The pixels went on to the display! Good enough! Ship it!" is the attitude.
Compare this to televisions, where there 120 Hz is common, 8K is a thing now, wide gamuts and HDR are not only supported but consistent and even calibrated out of the box! Dolby and NetFlix in particular have put significant effort into making sure their customers see the original artistic intention, not some faded or garish mess.
In the PC, Mac, and smartphone world it is literally impossible to send someone either a still image or video that'll look even vaguely correct. It'll be too bright, or too dim, faded, or worse: the colours will be stretched to the maximum display gamut. Photos of faces look like zombies or clowns in full makeup.
HDR is simply impossible to use for still image exchange. No matter what some random JPEG committee is working on, don't even think about such nonsense as sending someone a HDR file, it will practically never work, no matter what display the recipient is using. Or even just an SDR 10-bit file. You're wasting your time.
To give you an idea of how insanely bad this is, for years and years if you enabled HDR for your display under Windows 10 it would simultaneously wash out the desktop colours, dim it until it was way too dark, and then blur everything on top of that so that your 4K monitor is pointless.
Clearly nobody actually tested HDR support at Microsoft. After they received complaints, both to their tech support and in public... they did nothing. For years. YEARS.
I just find the whole thing incredibly sad. It's 2020. The future! The physical technology for nearly perfect display output has been available for years, but... no. You just can't have it, because the software won't allow you.
It doesn't matter what display you buy. You can't have HDR, or 10-bit, or colour management on the desktop, or your browser.
Firefox has had full ICC colour management for many years now. It's off by default. Internet Explorer truncates everything to sRGB even on a wide-gamut screen. Safari stretches colours for un-tagged images.
The only HDR and colour-managed thing you can reliably do on a PC is watch NetFlix. That's... it.
With any legacy application, and even many modern ones, UIs were either fuzzy, or tiny, or a mix of the two, even with all of the Windows per-program custom high-DPI settings tweaked. The UX was not consistent enough to be enjoyable, so I ditched it.
I also tried a vintage "mechanical" switch keyboard and mouse, just for fun. I think modern macOS doesn't work quite as well with a mouse because of the weird, narrow, disappearing scrollbars (though a mouse scroll wheel or scroll ball can help with that.)
I recently changed my terminal emulator from Termite to Alacritty because Pango broke bitmap fonts, and Termite uses Pango. Unfortunately several other things I use are still using Pango, and I've had to switch to subpar fonts in waybar and a few other spots.
In 2018, as the article says, macOS stopped using subpixel antialiasing across all Macs. On low DPI screens however, the loss of subpixel antialiasing made fonts look blurrier, and look smaller and less dark. This occurs on high DPI screens as well, albeit to a lower degree. To bring low DPI screens up to the same level of "darkness", the behaviour of "Use font smoothing when available" was changed to simply makes fonts bolder. This is a plus for people who have difficulty reading the screen.
Furthermore, the author seems to have an obsession around "pixel-crisp" fonts, during the section about the correct resolution for your display. What macOS does is render at 2x resolution, then scale down the image to the monitor's native resolution. Looking back, this was an amazing choice made by Apple, and has allowed for an amazingly bug-free high DPI experience. Even today, Linux and Windows have serious issues with high DPI. 99% of macOS users don't notice that their desktop is not running at native resolution, nor would they care.
If the author just focused on monitors, this article would be a lot better.
Also, 120Hz might be nice for a desktop, but if you are plugging in a laptop, you will notice your power consumption double. For battery life, choose a 60Hz monitor.
I actually disable anti-aliasing in games on my 4K display - not just for performance, but because anti-aliasing genuinely isn't needed at that density. I think the author could go all the way here too, since after all, AA is just another crutch for low-density displays.
On Windows, chrome (including chromium edge) seems to have the biggest issue. Windows cleartype fixes most of the native text elements but some apps like chrome look fuzzy no matter what.
Has anyone found a good solution for this or for similar displays with non standard subpixel layouts?
