Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmike84 | Hacker News Reader

I'm unsure about the advice of sticking to 1440p at 27".

I have a non-retina imac 27 (1440p), external LG 27" 4K USB-C monitor and a macbook pro 13 with a real "retina", and use them all regularly.

For my eyes, scaling works fine with 4K - font rendering is significantly better than on 1440p imac.

13" screen on macbook pro is even better, and 5K 27" would be perfect, but that's a different price point. I'm quite happy with the improvement from 1440p => "4K with scaling" transition, and won't consider buying 1440p in future.

Scaled 4K may be not the best for high precision design work, but for development tasks / text reading that's an improvement, in my experience.

View on HN

Here's [1] an article on why 1440p at 27" might be better.

[1] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

Not to mention it's great for gaming.

I’m pretty sure the parent knows that MacOS doesn’t support “true retina” at 4K 27” (at a reasonable size). The way MacOS handles resolution (that’s not perfect 1x or 2x scaling) is by rendering at twice the resolution you selected in settings and then downscaling to the true resolution of the monitor. So if you want to render at 1440p you render at 5k then downscale to 4K. What I believe the parent was trying to get across is that 5k downscaled to 4K looks better than true 1440p. Although it does tax the GPU more, many people would agree it’s worth it over 1440p.

In macOS there are side effects of scaling though, notably "blurry pixels," "shimmering," and increased GPU usage.

I haven't noticed any of those issues and I've been using a variety of Macs (2013 MBP 15", 2019 MBP 13", 2019 MacMini, 2013 MacPro) with a variety of 27" and 32" 4K monitors for over a year now. The 27" 4K monitors are for me the perfect compromise between screen real estate and display quality.

I definitely don't notice blurry pixels. I don't game, so maybe that's why I don't notice increased CPU use.

I feel like the 'shimmering' when scrolling on 27@4k would drive me nuts. But to each their own.

1440p (2560x1440) is 5K pixel-doubled. (27" iMac)

1080p is 4K pixel-doubled (21.5" iMac) (or 5K downscaled and pixel-doubled).

At least in my experience, if you sit far/close enough, you can "overcome" the limitations of each display variant. I can definitely see the difference between 4K running 1440p at 1.5x compared to a proper 2x scale factor, though. I can tolerate 1.5x or variations in between, but I'd vastly prefer 2x. If you play with enough resolutions and look at enough displays, you'll develop a taste which cannot be quenched without an LG 5K display, which is ill-advised.

At least to my eyes, my Dell U2715H with EDID override looks worse at 1440p than my LG 27UL850-W. I'd prefer to have a 2x scale factor, but at 1.5x, I can't see scaling artifacts or I'm used to them for still text. My poor GPU can't handle this though, so all motion and movement is terrible, and thus, I can't distinguish "shimmering" from just regular poor performance.

I'm really bothered that Apple sells an LG 5K display for the price they sell it at. Pro display XDR is joke-tier pricing for a developer. Even the 5K display is too expensive. The Ilyama 5K (XB2779QQS) was sold at the $999 price point, which actually kinda makes sense, but it's gone.

So practically speaking, either shell out $1,200+ for a good display or settle non-ideal retina or 1x.

I agree - I got a ASUS VP28UQGL and it's very easy on my eyes @4k

Reply on news.ycombinator.com