Group 1 can tell the difference between the two and strongly prefers 120Hz.

Group 2 can't tell the difference between the two and prefers the more affordable options.

Group 3 has not done a lot of comparisons between the two refresh rates, or has used 120Hz displays that were actually in 60Hz mode, or compared lower resolution 120Hz displays with higher resolution 60Hz displays.

I think a lot of people mistakenly think they are in Group 2 when they are in Group 3.

I own a variety of monitors and can easily tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz. All things being equal, I of course prefer 120hz (or 165hz as some of my gaming monitors support).

I also own monitors at resolutions from 1440p to 4k.

For doing work (programming, where I'm mostly looking at text), resolution makes a huge difference. I only do coding on high DPI screens and I would upgrade to 5k or 6k or 8k displays if I were confident that my hardware and OS would support them well. (TFA was very helpful in that respect.) In these settings, high refresh rate makes only a marginal difference to my experience.

For gaming, refresh rate makes a much bigger difference, and resolution makes a somewhat smaller difference -- my hardware can't reasonably drive many of the games I play at 4k or higher anyway. So I just use cheaper, lower-resolution monitors that operate at high refresh rates for gaming.

Someday I guess I'll just be able to spend $300 for an 8k monitor at 240hz and then I won't have to make this kind of choice. (In fact, in the several years since I last bought gaming hardware I think the options for high-refresh-rate 4k monitors have gotten much better; I might use 4k for gaming if I were buying today.)

But for now, I'll always pick resolution over refresh rate for doing work, and it's not because I can't tell the difference.

Its always so much nicer when I leave the Air. Everything is so much smoother.

In most browsers it will go up to whatever refresh rate your monitor runs at, including 144 or 165 hz, probably 240 but I've never owned one of those.

I have a hard time believing that anyone with functional eyesight wouldn't be able to see the difference between 60 and 120, but I can definitely see not caring enough to spend the money just to make scrolling and cursor movement smoother.

So I personally would always prioritize a good pixel density unless one plays a lot of games that require low input latency.

Screen wise I got a pair of Dell S2721DGFs that I’m quite happy with. IPS panel and commonly on sale for $300. Weakest point is backlight inconsistency for dark scenes but it’s a compromise I’m willing to put up with.

Brightness, pixel density, and contrast/blacks (including glossiness) are what I care about in terms of image quality.

Maybe if I were a gamer it would matter, but I couldn't care less about how smooth scrolling or cursor movement is. It doesn't change my productivity or affect my comfort at all.

Edit: I never got around to my point, which was even though I'm part of the group who doesn't really care about refresh rate, it appears that my body might care.

All I want is a large monitor (currently 43" + 27"), so I can get my work done, then turn off the monitors and collect my paycheck.

I’m still annoyed there are no 5K 27” monitors in the ~$500-800 bracket. I’d rather that kind of pixel density with decent quality in that price bracket first, and then let’s talk higher refresh rates.

Similarly I've used a 1080p monitor for years and I'm fine with it. I don't need tiny pixels for coding and messing around with pixel scaling on Linux seems more trouble than it's worth.

I think many people only remember "30FPS" as a stuttery mess between 15 and 40FPS on low-end hardware, which indeed is a terrible experience. In many games a stable framerate is actually more important than a high framerate, but people associate it the other way around because the only number they see in the corner of the screen is the framerate and those two metrics tend to coincide depending on how performant the hardware is.

And in some games low input latency is very important, which requires high framerates.

30fps might be fine for playing Solitaire, but it is definitely a limiting factor for first-person shooters.

Personally, after a year or two of programming on 30hz, I absolutely want 60hz for office use. Having lag while dragging around windows is not fun. Having a 1080p+ monitor is more about screen real estate than it is about precision: you just can't fit three windows side-by-side on 1080p while still having stuff remain readable.

That makes sense. For programming I use a tiled wm so don't drag windows around at all, I disable all animations so haven't felt any need for high framerates personally.

FWIW I do spend a lot of time with 120hz and 144hz displays.

For gaming it's awfully hard to go back to 60hz after tasting those high refresh rates. In fact, I've been saying that for 25 years. At the tail end of the CRT era a lot of higher-end CRTs could do like 90 or 100hz at 1280x1024. Most PC games couldn't push that many FPS even at lower resolutions but it really helped reduce flicker and eyestrain, even when staring at text in Windows.

I'm sure group 2 exists. It's just that all its members have an undiagnosed vision disorder.