Of course, on macOS that's an other story, they didn't always had ugly fonts, but that's been the case since a very long time now and that prevented me to switch more than once (I still have use macOS in a VM to build for iOS)
It lets you change a few settings around DPI and refresh rate, that arent otherwise available via the regular UI.
Not all desired modes will work, it's still fundamentally limited by macOS's crappy display support, but its better than nothing.
Even scrolling text or dragging windows around at >120 Hz is a game changer. Going back to the MBP display gives me instant headache until I re-adapt. It's hard to describe, it's like all of a sudden everything has a very distracting input lag.
Now I just need to wait for a 4k 144Hz IPS that can be driven via MBP (or just get what's on the market and run eGPU)
From CRT days I know I can see 60hz but not 75hz. I had stupidly assumed that modern 60hz with freesync would be ok. It's not. Especially @ grey colour for some reason (Asus screen).
The fact that I was coming from a 120hz laptop screen didn't help the situation either.
Anyway...so I'm buying a 144hz 1440p gaming screen next. Screw this resolution game...I need flicker free for my sanity.
And that isn't a great step over my working 22" 10-year old 22" FHD Dell.
How long until we have affordable 'Macbook like' crispness as 22" or 27"?
(Also Linux still sucks with fractional scaling.)
For my purposes a single 4k 43" monitor is fine. Its not ultrawide either. No need to upgrade. I have another identical one at the other place I "nest". Its like using 4x HD (1920x1080?) monitors but no bezel in between. Very comfortable and the text doesn't hide in obscurity. Plenty of space for everything and doubles as a excellent TV when needed.
Personally I think most of the trouble people have is due to staring at screens too long. You shouldn't be spending more than an hour staring at a screen continuously anyway. Even thats probably excessive. Take a break.
Its kind of like those people who's eyes are so tired they change their preferences to light text on a light background. Ummmm. No. Not good.
But I'm an old programmer, amongst other hats, so what would I know? I remember when 640x480 was crystal clear and so sharp and 1024x768 was "wow" extra real estate!
But yeah. Go higher res and bump up the physical size at the same time. Completely addictive if you have the desk space.
My last (almost) 2k CRT last just long enough that i could afford a 4k LCD when it died. I'm pleased with a pair of these but once MOAR PIXELS become affordable i'll buy them.
(High DPI is probably useful if you are doing a lot of print previewing, though.)
One area that I disagree though:
> The idea of a 4k monitor is NOT to get more pixels but to get the pixel-perfect, high-density UI rendering. Otherwise, a normal 1440p display would work better.
Not in my experience. Sure, 2x scaling is ideal for sharpness. But there's a tradeoff with screen real estate. I regularly switch between a 1440p monitor at work to a 4k monitor @1.5x scaling at home. Fonts are still noticeably sharper on the 4k monitor.
4k @1.5x scaling is not pixel-perfect, but definitely sharper than 1440p.
Unfortunately it's going to be a very long time before we get high-dpi equivalents. 4K, which is frequently 1080p equivalent in terms of workspace, is just not doable after you've been using 1600p.
If your monitor is so close that you can actually see the details described in the article, you're in the eyestrain land.
I keep my monitors far enough away that I don't see these details anymore.
I hope 5K monitors become as cheap as 4K monitors over the next few years.
* At the distance I sit they look fine to me. In particular I don’t notice any jarring loss in resolution compared to my MacBook retina display which sits next to them.
* The “native” text size on a 24” 1440p monitor is perfect for me. Any smaller and I would struggle to read certain things.
* I was concerned about HiDPI scaling on linux. Fractional scaling was still “experimental” at the time I looked.
* I actually care more about other factors like the stand than 4k resolution, and would prefer to put my money towards that.
* When considering buying a single large monitor and running at native 4k resolution, I had concerns about screen sharing. Would people on smaller monitors have trouble with scaling? Also, having two separate monitors helps me with window management.
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27MD5KA-B-5k-uhd-led-monit...
