4k at 21 inches? I'm using a 4k screen at I think 31" and I have to scale everything to read the screen. My dream is a 43" 4k monitor with no scaling.
But 1440p at 21" I think would be great. Personally I only use 1080p screens as secondary monitors, and would never go back to 1080p for my primary display.
“No scaling” is a state of mind. It’s a fiction we hold onto from our purely bitmapped, pixel art past. If your OS doesn’t adapt to high DPI monitors cleanly, change your OS.
The people who say "No Scaling" mean that they want to use screen to fit more things. It is not state of mind about past pixels, but about how much stuff you can fit on the screen. how many lines of code. How many sidebars in your utilities, etc.
People who say "Scaling" are a different breed. Some like it because for them smoother fonts are more readable. To others, scaling presents ability map physical dimensions to screen.
Saying this, I agree that OS and software has to support alternative scalings, and ability to make things larger or smaller. I wish we could just pinch zoom apps on Windows and Linux.
People have different preferences for how big items on the screen should be.
But everyone will take more DPI if you offer it.
Nobody is actually for or against scaling itself. It only becomes a question of scaling or not if you artificially lock in a screen beforehand, and that screen is in a certain DPI range. If you used a same-size 8k screen you'd have basically nobody calling for "no scaling", instead you'd have arguments like 2x vs. 3x vs. 4x.
Exactly... if my 42" was 8K instead of 4K, I'd probably just go 2x and live at that. I do like the slightly smoother fonts, but really like effectively 4x what a 1080p native display at 1x gives, without borders/lines etc.
Even if the OS supports it, many apps still write their own UI primitives and won't scale with the OS scaling, or when they do, it's not uniform so the text is either obnoxiously huge, or the UI affordances are way too small.
Working with a larger screen without scaling makes this problem go away. I personally have 2 x 4K monitors at 32" and find it quite ideal.
The fact that some apps get it wrong isn't a great justification for making all the other well-behaved apps look worse. Just add an option to scale specific apps in the window manager (faking the screen resolution, DPI, etc.) and let everything else run at full resolution.
The only thing macOS does is downscaling by a factor of 2 the oversized rendering resolution (virtual display on X server). For certain dpi it works fine, for certain it would blur everything (i.e. the screen I use atm is 24" 4K with 185 ppi).
Windows 10 has no problems rendering on ANY DPI, certain apps and frameworks ignore it though which is not a problem of OS.
Downscaling the screen at "retina" resolutions works way better than your intuitions assume. I thought it would be terrible and ugly, but I was wrong. And I'm normally super picky about things being pixel-perfect.
The way macOS does it is perfect 99 percent of the time—and it guarantees no weirdness when app developers have differing ideas about how their app should react to scaling. Apple got this one right and everyone else should just copy them.
If you have a high-res, large monitor, you want to arrange your windows like a grid. You don't want to actually use Google Chrome at full 4k with no scaling across the entire screen.
I mostly grid at 42" (moom is awesome)... still have to move my head. The mac/ubuntu top menu is a bit annoying on a really big display. Still prefer it to a couple smaller screens.
> The problem is that at screen sizes less than 30" it's basically impossible to read text at 4k. Even at 31" it's a bit small.
I have a laptop with a 12" 4k screen. I can read it just fine. I do scale it 200%, but that just means I would be able to read text just fine at 24" 4k with no scaling.
It's all preference and how well the OS handles it. I think everyone can agree that the are still issues to work through on the OS side w.r.t. display scaling.
Edit: I misunderstood your last comment. Maybe it isn't the OS's fault when programs don't scale well... but the OS should have an override that lies to the program to force scaling. Hacky though that may be, it would work well, at least for an even 200% scale factor.
Apple was selling these in store until not long ago. Should cover that use case (4 HD screens) fine, but the pixel density is terrible for using at scaled 4K.
I think what you have now (4K @ 31") is the perfect compromise. It's borderline retina, so while things do get slightly better at a higher density, the improvement is much less noticeable than the improvement from non-retina to borderline-retina.
The density is also such that if you turn off scaling it's still borderline usable, for the once in a blue moon situation you have to run an app that misbehaves while scaled.
I had the exact same dream, which is why I bought a 4K 43" monitor. Then I found out that it was so big I had to sit further away, forcing me to scale some things up so they are readable again, though not everything (DE settings are still at 100%, but e.g. code font is at ~120% and HN is at 150%).