A few years ago e.g. the Simpsons began to use these computer aided 3-d pans which hurt my eyes to watch. Pausing, they are all in normal resolution but when watching them the screen turns into a mush for me and I can just see color blobs.

I just realized that I literally never do this. It is indeed incredibly jarring. even at 60Hz. I think my eyes basically immediately "jump" to where I want to move the cursor, so I don't really "track" it. Do other people track the cursor with their eyes?

I guess that's another group, people correctly in high refresh rate mode but not consuming content that reaches that refresh rate.

I recently had the opportunity to try out an ultrawide 144hz VA panel at approximately the same pixel density as my Dell Ultrasharp 30" that came out a great number of years ago, and it was... fine. Used it for a few months and then sold it. Swapped the 30" back in and am back to my old stance that whatever replaces this screen is going to have to have wildly better picture quality than the ultrawide; I haven't even thought about it since. The picture quality on the VA wasn't necessarily bad enough to notice while I was using it, except for the viewing angles, but comparatively it didn't hold up at all.

Having used another 144hz display right at again the same pixel density at 27" next to my MacBook pro being actively used as a second screen, I think the density and quality of the MacBook display sort of nullified anything I got from refresh rate.

For me to replace my current screen, what I'm hoping for is basically for this 6k to either come down to earth in price, or for competition to come in and build an equivalent. If I could get that for ~$1500CAD eventually (only half of what they are right now on sale), refresh rate would still only be a nice to have. More important to me is a good KVM feature, thunderbolt/one-cable connectivity, and better aesthetics I guess above most other features. A nice webcam would be nice too, but I don't really care much about that being built-in unless it's invisible.

I think you're missing a Group 4 that realizes no one's actually made a top quality 120hz display yet and isn't about to sacrifice clarity for refresh rate when it comes to productivity. (fwiw, the MBP XDR comes closest but it's not a display)

If you value overall picture quality, then the vast majority of 120hz+ screens are either blotchy messes or have unacceptably low pixel density (or both)

Seriously, getting at least a 120Hz monitor makes for a world of difference because it makes everything smoother. Increases in resolution beyond 1920x1080 meanwhile are going to quickly hit the point of diminishing returns, anything beyond 2160p particularly so.

It may very well not be worth the price, but that’s different.

It's like having a small ache in your back - not really an issue, no problem to live 100 years with it. But then one day...it's gone. Do you really want to go back now?

Because twice the refresh rate means half the latency. And in games like shooters any mouse movement causes the entire screen to change, which makes lower latency very noticeable compared to just a moving cursor on the desktop. This is why VR feels really bad on low framerates, the latency between head movements and screen updates is too long.

I use the 32" Odyssey G7 which is 2560x1440@240Hz.

Realize >60Hz makes exactly zero difference for video playback, so the only areas for improvement are cursor movement and scrolling smoothness.

I would like very much to also have an 120 Hz frame rate, but then the price would become much higher.

Theres a reason why monitors give you both x/1000 and x/1001 framerates.

And you can set it to 59.94, nobody is stopping you.

This entire comment chain started with, essentially, what is the LCM of 60 and 24 (or 59.94 and 23.976), and its 120 (or 119.88).

I'd be more concerned with the automatic black frame insertion most LCDs do to increase contrast.

Note that 1/1000 is glitch every 40 seconds so it's quite visible to an "eagle eye". I'll ask.

>The time between frames is tremendous from the standpoint of a video editor,

This sounds like something I've heard from people with a head full of fun stuff talking about the space between the notes. There have bee times where that absolutely makes sense, but I'm at a loss on your time between frames.

That sounds a lot more like rolling shutter artifacts than 3:2 pulldown. What kind of camera are you using? Are you shooting with a CMOS sensor?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter

> This sounds like something I've heard from people with a head full of fun stuff talking about the space between the notes. There have bee times where that absolutely makes sense, but I'm at a loss on your time between frames.

Haha, fair enough. If you ever feel like diving in yourself, I passionately recommend In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye_(Murc...

Edit to match your edit: "The book suggests editors prioritize emotion over the pure technicalities of editing."

This totally depends on the content and level of production. I've edited content from properly staffed productions with script notes with circle takes and all that stuff. It's always fun to stack up the various takes to see how the director feels about the takes from the day of the shoot and seeing it edited context. It's also fun to see the actor's variations from take to take.