My new pinnacle is a beautiful 32" IPS panel on a Benq 4k monitor. I don't care for the refresh rate jump from 60 to 120 as much as 30 to 60. But I absolutely insist on large panel area, and lots of pixels to fill it with, so I don't understand how the blog author can live with 27". This is basically programmer nirvana and I don't know what could make it better, maybe some kind of VR setup with similar PPI but I doubt it.
My eyes are not so good and I like big text:
* On my Windows 10 laptop connected to a run of the mill 24" 1920x1080 Dell monitor, I put the scaling at 125% or 150% and everything is rendered bigger and sharp. Maybe one or two dinosaur apps are upscaled and blurry.
* On MacOS, the serious OS for graphics people, I can either render everyting sharp at 1x (with tiny menu bars) or have everything rendered as a blurry mess.
On a sidenote...I'm liking my Mac less and less. Reasons to stick with it are: no ads in my start menu and tracking in my calculator app like on Windows, no need to install crappy third party drivers to get peripherals to work.
Is it just me or is that insane in 2020?
This!
I can‘t understand how some folks can make dev work with the display of their laptop alone, without an external monitor. And then the trend of trying to setup the ipad pro as the sole working environment, with an external keyboard and a trackpad. Watching those (youtube stars) trying hard to make the setup work, them looking down on a tiny screen, the angle alone! We have had much better setups for years, why giving up on this to work with an inferior setup.
Currently doing 6x10 fonts on a 21 inch 1920x1080 monitor. A higher rez monitor would actually end up being a nuisance.
I even installed something called Dithering Settings for Intel Graphics and bought/installed a program called Iris on my Surface Pro.
I searched this article for both "eyestrain" and "fatigue" with no results.
I think engineers and nerds should resolve problems regarding ergonomics and eyestrain.
I feel like being cheated by the industry since my first Samsung Syncmaster 3, running at 60 Hz and everyone saying it was safe and that the eye could see no more than 60 Hz (BS!!)
The difference between 1440p and 4k is barely noticeable I find. I'd rather have 1440p and high refresh over 4k and 60hz.
There are some high refresh rate 4K 27”s but those are pretty expensive.
At the moment I have to upscale the fonts on most websites (e.g. 130 % on HN). Fonts look very nice (although not as nice as on the 4K display) but most UI elements are very small. Fortunately that isn't a real problem since my workflow is keyboard-driven anyway, so I rarely have to click on any buttons.
In the end it's still better than the 27" 1080p display I have in my office where you could see every damn pixel. I really don't miss working there.
Benefits: * Cheap-ish * Reasonable resolution with crisp text * Small difference between 60 and 120Hz
Drawbacks: * If you want crisp text and reasonable real estate, forget any other resolution than 1440p. It just won't align with the physical pixels and will look horrible.
I'd love to get a 4k monitor at some point, at least that would give me the scaling option in MacOS (1440p doesn't), but if I want really crisp text I have to render the equivalent of 1080, which isn't that much real estate for something like IntelliJ.
At the beginning of the year, my U3011 started blanking out on me. As it became more frequent, I started shopping again. But wow, the monitor situation right now is sad. There are no high dpi monitors with enough vertical space. And since they're all at least as short as 16:9, they're unusable in portrait as well.
I ended up repairing the U3011. It's going to have to last me a while. There's just no upgrade path.
As much as I miss my 2012 MacBook Air and consider it the greatest computer I’ve ever owned... I definitely couldn’t go back to a non retina experience.
4k at 40" is basically what the DPI of a 30" 2560x1600 was.
But a 80" monitor for 8k is ridiculous. So with 8K we can finally just pick the real estate you want and the DPI will be great.
It amuses me that the press always say "what will you watch on 8K!" ... this is just like 4K. The "content" on 4K isn't broadcast, streaming, or disc based. It's all generated content by game consoles and computer applications, and upscaling.
I just went in and fiddled with Display settings and my 4k TV doesn't show 1:1 scaling anymore.