That said, I'm very happy with my purchase. The only thing I would probably change is to get a different model (sadly, it was the only available 43" 4K 60fps model in my country at the time of purchase).
Yes but with 200% scaling you now only have the screen real-estate of a 1080p screen.
At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time.
At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit in the quandrants.
I run a 43" 4K Dell at work, no scaling. It is sweet. I can either fit 10 full pages of a Word document simultaneously, or I can tile 6 large terminal windows and output windows all together.
Actually I have pretty bad eyesight, so I wear glasses all the time. But maybe that is the key, maybe it's more of a problem for people who have very slight near- or far-sightedness so they don't wear glasses etc., but the really fine detail is hard to see.
I have a 31.5" 4K display that I use at native resolution, and while I love having all the screen real estate, I hate the jaggies. The rest of my time I spend looking at a 15" MacBook Pro or iPhone retina display, and having everything be so pixelated really distracts me and makes text harder to read.
I would love a 31" display at something closer to 8K resolution so I can run it at 2x scaling and get true retina.
If you need scaling at 31"... How is your vision? Do you use glasses? Or do you sit further away from the display? I had a friend who thought native 4K at 30" was too small, but it turned out he actually needed glasses, and once he got a prescription he joined my side.
Sitting behind at 43' 4K monitor without scaling and it works great. 4x 1080p in one screen without seams is soo good.
Benefits:
- You get so much screen space. You can fit so many thing on one screen. There is now space for 20 icons vertially on my desktop (not that I use the desktop much, but consider it more of something to compare to).
- You move your head more, as you don't have your entire screen in focus. Same goes for multi-monitor setups.
- No seam in your 4x1080p screens.
Some caveats:
- You'll miss notifications. My field-of-view is not good enough to see the small popup in the lower-left/right of windows. I wish I got more notification in the center of my screen.
- If you use it as a windows monitor, you will notice color/blurry reflections of the desk in front of you, making it harder to read the bottom 2% of the screen when you are looking at the center. Usually, this is where your taskbar is. Solution: Move the taskbar to the top.
- You will still overlap your windows. Most of the time you will just increase the size of your editors/browsers to fit more content in those. I think my browser is currently larger than a 1080p screen, just because I read it a lot and it is such an important part of the screen. You do however get so much more content in your editors/browsers.
- Getting headaches and eye-strain? Turn down the contrast and brightness by a lot. You are starting into an even bigger 'lamp' than usual, so save your eyes. On 1080p I usually work around 40-50 brightness and contrast, while on this 4K they are both on 30.
I still wish I had something smaller though, but there simply are no developer 4k screens in the range of 33' to 38'. I do not want ultrawide, nor pay +2k so I can read my lines of code in the most color-accurate way possible.
How close are you sitting to this 43" 4k? Retina is a function of viewing distance. I've been enjoying a couple hundred dollar 4k 60hz 42" seiki for years, it's basically the equivalent of stacking 4 "traditionally sized" 1080ps together and eliminating the bezel. I wouldn't use it for detailed graphics work due to not so great color fidelity (though there are better models now), but everything else, for the price, mwah. It is "retina" at 33 inches. Admittedly I'm often closer than that, but not by much, and frequently I'm further away.
24" 1920x1200 is not bad. 8K is still a massive strain on hardware so I'm planning to get something like 32" 4K. Retina is nice, but real estate is useful.
24 inch 1920x1200 is ~94 PPI - this is pretty crappy by modern standards and will result in the dreaded “jaggies”. Great if you can live with this, but one shouldn’t be surprised that many people won’t.
100 PPI is what we typically had on good monitors in the late 90s, it’s 20 years later now!
With 200% scaling you now only have the screen real-estate of a 1080p screen.
At 4k I can have 4x 1080p windows open and visible at the same time.
At 1080p at most I can have two windows open side by side. Some programs will fit into a quandrant at 1080p, but others wont. For example, at 1080p you can have 4x task managers open, but spotify/discord won't fit.
Also once in a blue-moon you'll find some software won't scale at all, or has issues scaling. If you only have a 21" screen then you have this tiny microscopic text you have to try to read.
running 42" 4K at home and it's pretty great, though physically a bit too big... I think 36-28" would be practically better, would have to move my head less and could see the whole screen at once. Using a pretty large desk, so it does sit back a way.
You are correct that the size of the screen has nothing to do with data rate, except often larger displays have higher resolutions (which does affect data rate).
But 1440p at 21" I think would be great. Personally I only use 1080p screens as secondary monitors, and would never go back to 1080p for my primary display.