On shoots with barely enough crew so the camera op is also the boom op, it's basically all feel from the editor.

This is what I was hoping someone would chime in about. I have never looked into whether it would be handled differently, but I would not trade a higher resolution display regardless. Maybe it could potentially influence where I cut in certain rare situations, but sounds unlikely.

And even if you did use it, it doesn’t do anything to help with the extra 1000/1001 factor, so what is the point?

For the stupid North American non-integer frame rates, just change the playback speed by a fraction and get on with life. Or drop 1000/1001 frames for live, people won't notice.

At this point, the only great reason is that it's an industry standard, but that alone is more than enough reason to still do it, evidenced by the fact that so many people still do it.

At least everyone tasked with editing 3:2 pulldown footage for 3:2 pulldown distribution, which is most of the video editors in North America the last time I checked.

Edit: also, any editor worth their salt will take the telecined content back to progressive for editing. if they then need to deliver like it's 2005 to an interlaced format, they would export the final edit to 30000/1001 with a continuous 2:3 cadence. only editors unfamiliar with proper techniques would edit the way you suggest.

For people never having to work with this kind of content, it makes sense. I’d equate it to modern programmers not knowing Assembly, but can write apps that perform adequately. There’s plenty of content shot on modern equipment delivered to non-broadcast platforms that will never need to know the hows/whys old timers did what they did

We'll have this available for purchase any decade now... any decade. Soon, perhaps as early as the 2030s, 2040s tops!

All joking aside, I'm tempted to create a GoFundMe page for this and see if there's other people out there interested in convincing a panel manufacturer to print some 8K monitor-sized OLEDs...

It's probably a niche market, but most games on the switch run natively at somewhere between 720 and 1080p and look awful scaled up to 4k.

Native 720p does look slightly better than integer scaling to 2x because of subpixel stuff, and generally liking that LCD look. But integer scaling would be enough really.

Sounds like a fun project, you should build one.

Taking in a 720p hdmi signal and pixel doubling to 1440p or tripling to 4k and outputting that as a valid HDMI signal without adding more than a frame or two of lag would require custom chips. Although maybe a software solution involving a gpu might be possible?

Implementation is left an as exercise for the reader.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNBmFJ68SCw

It’s hard to describe, but somehow the picture seems more “dull”, or less bright (independent of the actual brightness of the monitor), or more toned down. The colors don’t pop as much."

A useful post. Whilst I've not yet had the luxury of owning a 6k or 8k monitor his comment about matte and glossy screens is very useful (also I'm more likely to trust his opinion than many others because his discerning experience is backed by the fact that he's actually using an 8k monitor—and that takes money and commitment).

Over the years I've made many comparisons between matte and glossy screens and I have to agree with him for the same reasons. Despite being more susceptible to reflections, glossy screens always seem brighter and somehow sharper than matte ones of the same resolution and brightness. I've never investigated the reason in depth but I suspect the matte finish disperses the light from the screen and the net visual effect is a 'rounding' of transients resulting in lower contrast somewhat like offset printing which never looks as sharp as letterpress (where the ink dries thicker and looks blacker at the edges of the imprinting, this increases visual contrast even though the resolution may not be much different).

Their main supposed advantage, that they mitigate glare, is just false. With a glossy screen you get a small point of reflection. Matte attenuates it just a tiny bit, but never enough so that is not bothersome. You can usually tilt/angle your screen to fight glare, but matte makes it harder because the glaring spot is bigger/more diffuse. Also, higher brightness is one of the things that fight glare the most and matte reduce it a lot!

Mobile phones, the devices we carry outside the most and should be most susceptible to glare issues never ever come with matte screens! How is matte even still a thing?

In my experience matte only has issues when the sun is shining directly onto it, whereas glossy will immediately glare in areas which aren't incredibly light. Got something with black on your screen? Guess what, it's suddenly a mirror! Additionally, glossy is way more susceptible to fingerprints, so you have to religiously keep cleaning them.

> There's a reason macbooks, and almost every TV uses a glossy surface.

I always thought it is just because it looks "premium".

> Mobile phones, the devices we carry outside the most and should be most susceptible to glare issues never ever come with matte screens!

Yes, and I often notice myself tilting the screen away from reflections. That's a lot harder with a desktop.

>You can usually tilt/angle your screen to fight glare, but matte makes it harder because the glaring spot is bigger/more diffuse.