I mean, it's Catalina issue, but still. Tonsky: May your Helvetica always be silently replaced with Arial
Try experimenting with the font rendering settings in the prefs. There's a "middle" option of "greyscale-only" text aliasing in addition to the regular off or on settings.
Depending on your monitor, font choice, and personal preferences you might see an improvement by playing around with these.
Anecdotally, when I had an older MBP with a weak integrated GPU, lowering the anti-aliasing setting to greyscale (or off) seeming to increase the responsiveness and framerate on my 4K display in JetBrains IDE's. It was particularly noticeable when scrolling.
I'm aware this article is mainly about text rendering, just want to point out something I hate with hi-dpi + non 100% scaling.
Also, on Windows with 125%, I don't find text as blurry as the author showed on Mac. They look pretty crispy to me. I guess that "scaling twice" thing is a Mac only issue (at least for text)?
Yes, the LG is newer, 4K, has a higher DPI, etc. But I often find myself putting my most important windows on the Apple Display. The color is just so much more beautiful and vibrant, the clarity and contrast are superior, it's just so much better.
Sure, I can't fit as much code on it as the LG, but boy is it pretty. Apple definitely puts quality in their monitors. It's a shame they left the consumer market in 2016.
I often reflect on how blurry and oddly colored the crt is in comparison, and that how back in the day I never noticed or cared.
It works fine for slack, and I prefer bigger text for chat anyway. Because it is still working, I don't see a reason to put it in a landfill or be "recycled".
I'm holding out for Thunderbolt 4, when I can (hopefully) treat my wiring topology like USB instead of daisy chained all to hell and back. Because of this, I looked at good qualities in a secondary monitor that were survivable on a primary. For instance sound quality and real estate are less important, raising the priority of PPI, color gamut, and VESA mount.
Slightly off topic but I have the 16" Macbook Pro with maxed out graphics, and as soon as I connect my monitor, the fans start getting ready for lift-off (~5.6k RPM). It's a Samsung 4k 32" (DP 1.4 to usb-c).
I know this is a common issue but anyone else able to resolve this yet? It drives me crazy that this powerful machine starts sounding like jet just from connecting 1 monitor (Apple says it can support four 4k monitors).
The CPU and GPU don't look to be under any stress as such.
Its just that when I use my retina macbook for hours, my eyes hurt. In particular, it is a relief to go back to a older non-retina macbook that I use for some minor projects. The non-retina macbook seems less visually taxing on my eyes.
I would appreciate any ideas.
LOL
Has the author considered that maybe perhaps some people prefer more screen space and less "pixel crisp fonts"?
I'm currently using a 27" external monitor at 2560x1440 ("QHD") and this is wide enough for five terminals side-by side at 83 columns each. (Monaco 10pt, anti-aliasing off, iterm2)
In decreasing importance (imo):
- cost
- contrast ratio / black level
- all aspects related to temporal feel that aren’t refresh rate (response/decay time, sample and hold, backlight strobing, etc.)
- color gamut
- color precision (nobody wants banding from 6 bpc + FRC)
You can’t honestly make recommendations to people for $1000 monitors without even addressing these points, even if you don’t think they’re important for your workflow. It is very poor form.
I also love the fact that my window layout is exactly the same whether I am working at my desk or a coffeeshop. Or at least when I used to work at coffeeshops...
I'm still incredibly frustrated with just how much of a mess multi-display docks are with MacOS and how it just doesn't support DisplayPort MST at all.
https://medium.com/@sebvance/everything-you-need-to-know-abo...
I also disagree with almost all of his assertions on font antialiasing, but I think it’s not worth refuting.
When using non-integer scaling, does mac OS actually render fonts at 2x, then scales it all down?
So you have a 3840x2160 monitor, set mac OS to "look like 2560x1440", it would render at 5120x2880, then scale it down to 3840x2160?
To me, a more logical solution would be using the vector font of the target physical pixel value (3840x2160) and skip all scaling etc.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15396/sausng-odyssey-2020-mon...
Guess coders care little about typography, like everyone else, mostly out laziness and lack of appreciation.
Don't know why i should switch.
