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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.

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I've had 4K monitors on both my work laptop, my PC, and my TV for as long as that was possible. Nearly 7 years.

This has cost me thousands and thousands of dollars.

My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. I don't sit next to the case staring at RGB LEDs. I can't "experience" a processor in any aspect except speed, and that's been perfectly acceptable for a decade.

But I'll stare at the screen for 8 hours a day for work, and an additional few hours at home.

Spending money on improving the image quality of something I look at for 10+ hours a day is absolutely worthwhile!

This is also the advice I give people: Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned, and make sacrifices elsewhere. A larger 4K monitor is a very visible upgrade in the literal sense versus, say, a few hundred more megahertz on the processor.

I feel this way not only about monitors, but chairs and shoes, and for the same reasons.

And keyboard, mouse, headphones, bed, pillow, and underclothes.

I've heard the saying as "spend good money on what separates you from the ground" - tires, shoes/boots, mattress, etc.

In this sense, it'd be "spend good money on what separates you from the virtual". That is, of course, our I/O devices :)

A larger monitor I can understand, but on a laptop, how can 4k resolution be visible if it's... too small to see?

Depends how close you sit to it (touchscreen models promote closer use) and how good your eyes are :)

I can definitely see the difference between 4K and Full HD on a 15".

That’s sort I’d the point: that you can’t see the pixels … Text looks amazing because you don’t have to anti alias the jaggies away now that the pixels are so tiny. I much prefer text on a very high dpi monitor because everything just looks so crisp. Like a really good printed page, or something else physical. Going back to a low dpi monitor is real hard for me now—pixelated text is really hard to look at.

Well, you wouldn't run the computer at a 1:1 resolution, it would be a logical lower resolution displayed at a higher resolution. For a 4K display, everything would show at the size it would be on a 2K display — but actually rendering at 4K, everything is much crisper rather than just blown-up pixels.

Apple calls it Retina Display, Windows calls it display scale. Apple made it mainstream in 2010 (iPhone) and 2012 (iPad, Macs) whilst Microsoft seems to have made it much more mainstream since Windows 8 and the introduction of its Surface computers.

> Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned

But! Do a bit of research. I sent back a 24" 1080p monitor and got a 21.5" one instead, because the pixel density was too low. And it always will be, but still there's tons of 24" monitors out there at 1080p because people think bigger is better.

Make sure you're going bigger and better in the right ways.

I feel this way about high refresh rate.

Having a 120Hz monitor feels like having a computer that keeps up.

(Provided your input devices are also fast enough.)

>My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at.

Sure. But that doesn't get over the law of diminishing returns. It might not be 4K that, but would you buy 8K or 16K because "it's the monitor I'm looking at", when the only thing it does is waste CPU/GPU, resources, and battery -- for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway?

>for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway?

Personal experience tells me that the resolution difference between 4k and lower resolutions (for the same size screens) are Very Noticeable on my 27 monitors. (I have one 4k and one 1440p.) Text is noticeably easier to read on the higher resolution monitor. I think this is primarily because we sit much closer to monitors than to TVs. (I don't think I can tell when my TV plays 4k vs 1080p, as I sit about eight feet away.)

If I had a 30" monitor with 8k resolution, I would probably not be able to tell a difference, unless I went looking very closely to it, so I don't think I'd spend the money on that. However, at 40" or 42", I suspect one would notice it at the distances one normally sits from a computer monitor. At that point, my reason for not buying it would be that I can't afford it. ;)

If you have poor eyesight it's even more noticeable! Personally, the higher dpi the better for me. I have a 24in 4k monitor and want to buy another but these sizes with 4k are rare

I've seen an 8K monitor in person.. and... wow. It's like a glossy magazine that can move. It's absolutely astonishing how much additional detail you can see in fonts: subtle differences that are totally lost in normal rendering suddenly come to life. Each font has a unique personality that's just lost in the clunky rendering to a few dozen(!) pixels of a mere 4K display.

Compared to what? A cheaper monitor? On a relative basis, spending $400 on a 4k monitor vs $250 on a similar 1440p monitor is wasteful. But if you compare to any other category of goods, it's a drop in the bucket. Most people don't even consider efficiency when adding thousands of dollars of options to a new car purchase. You can buy a lot of 4k monitors for the amount families spend on larger than needed houses throughout the suburbs of the United States.

