Looking to buy a new monitor, some opinions would be appreciated

[rdl]

As someone who started gaming when 1024x768 was pure heaven and hard to attain, it's amazing that people these days consider 1920x1080 as being too low.

[tpowell1830]

I bought my 240 Hz. refresh television monitor at Costco where there were multiple variations of the same monitor playing the same video. I noticed a distinct smoothness to the one that had 240 Hz. refresh rate. BTW, there was no sales person steering me at Costco and I made my own side by side comparisons without looking at specs. The one that I thought had a better picture, especially during action scenes, was the 240 Hz model. I know this is anecdotal, but this is the reason we choose a monitor. I never go and study the reports and specs of any monitor when I pick one. I had no idea that this monitor was 240 Hz refresh until after my side-by-side comparisons.

Scientific studies mean nothing in the real world where viewing and seeing is concerned, we like what we like, regardless of hype. That is not to say that a percentage of the world will listen to other people or sources in decision making, but there are many among us who merely want the best and by side-by-side testing/viewing can make a decision based on the comparison. This is how I pick every monitor that I buy. When it comes to computers/laptops, however, I do use a spec driven logic because these are very important when choosing a tool, but choosing a monitor is based on viewing and size. That is why I like shopping for monitors at places like Costco or Fry's because the monitors are often playing the same feed. The best is subjective when it comes to viewing, everyone is different.

By and large people buy what appeals to them and the specs may prove out the differences, but quality is often a subjective experience. Some people are steered to a particular model or spec by friends or family. If it looks better for you, then it IS better for you. Then there are some people who buy down to a price only, go figure. Bottom line here is that until you see the monitor in action, with actual video or gaming play, you will not know if it is a good choice for you. I have had my 55" monitor for a year now and I am happy with its' performance.

Just my 2 cents...

EDIT: And yes, this is an opinion.

[Raj]

consider it-http://emerythacks.blogspot.ca/2013/04/connecting-ipad-retina-lcd-to-pc.html

[brucehoult]

I've had the same old Dell Ultra sharp 30" monitors for years now.  Different versions, and bought at different times when they run their 50% off sales.  Maybe one day I would get a 4k monitor, but then it would probably have to be 2x 4k.  I would rather have more screen real estate than a single high-rez monitor.  You can only make your desktop windows so small after all.

Yes, I had an original Apple 30" 2560x1600 (bought used about five years old) for many years. About 15 months ago I bought the Dell equivalent. It was *still* even now about NZ$2000. In comparison 32" 4k monitors are about a third of the price and just as good or better in everything except professional colour calibration. I have several Samsung U32J590 which go for $399 here in the USA. They're fantastic for programming. The only thing is that (in Ubuntu) I need to bump my terminal and emacs fonts up from Ubuntu-mono-9 to Ubuntu-mono-10 to save my poor old 56 year old eyes, and hit ctrl-+ to get maybe 120% on a few web pages too. A full-height emacs window shows 148 lines of code, which is superb, and significantly more than you get on a 1600 high monitor with 9 pt font.

I would not buy a 4k monitor in 28" or smaller size. You have to bump the font sizes too much, and the 32" monitors are very reasonably priced.

[Halcyon]

I would be recommending 2560x1600 as a minimum. I currently use a Dell UltraSharp U3011 and 2560x1600 is its native resolution. I find that at this resolution, I'm still running out of screen real estate for the multiple windows I have open. Windows and text also looks large (I'm sitting about 50-60 cm away from it). The only reason I haven't bought a 4K monitor is because this display is just gorgeous to look at.

If your eyesight is less than average, I would recommend a larger monitor (but still at the higher resolutions).

[brucehoult]

2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting. if it comes in 47inches, that makes the ppi really good.

That's only 100 ppi, almost exactly the same as an ancient 1280x960 16".

A 3840x2160 32" is 137.7 ppi, right about the same as the 133 ppi 1920x1600 17" laptops I've been using since the late 2000's. It's nowhere near "retina".

[3roomlab]

2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting. if it comes in 47inches, that makes the ppi really good.