That is a total resolution of 5760*1200 plenty enough. With the added benefit that ide, browser, terminal, mail, slack and whatever neatly snap into position and can be reached with the press of a button.
I don't see any reason to trade sharper text rendering for a worse aspect ratio.
16x9 just feels wrong to me; i am working and not at a cinema.
I use 120% zoom on a 1080p monitor and it looks great.
Paying $900 so you can squint at tiny text a bit better seems silly to me...
This is a really well-written and deep article by someone who is clearly an expert. All points are well illustrated and I learned a lot about how my MacBook renders graphics from reading it.
And yeah at the end it gets into what monitor you should buy. But that wasn't the point.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...
As I use work laptop and personal desktop both, changing to ultrawide that supports USB KVM is god blessed. It removes any clutter to switching between the PCs.
Even if that means that I can't click any link in a tweet; I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
I prefer the UX (and especially: fast load times) of an image to the one of a script. Also, an image means fewer requests and fewer potential privacy issues.
It's amazing that all these display bugs still exist when Apple has presumably invested so much into their $6000 Pro Display.
Dear Apple: Why not spend a little time making the software work, too?
I really hope 120Hz going to standard for work monitor.
Anybody actually gone and done this?
I was searching hacker news and elsewhere for opinions last night. I got confused, frustrated and gave up. Today is no exception. The only thing I know is, I want a large hi-res monitor that is at least comparable to my laptop.
There is a really nice LG 43" monitor (not a TV, it uses displayport) which is optimal for using 1:1 pixel scaling.
That's not a bad deal for a 4k high refresh rate monitor, but if you play any games you would need at least a 2080 or 2080ti which is another 700-1200, 1440p high refresh monitors go for around $300-400.
Pixel density will be better, for example, in game textures and movies?
I am really interested in buying a new monitor from quite a while, but I really don't get that part, can somebody help me with that?
Thanks in advance HN folks!
With... good color gamut? Without ghosting? If so I want to buy that monitor today.
From code maintenance perspective, I noticed that if you feel that there isn't enough space on your screen, it might be the right time to refactor and split it to the smaller chunks: extract another view partial, class etc.
A great e-ink monitor - that would be my dream monitor.
Note that the UP3218K isn't the brightest monitor in the world. I've read some reviews that claim you need a darkened room to see the full color gamut.
But 16:10 is dead; so why bother? it might only be a little horizontal space but it's a huge difference to not have it.
Thankfully recent laptops are returning to 16:10 (Macbook's and Dell XPS's) But monitors still do not seem to exist.
Honestly I don't see the need of 2160p on a monitor, it usually just causes display issues and it's a performance drain.
For gaming/everyday use, 2k w/ a high refresh rate is the sweet spot imo.
The 21:9 aspect ratio is perfect for having the standard IDE + chrome tab arrangement. It doesn't have the issues brought in by having multiple monitors and 1440p is a good middle-ground resolution.
It doesn't have the feeling of macbook's retina, but still is good enough.
Wouldn't these monitors feel that they have even less clarity that this dell one?
I thought my monitor would be squarely middle of the pack but turns out it is barely above 80 ppi
Display size: 23.53" × 13.24" = 311.5in² (59.77cm × 33.62cm = 2009.68cm²) at 81.59 PPI, 0.3113mm dot pitch, 6657 PPI²
I tried it (I guess I've had it on all this time) and, indeed it looks better. (This is on a recent 27" iMac with Catalina.)
That is the first thing I fix on an Apple laptop - change it to 4x HiDPI scaling!! I was very annoyed when they changed the default.
But I'm old, and most of the effort is wasted on me.
What I need, is real estate.
I have that. I use an ultrawide (5120 X 1440) monitor, broken into two screens (3440 X 1440, 1680 X 1440).
Works great.
This allowed me to move the screen back 6 feet. The result was an improvement of my eyesight (I'm near sighted) within 6 months.
All the desk space, loads more screen space. I don’t need high dpi as a programmer.