I would need to be able to switch quickly between a matte monitor and a glossy one to be sure, but IIRC the main advantage of matte is a many-fold reduction in how often I have to swivel my attention to the issue of glare. In other words, it is the need to "tilt/angle the screen" that is the main cost of glossy for me because I cannot do that without taking some of my attention away from the task at hand. In contrast, if I am already constantly holding the screen in my hand a la a smartphone then I can adjust the angle with very little conscious attention, so IIUC I have no preference for matte screens on smartphones, which if my preferences are common, would explain the absence of matte screens in smartphones.

It is very true, contrary to what you claim. The glare on my old trusty Dell U2413 matte display is next to non-existent compared to Apple M1 Air that is hooked to it.

Another issue is the nature of the reflection. In a glossy screen, the reflection often is a mirror effect that, at least for me, is easier to ignore. Reflections in matte shine up the surface's tiny individual indentations and that blocks more of the screen under it.

And what about screen protectors? You can make a glossy screen matte with one, but not the other way around.

Also, screen protectors? Last time I saw one was ~1994.

> Also, screen protectors? Last time I saw one was ~1994.

Ugh, I think you're thinking of those tinted glass things you'd hang on old CRT monitors? Never heard of those being called "screen protectors" though. By screen protector I mean replaceable covers for flat screens:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805177079468.html?spm=a2g...

My proposal for the industry: ship screens as glossy and add the matte as an optional screen protector. Note that before around 2010 this was already how they shipped displays: the matte was a plastic layers that you could frequently peel off. Nowadays, most matte displays have the surface finish done right on the polarizer layer.

It allows for a more exact color representation with less eye strain, especially in brightly lit conditions. No lamps glare, sunlight doesn't bother you as much, etc.

As I said elsewwhere, I don't think matte is a problem in well-lit office environments as the usual office apps usually don't warrant the extra contrast and sharpness. That said, I used to run an IT operation and the matter arose quite often. What was telling is that some people simply didn't care about glare, they either moved their heads or just tilted the monitor a little whereas others found glare intolerable. I suppose that's why both types are available.

BTW, I'm one of those who doesn't find glare a problem, for some reason I 'tune' it out (I do the same with audio, I can listen to the radio through atrocious noise and static that drives others crazy).

Edit: Incidentally, I'm typing this on my Lenovo ThinkPad which has matte screen but I'm using an external monitor with a glossy screen which I prefer (to be fair, it's also slightly larger). No, it wasn't a mistake at purchase time, it was given to me. :-)

Previous Apple displays have been decent in this category too, though. The 5k 27” iMac’s coating was also pretty good and what they use on MacBook Pro 14/16” is only a little worse than what’s on the Studio Display.

The difference in crispness between the Dell UP321K (~280ppi at 7680x64280 at 31.5 inches) and this new U3224KBA (~220ppi at 6144 x 3456 at 32") is dramatic.

The new Dell 6K is about the same as the Apple 6K (the XDR Pro Display). I had that 6K Apple and the 8K Dell side-by-side on my desk for a few months (until I could find a buyer for the dramatically inferior Apple). During that time, I asked anybody who happened to stop by to look at the screens and compare them.

Almost everybody could see the difference immediately.

A few people, admittedly, said they looked pretty much the same. I think there's a certain level of eyesight required to discern the difference. Having said that, I got my first prescription glasses 2 years ago, and I can easily see the difference with glasses on or off.

I cannot see pixels on either one. But what I can see is a slight fuzz at the edges of letters on the lower res display. Moreover, I need my glasses to use the 6K for long stretches and I don't even really need to wear them with the 8K. That's what made me so attached to this monitor.

I was therefore bummed to see Dell release this 6K. I want a modern version of the 8K! Two cables sucks, it's quite a compatibility nightmare to get configured properly on Linux if you want to use cheaper monitors alongside it (because the software support for multiple displays at different scaling factors is pretty bad still on most Linux). On Mac it never worked at all, until they released the M2 chip(!).

(It has always worked fine on Windows, just plug it in.)

Having used this for a few years, I don't ever want to go back to 6K, or 5K, or 4K. I just want 8K to get cheaper so that I can rock 3 8K displays, instead of the 4K-8K-4K I suffer today.... also, 120Hz please.

I have compared them with magnifying glasses, and really tried to get into why such a (seemingly, at first) small increase in resolution made such a huge difference.

