Greetings,

I am a programmer, a wannabe indie game developer, and a fan of big screens. I just made the leap from 1920x1200 to 4k (actually, "UHD") at 3840x2160, and thought I would share my experience.

Note, I am a Windows user.

I was using five, 25" 1920x1200 displays, arranged with 3 on my desk and two above. When deep into programming, I can easily consume all of this space, depending upon what I'm working on. It isn't unusual to have 2-3 VMs, two versions Visual Studio, countless browsers, and other tools like Eclipse or IntelliJ open at once.

However, looking "up" to the top two monitors was a pain in the neck--really.

I have been watching UHD monitors since they released, and waiting for the price to drop into the troposphere, which they did just recently. I bought three Samsung U29D590D, 28" displays and got rid of the old monitors.

First impressions

Wow, stuff is SMALL! I went from 94 dpi to 157 dpi, and my eyes could really tell. I wondered if I was too old now to chase ever more tightly packed pixels.

Second impressions

With Windows Scaling to help adjust fonts and icons, these are very doable, with only a few minor gotcha's.

Final impressions
Utterly satisfied. All the tools I use make it easy to zoom in/out on my code, Windows scaling helps with toolbars and other screen elements, and I haven't yet found a bad spot.

However, whereas I assumed before purchase that three, quad-HD displays would give me about as much realestate as 12 HD displays, I would estimate the actual result to be something more like 9, because of scaling. This isn't bad, and rather than resulting in more eye strain it causes less, because everything is much clearer and crisper.

Thoughts about gaming and/or game dev

Games are slower, but that's because there are 4x as many pixels. The performance loss isn't always that bad, however, because many games are not fill-rate limited, but geometry limited.

Also, when it comes to game development, it is awesome to get full HD in a Window, and also to be able to run at the largest [industry standard] resolution so as to stress-test my game.

These monitors are 60hz when powered through DisplayPort. Given that I power them with two GPUs (R9 280x) to get the full 60hz on all 3 monitors, I cannot setup an Eyefinity display at that frequency. However, I can use a display port splitter (MSP) to power all 3 from one card, make the other card a CrossFire slave, and run my game at up to 11,520x2160, for the ultimate "Damn, my code is slow!" experience. (I did this once for fun, but let's face it: this is not a useful test-case as yet).

Summary
That's about it; I am happy with my upgrade.

I wrote somewhat more about it here:

http://uhdcoder.blogspot.com/

Nice.

Can I actually counteract your story though? I switched to a smaller display when I went from a desktop to a laptop, meaning the screen went from 1920x1080 to 1366x768. Surprisingly, the increased quality of the new display counteracted the drop in resolution, making the laptop screen and the desktop monitor about equal. The lower resolution is better for making mobile games since you generally don't want to make games too high resolution on mobile hardware.

Great take, Shane. Displays are more personal than even mice, in terms of what makes each of us happy. I'm a "lots of pixels" guy, and although I would say these monitors are beautiful, I haven't seen a Mac screen--for instance--that isn't "better."

My mobile dev is all Android, and native (Java or C++), and I stopped using the Android Emulator entirely because I couldn't show the most common screen sizes on my PC. Even the [dated] Samsung Galaxy S3 has a 1280x720 screen, which doesn't fit (in Portrait) on a 1920x1200 screen. There is scaling support, but that generally stops me cold as most of what I do in mobile these days is highly graphical and I really need to see all the pixels.

What kind of laptop did you switch to? I have many friends who live on their laptops, but I could just never get used to it.

What kind of laptop did you switch to? I have many friends who live on their laptops, but I could just never get used to it.

It's an Acer with a quad-threaded Core i7, 8GB RAM, and a Geforce 750M.

Is that you, Batman?

So you're not finding any significant downsides to the switch? We've been looking at swapping out our 27 and 30 Ultrasharps, but I've been a little wary of whether they've got the scaling thing sorted out completely.

Read my blog post for more details, but in short:

* Without scaling, things are too small. With scaling, it is fine.

* A few apps don't scale. Here are some examples:

- IE - perfect scaling

- Firefox - perfect scaling

- Chrome - proper scaling, text is fuzzy

- Opera - no scaling at all

- IntelliJ - perfect scaling
- Eclipse - perfect scaling

- Visual Studio - perfect scaling

- CoreTemp (CPU temp monitoring) - no scaling; 8-pixel System Tray temps too small

With these 28" displays, unscaled apps are just a bit too small for my 46 year old eyes--I can read it fine, but wouldn't care to do it for 8 hours. If I were 25, I might feel differently. In either case, I would prefer a 32" display (such as the Asus 31.5" IPS panels), but those are still > $3,000 each.

I don't use Photoshop or other professional graphics software, so I can't comment on those.

For media designed for this resolution--or when watching HD in just 1/4 of the monitor's view area--these things are amazing. I can run VS on the right half of a monitor, put my full HD game in the top of another half, and run a GPU monitor on the lower half; it's really a performance enhancer when used in that way.

I have a day-job too, at which I have two 1920x1200 IPS panels, and using those I feel like I am programming through a keyhold.

I wouldn't switch back.

I was using five, 25" 1920x1200 displays, arranged with 3 on my desk and two above. When deep into programming, I can easily consume all of this space, depending upon what I'm working on. It isn't unusual to have 2-3 VMs, two versions Visual Studio, countless browsers, and other tools like Eclipse or IntelliJ open at once.

Come on, 5 monitors for programming... I can't even image that. :)

From my MacBook retina running win7, I have similar experiences as posted above.

One, it is really epic for programming. I never considered myself a sucker for high resolutions, but I am converted. I can no longer stand looking at text and being able to see pixels. The amount of stuff you can fit on such screens without feeling claustrophobic, straining your eyes, or hurting your neck, really is amazing.

Two, windows does scaling very well. The exception is chrome, which stubbornly keeps screwing up its text rendering, but IE11 really is a great browser as far as I am concerned, not only when it comes to the quality of its rendering/scaling. MSVS, office, IE, and all MS flagship products scale without the slightest issue. Old win32 style apps or cringe-tastic java UI's may not fare so well though. I usually disable scaling for those apps, increase the font size internal to the application where applicable (textboxes do scale properly), and put up with the tiny menu's.

Come on, 5 monitors for programming... I can't even image that.