Frankly, 4K/5K monitors seem like a gimmick for most people. Especially puzzling is why you would pack so many pixels into smaller (~27“) monitors and require more power and graphics muscle for imperceptibly “better” images.
Is this hard to do? Caveats?
I do. Having irritating colors makes looking at text annoying as well.
And sometimes working with limitations is the fun itself.
But I basically agree. I use a pair of 4K monitors and it works well. I run the UI at 150%.
but really....1080p is just fine for looking at text on a screen. Maybe the reason the text is blurry for you is that _you need glasses_.
document.body.style.background = '#fff'I'm not going to sacrifice my spine for slightly fancier characters.
Higher resolution (to an extent) allows me to see more stuff.
4K on a 27" doesn't work for my workflow.
My workflow on a laptop is to put two windows side by side so that I can compare things/read documents/code against documentation.
Unfortunately most websites nowadays are designed for widths of 1280px, and anything less than that is sometimes treated as mobile or gives it a terrible responsive design. It frustrates me, endlessly.
On a 16" MBPr I can get 2048x1280, which allows me to put up two windows side by side at 1024px, which does work for most sites, but sometimes there are some sites which are just broken.
A big reason why I need larger windows is when doing side by side PR Reviews on GitHub, 1024px can only show 56 characters, 1280px can only show 78 characters. Personal opinion, GitHub has too much white space. I tend to have another window open to compare against documentation/etc.
I've compared it at
https://github.com/aizatto/character-length
https://github.com/aizatto/character-length/commit/bae8f00fe...
For desktop:
I'm comfortable is 27" 2560x1440. Two windows side by side at 1280px. Pixel pitch is 0.2331mm
Using 4k at 27" is too small for me. Pixel pitch is 0.1554mm . Without the correct dongle/cable MacBooks can't even push at 4k 60hz via HDMI. Tip: use DisplayPort.
I've settled on 38" 3840x1600 because it allows me to setup three windows side by side at 1280. Which works great for my workflow.
Which sometime tends to be:
- 1 window for source material - 1 window for my main focus - 1 window for a comparison material
38" 3840x1600 pixel pitch is 0.229mm.
I settled on the Dell U3818DW, because it can charge my MBP via USB-C. Only recommendation is if your laptop is asleep, don't leave your laptop plugged int. It likes to wake it.
The 1600 also gives me some extra room vertically.
If you can afford it, I'd recommend giving 3840x1600 a try.
A list of such monitors https://pcpartpicker.com/products/monitor/#r=384001600
I got one of the first 4k mainstream monitors. I paid $3000 for it. This was back in the day when DisplayPort didn't really "do" 4k, so it was done by pretending it was two monitors internally. This broke EVERYTHING. For years, I struggled with Linux trying to treat two monitors as one big one (and putting new windows right on the border). Welp, they fixed that. But trying to treat two monitors as though it's one was completely impossible. I eventually got it to work by enabling a bunch of random features in the nVidia driver, that when enabled together triggered a bug that broke Xrandr, so everything thought I just had one monitor. (I could not, of course, add a second monitor.) Miraculously, they never fixed that bug. It worked for half a decade at least. (At some point in there I switched to Windows, which of course supported it perfectly because the driver was specifically hacked to detect that model number and do extra stuff.)
Several years later, I wanted to get a monitor that supported more colors than sRGB. Big mistake! While inexpensive, I learned that NOTHING supports color spaces correctly. The Adobe apps do, but that's about it. Online image sharing services go out of their way to MODIFY the color space that you tag an image with, so there is no hope of anything ever showing the right colors unless you manually clip them to sRGB. Things like the Win32 API, CSS, etc. have no way to say what color space a color is encoded in, so there is no way to make the operating system display the right color. ("background-color: #abcdef" just means "set the color on the user's display to #abcdef", which is a completely meaningless thing to do unless your working colorspace is sRGB, and the user's monitor works in sRGB. It worked for years, but was never correct.) The worst thing is, nobody appears to care. ("It just makes colors more vibrant!" they'll tell you) Big mistake. Do not buy unless you never want to see a color as the author intended ever again. (I solved my photography colorspace problem by switching to black and white film. Take that, colors! You can't display them incorrectly if there aren't any!)