I've compared standard 27" 4K, the LG and Apple 27" 5K ), the Apple 6K and the Dell 8K. It really is just a lot more pixels. The fuzz is definitely small, but there.

Another good test is open VS Code full screen, divide it up into panes, and make the text as small as you can read it. I mean really small. The text on the 6K just looks awful while the 8K still looks good.

Sometimes I do actually do this and put on my glasses (the text is too small for me to read without assistance, but it is still pretty crisp). It feels like a nerd superpower.

There are actually a bunch of us 8K superfans out here on the internet, but it's been a lonely party, because the Dell UP3218K seems to be still the only 8K computer monitor you can buy. (As in a roughly 32" desktop monitor, not a TV.)

I don't think they're in the same class.

Spec shows Apple's Pro XDR is 2.5x brighter and have a much better contrast ratio along with 10bit and P3.

But in that case I'd expect the Dell 6K to fare even worse than the Apple 6K in a head-to-head comparison with the Dell 8K.

It’s not obvious to me why this would happen. Can you share why this is?

With my glasses on, though, the 6K (or 27" 5K) look less crisp but somehow not fuzzy. Like I can see the antialiasing at the edges, but this doesn't look blurry to me. (It just looks more like a 4K display, where the antialiasing isn't great, you can see the pixels.)

With my glasses off, I cannot make out the antialiasing or pixels the 220ppi screens, but it looks fuzzy/blurry. Like its right at the edge of what my unaided eye can resolve.

After a while (hours), looking at the blurry text has me rubbing my eyes or starting to squint.

The 8K screen doesn't look blurry at the edges of letters. It just looks sharp.

I have wondered if this is something specific to exactly how much my eyesight has deteriorated with age, and maybe when it gets a little bit worse, it won't bother me as much. (?)

Or perhaps you're referring to HDMI 2.1 support?

The only 8K monitor has for years been the Dell UP3218K, which uses DisplayPort -- and requires two DisplayPort cables, actually, to get 7680 × 4320 at 60Hz.

Apple has never supported this on any of their machines -- they just couldn't drive the monitor. (It worked, but only in 4K mode.)

They quietly changed this with the M2 machines. I had a MacBook Pro M1 Max that couldn't drive this monitor at 8K. Then I found this GitHub thread[1] where it was revealed that M2 Pro can drive up to one of these 8K displays over Thunderbolt (to DisplayPort). And the M2 Ultra on a Mac Pro or Mac Studio can drive 3 of them.

I don't think it is scaling, per se, but rather that Apple has never supported the full DisplayPort spec. That 8K monitor apparently needs support for something called "dual SST" and Apple never supported that in their software. More details are in the linked GitHub discussion.

So, I don't know why they didn't make this work on the M1 Ultra, too, but Apple gonna Apple. So I went down to the Apple Store and bought a Mac Studio M2 Ultra the day I read that. Now I can plug my Mac into my KVM switch and use this monitor on Mac just like I always could with Linux and Windows.

[1]: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/discussions/199#d...

It took us a long time to go from 1080p to 4K. It has taken even longer for 4K at 120-144Hz to be practical.

It’s more likely that you’ll end up with intermediate steps to 5K, 6K, than getting 8K 120Hz.

The other limitation is lack of demand. You need a gigantic monitor for 8K to be worth it, and you need a powerful video card to drive it. The number of people who would buy such a monitor is very, very small.

I have a 4k 24" monitor that I can still see aliasing on with AA disabled.

8K 32" would give me more real estate and should, in theory, completely eliminate the need for AA.

Additionally much of the demand for >60Hz is for gaming purposes, and there is nowhere near a powerful enough GPU anyone can afford that would be able to render games in high quality or extreme detail level at 8K above 60 FPS. Right now a GPU that costs $1500 USD can maybe render a 4K game with extreme detail level at framerates that vary between 55 to 75 fps.

8K is the point in which at the monitor size I use, individual pixels would be too hard to see. They're already a bit hard to see at 4K, but at 8K it'd be perfect.

I try not to be overly sapien-centric when making assumptions about my fellow HN readers.

Marshall now thinks that the mantis shrimp sees colors in a unique way. Rather than discriminating between millions of subtle shades, its eye actually does the opposite, collapsing all the varied hues of the spectrum into just 12.

