Can I ask a potentially dumb question? If you buy super-high-res monitors and then have to scale everything in order to see it, what exactly is the benefit? I have a couple of 21" monitors running 1280x1024 which is about 75dpi. If I wanted more screen space and got 2 28" displays then 1600x1200 would give a similar dpi and at the distance I sit I don't get offended by the pixel size. If you're having to "fix" the problem of the pixels being so small, what are the benefits?

Can I ask a potentially dumb question? If you buy super-high-res monitors and then have to scale everything in order to see it, what exactly is the benefit? I have a couple of 21" monitors running 1280x1024 which is about 75dpi. If I wanted more screen space and got 2 28" displays then 1600x1200 would give a similar dpi and at the distance I sit I don't get offended by the pixel size. If you're having to "fix" the problem of the pixels being so small, what are the benefits?

He still got more screen space.

He increased his space with 45%, even though he went from 5 screens to 3.

It's just that 157dpi is so very small :)

Crisper text means your eyes get less tired too.

Can you elaborate about your coding setup? I am using one VS 2012(rarely 2 or 3 open at the same time), SQL Server management studio and couple of browser instances, very often notepad ++ and git shell are also open, and all this I can handle on a single 22" monitor. Yes I could use another monitor, but I DON'T REALLY need one. So for me 3-5 monitor setup for coding is really out of this world

And for those fawning over that 4K -- make sure to research it before you bite. It only does 4K at 30hz, over a particular version of hdmi or display port that your video card has to support. I forget which.

30hz stresses me for the mouse cursor alone. it moves so sluggish.

but i can't wait for a nice .. 32" 4k monitor or similar.

i got a 2560x1440 27" touchscreen recently. that's a joy, too.

i can't do multiscreen myself. no clue, i tried so often. never worked out.

I'm not sure I'm ready to jump on the 4k bandwagon, but any of you who are still soldiering on with 1080p (or, *shudders*, less) should really try out the 27" 2560x1440 monitors. It's kind of the resolution/size sweet-spot, lot's of screen real estate, and no need to crane your neck looking around it. Plus, they cost about $300 shipped from S. Korea

Not to mention they're generally IPS, so the image quality is vastly improved too.

eclipse really likes to eat screen real-estate

I know right? I took an embedded systems class using Eclipse using my unibody macbook, 13.3" at 1280x800 was painful, especially with the plugin for the JTAG debugger and some other tool window I forget. After menus and window chrome, I had probably not much more than 800x600 pixels for code -- barely better than when I cut my teeth writing QuickBasic in VGA's 16-color 'high-res' mode

Not to mention they're generally IPS, so the image quality is vastly improved too.

Actually, many of these 4K displays aren't IPS -- they're some new thing that's definately better than TN, and supposedly as good as IPS (and sometimes even marketted as IPS) -- but they definitely aren't up to the color quality of the professional ultrasharp monitors (like the 30s and 27s we've been talking about), let alone even more expensive displays with 10 bit per channel support.

ChaosEngine, on 13 May 2014 - 04:27 AM, said:


Not to mention they're generally IPS, so the image quality is vastly improved too.




Actually, many of these 4K displays aren't IPS -- they're some new thing that's definately better than TN, and supposedly as good as IPS (and sometimes even marketted as IPS) -- but they definitely aren't up to the color quality of the professional ultrasharp monitors (like the 30s and 27s we've been talking about), let alone even more expensive displays with 10 bit per channel support.

Although you're probably right, I've used both a pseudoIPS panel and a tweaked TN panel. The pseudoIPS was still better.

Actually, many of these 4K displays aren't IPS -- they're some new thing that's definately better than TN, and supposedly as good as IPS (and sometimes even marketted as IPS) -- but they definitely aren't up to the color quality of the professional ultrasharp monitors (like the 30s and 27s we've been talking about), let alone even more expensive displays with 10 bit per channel support.

You can buy the exact same panels as the S. Korean ones from Dell or Apple, for twice the price in a nicer enclosure, packaged up with a hardware scaler. I consider this a bit of a waste, since my GPU does scaling just fine, with significantly less than the additional 10ms of latency the hardware scaler introduces.

No, I'm talking about the 4k panels, not the Korean Displays -- those are the same LG/Samsung panels Dell and Apple use, but from a lower bin -- Apple, Dell, and others pay top dollar to have their orders filled with panels that don't have even a single dead pixel, have great uniformity, etc. The panels that the Korean's use are from a lower bin that costs less, their orders are filled with displays that could potentially have a small number of dead pixels or other minor defects, but of course could also contain panels that exceed that bar and are every bit as good as the ones Dell and Apple get, depending on what their current manufacturing capacity and quality is, together with how much demand for A+ grade panels are coming in from other IHVs.

All of the inexpensive 4K displays use this new variation of TN technology -- Dell's 32" 4K is IPS, but it costs $3500 and presents itself as two displays to your video card using displayport multi-transport, to achieve 60hz. There might be others, but you can assume they're all in that price range or higher.