The next thing I jumped on is high refresh rate. I waited until 144Hz IPS panels were affordable, and got one. It sure is better than 60Hz, which looks like a slideshow, but there are of course problems. The first is... it is pretty optimistic to think that an IPS panel will actually update at 144Hz. They do not. The result is blur. I run mine at 120Hz with ULMB (which basically strobes the backlight at the display update rate). That looks really good. There are some artifacts caused by the IPS display, and 120Hz is noticeably slow, but moving things sure are clear. You can pan a google map and read the labels as it moves. Try that right now on your 60Hz display, you can't do it!
But because of IPS, at 144Hz without ULMB, you get a smooth mush. At 120Hz with ULMB, you can read moving content (like player names attached to people in an FPS, it is trippy the first time you use it). Having said that, it's bad for anything that doesn't render at 120Hz. Web browsers, games, CAD... great! Videos... AWFUL, just awful. On a 30/24Hz video, frames get strobed 4 or 5 times, and this causes your brain to think "hey, a slide show". (You can record the display with a high speed camera, and it will look completely different from what you see in real life. Darn brain, always messing things up.) Things like pans skip and jerk, as your brain tries to interpret the video stream as a series of <image 1> <black screen> <image 1> <black screen> <image 2> <black screen> ... instead of a smooth blend of <image 1> <image 2> ... You can post-process the video to "invent" frames in the middle, so your monitor displays new image data each time it strobes the backlight. I do this with mpv and it looks great. But if you watch video in a browser, you are out of luck.
My TL;DR here is that buying any sort of fancy monitor is just going to make you very unhappy. You will learn everything in the world there is to know about color space math, pixel transition times, using high speed cameras to debug issues (what a time sink), how your brain processes moving images, etc. It won't make you any happier. It won't make you better at programming.
If you play competitive games, get a TN 1080p 240Hz monitor, simply because that's what everyone else uses. Don't use it for anything except the game, because every second that you use it it will make you unhappy. But it's absolutely a joy to play a game on it. (Why 1080p and not 1440p? Guess who bought a 1440p 165Hz monitor. Not anyone that has ever contributed code to the game or played the game at a professional level. But I did! Guess who gets to live with the bugs.)
If you are a programmer, just buy whatever. Every single monitor ever designed will make you unhappy.
If you are a programmer who works with color, get yourself a good therapist. You will be meeting with them on a daily basis, and even then, you'll still be scarred for life. It's all about damage control at this point.
BS. Maybe true on user-hostile OSX/windows. But If LCD manufacturers provided the correct information on the DID data, it would be very trivial.
On linux and with a little trial and error (you only have to do it once per monitor ever) you can fine tune the subpixel hinting. I use a photographer loupe (magnifying glass) to look at the a white region on my ancient LCDs to see the subpixel configuration, set it on my X config and have perfect aliased text just fine. ...well, except on some gtk2 applications :) But if you work more than a few minutes on those you have other problems.
With 4K you can lose a lot of performance especially since they are often paired with integrated graphics. Also what's the point of a higher pixel density when it's higher than you can resolve? Meaning if you have to zoom that's a sign that you get nothing more from increasing resolution. Also despite claims to the contrary, a lot of software is still not well suited for 4k resolutions.
High refresh rates are completely underrated as it's at the same time a meme but also a widespread false belief that human eyes have some kind of limit that is being satiated by your 60hz displays. Scrolling code on 144hz is smooth.
Bonus point that isn't mentioned in the article: HDR is a meme, don't buy into that crap.
Also: CRTs are criminally underrated and still unfairly judged. We lost something from that era. Colors, black levels, subjective image quality and input lag have still not recovered from the peak of display technology in the year 2000 or so.
burn-in isn't the issue it once as.
will take years for people to realize this, though. feels good to live on the edge.