From Science: "A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp"

The mantis shrimps (stomatopods) can have up to 12 photoreceptors, far more than needed for even extreme color acuity. Thoen et al. conducted paired color discrimination tests with stomatopods and found that their ability to discriminate among colors was surprisingly low. Instead, stomatopods appear to use a color identification approach that results from a temporal scan of an object across the 12 photoreceptor sensitivities. This entirely unique form of vision would allow for extremely rapid color recognition without the need to discriminate between wavelengths within a spectrum.

Manufacturers can also justify making pretty big screens with that many pixels. Samsung's 8k TVs are 80-something inches. Since it's that big, you can sit further back, making up for any loss in pixel density, and still have a huge picture.

Why? Is that an OS problem?

You have to trade off distortions for bluriness and you can't avoid both of those artifacts at the same time. The higher your pixel ppi, the less noticeable any scaling artifacts will be though.

Do we have lots of scalable UI elements that expect to line up with raster images a certain way on most operating systems?

It's a shame (for me, who can't afford HiDPI displays to replace his current ones, and would have difficulty pushing all those pixels even if he could) that Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing. :(

But with OLED.

The 120 Hz i don’t understand however i am not a gamer.

Try setting your refresh rate to 30hz for an hour.

What people mostly notice is latency not refresh rate.

It's noticeable for me on every single mouse movement— no special effort is required to move the cursor 'quickly'.

You can show multiple mouse images at 60 fps which shouldn’t trick people if they can actually see 90 vs 60 vs 120 fps.

If you don’t mind me asking how old are your friends?

What blind test did you use?

I added mouse trails to verify people were actually noticing the FPS not just artifacts from the rendering pipeline.

I'm constantly switching between my M1 Air and work M2 16 Pro and refresh rate has never bothered me.

It's useful for smoother scrolling amongst other things.

I'd like a display that has parity to my laptop but is just bigger so I can fit more on it.

Previously, I actually often felt motion sickness when scrolling through code on small 60hz laptop screens. Had no problems with larger (> 23") desktop screens, though.

Depends on your monitor size.

Might be a waste at 27", but if you want to use a 48" display, I can assure you that you'd notice the move from 4k -> 8k.

8K in a game will use tremendous amounts of power, but it's not pointless. It's like having antialiasing turned on. And high frame rates are important for motion because normal rendering only gives you a single point in time.

Though response times also matter a lot for ghosting and such.

But for desktop productivity? I don't feel I gain anything from it. 60 hz is fine.

For me 40 inch is the sweet spot for coding: any larger and it gets too pixelated at 4K (you can make out the pixels, but that's OK for coding), the UI scale can be set at 100% so all is well proportioned. Entire classes/methods fit on a screen without scrolling.

I own two Philips 4K 40 inch monitors, they only cost ~$600 at the time, and I dread the day they stop working. I would be first in line for 6K or 8K, or any ≥4K really, at 40 inch.

I imagine that in the future, people will look back at much of the media from recent decades and think that it looks a lot worse than we remember because it was produced on bad screens or made to look good on all of our crappy screens.

As a personal anecdote: when I was choosing components for my first desktop computer (instead of using dad's work laptops), I selected components which are affordable. Also, as a coincidence a local IT magazine had a big test of desktop CRT monitors. So I've chosen some inexpensive one which wasn't terrible and as every kid asked parents for money. My mum who was already working on computers on her job had a look through that magazine and said that she'll pay for the whole computer only on the condition we buy the best monitor on that test. So we did (it was a trinitron Nokia @ 100Hz which was a lot), and I think with that move she saved my eyes long term, as I'm in my early 40ties and the only healthy thing I still have are my eyes. In any case, I've soon realized when I got that monitor is that I'll never save money when buying stuff which I use all day long.

Back to the topic. CRT monitors also were space heaters, and had a large volume which was only fine when being permanently placed on a geek's desk.

When LCDs arrived they actually were considerably better than average CRTs. The picture was rock solid without flicker or refresh rate artifacts, perfectly rectangular (a big problem with an average CRT as a matter of fact) and very sharp and crisp. All for a little bit more money. After two or three years they were actually even cheaper than CRTs. And I forgot to mention, they took much less space so you could place it on a POS counter or wherever. It took much more time to replace the top end CRTs, but I guess this is always the case when talking about some tech product.