Things are getting obscene at the high end of the treadmill though. Current high-end monitors like 38GN850G and X27 are already plumbing the $2000 price point and the X32 is expected to tip the scale at $3600 MSRP. "Compared to" just going out and buying a TV and using it as a monitor - you could buy a 55" OLED for your PC and a 65" for living room at that price. Or two 55" oleds, replace it in 3 years when it starts having burn-in from years of marathon Starcraft sessions or whatever.

There really isn't a lot to justify a 32" IPS 4K144 over a 48" OLED 4K120 other than burn-in.

Enthusiast, early adopter products have always been expensive. This doesn't seem that exceptional to me. It's not like tons and tons of people are buying that high end monitor. I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Hdmi 2.1 isn't even done yet is it? How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk?

Fwiw I have a 4k 144 monitor that I got for $800-900. I believe I first heard about it on this site actually. 4k is important to me for text and 120hz is important to me for gaming. It's nice to have both, and gsync compatibility, all in one device. Well worth a small splurge.

Yes, high-end is a thing but high-end gaming monitors have tripled over the last 3 years or so, and now they are to the point where they are competing with premium televisions which offer a better overall picture quality. So you really have to figure out what you actually want.

IPS contrast is not good and OLED contrast is amazing (it's the only way to get "real" HDR except for VA which has poor motion clarity), with the only real downside to OLED being burn-in (it's gotten massively better over the last few years but heavily UI type stuff in lightmode-type color schemes with fixed elements is the worst case scenario, this should not be your daily driver for Excel spreadsheets). But again, you have to bear in mind that you could literally buy two OLEDs for the price of that "premium" IPS monitor, so if it doesn't become obnoxiously burned within 2.5 years or so (assuming a 5y lifespan on your IPS monitor) you are coming out ahead on burn-in.

> I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist?

Yes, LG's OLED series has supported 4K120 input (not strobing/interpolation, true input at 120fps) since the last generation (C9, support continues with CX). Also supports HDMI VRR.

CX adds 120 Hz black frame insertion - so it can take 60 hz and alternate between a signal frame and a black frame for additional motion clarity.

> How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device?

For the LG OLED series, HDMI 2.1, from an NVIDIA 3000 series or Radeon RDNA2 GPU.

Or, display stream compression over DP 1.4, which is what the 4K144 gaming panels are currently doing (none of them currently support HDMI 2.1). Also, that currently only gets you to 4K120 without chroma subsampling, another disadvantage of the current "gaming monitor" crop.

> And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk?

Wall mount. CX 48" wall mounted 3 feet away is probably about the same as a 34" ultrawide that's 18" away (which is what I'm currently using) I'd think. Certainly a "big" monitor but the people who are really up shit creek are the ones with shallow desks and/or who are currently situated in a corner and can't wall mount.

I don't disagree at all with this.

In an adjacent field, graphics, we used to debate spending cycles on simulating thing like lens flare, as if in a first person shooter you are wearing goggles with tubular optics? Sure it showed off mad math skilz but what was the point?

I do appreciate the lack of eyestrain for detail work on a high resolution CRT though.

at least on a 27" display, I mostly agree 2160p is overkill for games. it's hard to notice the additional sharpness over 1440p, and it breaks a lot of old games that don't support UI scaling. the performance hit isn't necessarily that bad though; at 2160p, I'm satisfied with much lower AA settings which almost splits the difference between 1440p and 2160p. if the game is really demanding, you can always drop down to 1080p with perfect scaling. it wasn't too long ago that 1080p was an acceptable resolution on a 27" display. not really an issue for me anyway. my 1080ti can do better than 60 fps in most games I play.

knowing what I know now, I'd almost rather have a higher refresh rate 1440p monitor. but now that I'm working from home, I really appreciate the higher dpi for coding. the difference in font rendering really is night and day. I can't unsee it.

yeees. Just look at the crappy Netflix 4k, which is less bandwith than a 1080p Bluray (like 30% less iirc). Now, obviously, it's a better codec, but h265/VP-9 (or whatever they use) won't give you a > 400% increased efficiency over h264. So, people are buying new Fire-TVs/TVs/GPUs all so that they can enjoy a 4k artifact show.

Meanwhile I've fallen under the hedonic treadmill and bought a TV. Sitting 3m from this 49inch screen, I play Netflix in 540p (on Linux) – and it totally looks fine. Well...

But, truth be told: I'm typing this on a 32inch 4K monitor. For work it's gorgeous (yet some people still buy FHD...).

Even worse, you can't see in 4K. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM

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