2048x1536 19" (135ppi) at up to 72Hz was common at reasonable prices in the late 90s if my memory is correct. Although OS scaling sucked and text looked weird due to the shadow mask at that size. 1600x1200 (105ppi) was the sweet spot for me. And actually in my first job in 2004 I had two 20" 1600x1200 (100ppi) LCDs that I recall were reasonably priced and they were nicer overall. This was around the time LCDs became the default choice. Then "HD" became a thing a couple of years later and you are right, for the next ten years virtually all monitors were "widescreen HD", which was 1280x720 if you fell for marketing of the lower-priced units or or 1920x1080 at best. Anything higher was very expensive.

In 2012 the retina macbooks came out and I got a 13(.3)" with 2560x1600 resolution (227ppi). This was the first time for me that LCDs were finally great. But you couldn't get a resolution like that in an external display. So at that time I mostly just didn't use external monitors until 2016 when suddenly 4K 27" (163ppi) became reasonably priced. So I used 2 of those for years and they were good enough but still left me wanting.

Now still to this day, 4K is the max for external monitors at reasonable prices at any size. About 2 years ago I got an M1 macbook and realized it only supported 1 external monitor. I felt like I needed to keep the real estate I was used to and anyway, with the pandemic and WFH, managing multiple monitors with multiple (work and personal) machines sucked. All I could really find at a reasonable price was 32"/4K and 49" ultrawide. I begrudgingly downgraded to a 49" 5120x1440 monitor (109ppi). I will admit that going from 60Hz to 120Hz was nicer than I expected.

So in 2023 my laptop screen is great and has been great for 10+ years but this was my story about how I am still using the same pixel density as I did 25 years ago.

I am not sure with that dot pitch of 0.25mm it was worth it.

[1] https://www.backoffice.be/prod_uk/ViewSonic/p225f_viewsonic_...

I'm struggling to remember how much they did cost, but with $2000 price tag for the top of the notch machine the monitors on the low end tended (well, AFAIR, don't take my word for it) to be less than $150, and hi-end were like $700 for not the ultra-uber-special cases.

And Moore's Law. LCDs are semiconductors so their price goes down by a factor of 2 every 18 months.

However, even size would be enough. CRTs were ridiculously heavy. My GDM-FW900 was almost 100 pounds. And I used two side by side. I had to shop specifically for a desk that wouldn't collapse when I put them on it.

I can definitely live with 60Hz on desktop if I have to, and I can't game at 6K anyway, so doing 2K@120Hz gaming and 6K@60Hz or 8K@60Hz desktop work would be ideal, and wouldn't get into the silly bandwidths of 8K@120.

https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/g3223q

The technical aspects of this review are interesting, especially the wide range of machines tested. I finished writing a review of my own[0] a few days ago, which is less technical but goes into some other aspects of the monitor.

[0]: https://www.wells.dev/dell-ultrasharp-u3224kb-squandered-pot...

Wouldn't be the first time. My previous Dell monitor, the U3818DW, had a bug with its USB-C implementation that only affected Macs (somebody proved via protocol inspection that they were actually implementing part of the protocol wrong; it just didn't manifest on Windows). Their support forums for the issue are full of a single Dell representative whose sole response was to remind all of the Apple users that _technically_, Dell never qualified this monitor for macOS, and it's their fault for not carefully reading the technical documentation before purchasing. (Naturally, many of the reviews on Amazon are of people plugging it into a MacBook Pro.)

Really soured me on the idea of buying a Dell monitor for anything Apple related after that.

The other issue is its cost. Expectations raise alongside price, and at an MSRP of $3200 they’re pretty high, and this monitor in my opinion doesn’t meet the bar… with its build quality, problems, and lack of polish it’d maybe make sense at half that price, but even then that antiglare coating would make it a hard sell. They’d need to at least change the coating to make it resemble that of a more traditional matte monitor (which has no grain or sparkle effect).

And you’re right, there isn’t really an alternative except the Pro Display XDR, which is priced far beyond what many of us would find reasonable, uses increasingly dated local dimming tech, and has no extra functions beyond the hub on its back. That’s part of why I was disappointed: everything was lined up for Dell to have been able to knock this one out of the park — it would’ve been easy — but they didn’t.

Also, it just seems strange that anyone is asking for a 1080p monitor in 2023 outside of Esports. Are you sure you want 1080p (2K) and not 1440p (2.5K)? It bothers me when people use 2K to refer to 1440p. 1080p is 2K[1].

[0]: this chart has a few recent monitors and gives a general idea of how much power monitors consume: https://youtu.be/Wik4DhEaj_8?t=527

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution is very clear on this subject, and I agree completely. 1080p is much closer to 2000 horizontal pixels than 1440p.

Certainly, one of the most impressive things about the M1 laptops when they came out was that they woke instantly from sleep, including the screen.

My 165Hz 1440p 32" (31.5") LG with 8 bit color and two external speakers consumes ~20W, measured at the wall.

My 14" laptop screen is about 19.8% of the area of that display. I have loosely measured it from ranges of ~<1W at min brightness to ~8W at max brightness. It is 1440p, 60Hz, 14", HDR (DV). I usually run it at ~20% brightness, which seems to be around 3W.

My office has the usual LED lighting at night or a large window + sliding glass door during the day. Not a dark cave by any means!

... But then the table just below states the MacBook does it at 8gbps without DSC. What's going on here?

> I honestly don’t know. Maybe this is a bug in the monitor’s firmware and it does use some version of DSC after all? Or you’re right regarding lack of DSC support and it uses more than 8 Gbps but displays it incorrectly? Not sure. But something is definitely different about the monitor’s link when a MacBook is connected…

Then I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36581855, which points out 24 bit colors vs. 30 bit colors. The MacBook links up with 24-bit colors indeed. Maybe that’s the difference?

I don't see the benefit of going higher than 1440p or 1600p though, any higher res just means I need to increase scaling otherwise things are too small to read comfortably for me.

It depends much on the type of work one is doing. I don't have 8k but I'd surely love to have one when I'm editing high resolution 48-bit TIFF files (≥1GB) which I do quite often.

Normally for other work 1920x1080 is more an adequate.

The article mentions that "it (the Dell UP3218K) needs two (!) DisplayPort cables on a GPU with MST support, meaning that in practice, it only works with nVidia graphics cards."

I would like to tell people here that this is not true in my experience (which might be related to advances in amdgpu and/or linux in general): I'm running one Dell on a Vega (64) Frontier Edition and one on a 6900XT, both on Linux 6.3 with the amdgpu driver. It sets up correctly, using DP TILE extension, so both cables used, 7680x4320@60hz.

Also I would like to add (subjectively) that nothing beats the display quality of these screens. It's literally life/eye-changing.. insanely nice, sharp. I could never go back to sub ~200ish DPI displays.

I most recently tried the AMD GPU that came with my ThinkStation P620, and it could not drive the monitor at native resolution :(

Maybe I should try a 6900XT. Which particular model do you have?

How much power does it use when driving the 8K monitor?

Do you have PCIe ASPM enabled in the UEFI setup for your PEG slot, and does that run reliably? I was running into problems with ASPM with my nVidia: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/pcie-errors-after-enab...

This is nonsense, of course AMD graphics cards support MST. https://www.reddit.com/user/hubsdocks/comments/rcf6vz/dell_w... Perhaps some weird Linux driver limitation...?

As for DisplayPort, the only semi-modern customer grade video card with four DisplayPorts is the AMD Radeon™ RX 5700 XT Taichi X 8G OC+ RX5700XT TCX 8GP.

With Intel ARC cards, the 8K monitor works neither on Windows nor on Linux :(

You have to either use the HDMI port from the Mac (if you have an M2 one) or use a usbc to HDMI converter which for some reason triggers the DSC.

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dell-6k-u3224kb-monitor...

The main issue is that users reported that text does not look very nice when the monitor runs in 24-bit color and full resolution, which is a bit concerning when considering the asking price.

And yes I have it pegged at 60hz, unlike the "solution" says, removing the variable rate does not solve the problem.

Buyers beware of Dell screens with macOS on Apple Silicon.

And yes I've tried many different cables... :)

I found that if change the color profile I can mitigate the issue, but then it doesn’t look quite as nice.

On the LG, not only is there flickering but a transient burn-in which still appears when the TB cable is disconnected! It fades after a few hours.

Many owners have the same issue with their M1 devices so I assume it’s not something that is fixable.

I like it enough I'm considering a second. Only downside is no usb-c.

I believe this is why it's not a problem for you:

    [...] both and connect through a CalDigit TS4

(Why? Yields. A 6" phone screen is like 12 square inches. A 27" desktop monitor is over 300 square inches. If you have a 98% yield of phone screens without defects, that implies only one defect per ~600 square inches, which means that at a handwave level, you'd have a 50% yield of desktop monitors with that same tech. "We have to throw away half the screens we make as junk" is a lot worse than "we have to throw away 2% of them.")

And smaller defects are better when you do sell off the imperfect panels.