That's only 100 ppi, almost exactly the same as an ancient 1280x960 16".

A 3840x2160 32" is 137.7 ppi, right about the same as the 133 ppi 1920x1600 17" laptops I've been using since the late 2000's. It's nowhere near "retina".

you are trying to say that a screen with near retina levels of resolution (about 330ppi) is the best display and/or provides best viewing comfort?

edit : If the PPI is too high, you end up sizing up the fonts. If the screen is too small and too much info is crammed into a tiny screen, you end up moving your face up to it and sticking your eye to the screen. Then touch screens ended up with finger zoom features (or ctrl mouse wheel zoom). We all tend to use this zoom to sit back and zoom it up. Which then defeat the purpose of really high PPI. If truly high PPI viewing up close is the natural way for us, then our vision should improve over time with continous use and we should not get fatigue over it at all.

I think it is just really weird (or cleverly exploitative?). We are being bombarded by huge amount of ads about high PPI (or in passive ways?) and high FPS, when we get them, we need powerful hundred watt GFX to drive them, but when we really want to see any detail, we will ctrl mouse wheel to zoom and we replay them in slow motion +freeze frame (or zoom and freeze).

(sorry I sound like a large screen low PPI advocate/dictator)

[brucehoult]

2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting. if it comes in 47inches, that makes the ppi really good.

That's only 100 ppi, almost exactly the same as an ancient 1280x960 16".

A 3840x2160 32" is 137.7 ppi, right about the same as the 133 ppi 1920x1600 17" laptops I've been using since the late 2000's. It's nowhere near "retina".

you are trying to say that a screen with near retina levels of resolution (about 330ppi) is the best display and/or provides best viewing comfort?

Where on Earth did you find that in what I said?

[3roomlab]

Where on Earth did you find that in what I said?

I have a question mark in my sentence

[brucehoult]

Where on Earth did you find that in what I said?

I have a question mark in my sentence

I did not express or imply any opinion on the desirability or otherwise of "retina" in my posts.

I simply pointed out that the resolutions and sizes being discussed are quite low and standard PPI.

[ebclr]

I won this monitor

https://www.asus.com/Monitors/ROG-Strix-XG32VQ/

And is a perfect monitor for me, taste one

[nctnico]

2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting. if it comes in 47inches, that makes the ppi really good.

That's only 100 ppi, almost exactly the same as an ancient 1280x960 16".

A 3840x2160 32" is 137.7 ppi, right about the same as the 133 ppi 1920x1600 17" laptops I've been using since the late 2000's. It's nowhere near "retina".

you are trying to say that a screen with near retina levels of resolution (about 330ppi) is the best display and/or provides best viewing comfort?

(sorry I sound like a large screen low PPI advocate/dictator)

I'd be careful with very high resolution screens especially in an engineering environment. There is still a ton of software out there which draws single pixel lines (schematic entry for example). Those lines will be hard to see. For engineering a doth pitch of 0.27mm (93ppi) is a good choice IMHO.

[brucehoult]

2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting. if it comes in 47inches, that makes the ppi really good.

That's only 100 ppi, almost exactly the same as an ancient 1280x960 16".

A 3840x2160 32" is 137.7 ppi, right about the same as the 133 ppi 1920x1600 17" laptops I've been using since the late 2000's. It's nowhere near "retina".

you are trying to say that a screen with near retina levels of resolution (about 330ppi) is the best display and/or provides best viewing comfort?

(sorry I sound like a large screen low PPI advocate/dictator)

I'd be careful with very high resolution screens especially in an engineering environment. There is still a ton of software out there which draws single pixel lines (schematic entry for example). Those lines will be hard to see. For engineering a doth pitch of 0.27mm (93ppi) is a good choice IMHO.

I'm utterly lost here.

3roomlab said "2560x1600 30inch, I think this pixel per inch (ppi) is high. I would be squinting"

I point out that this is only 100 ppi, which is perfectly fine.

3roomlab then puts words in my mouth that I'm somehow advocating 330 ppi.

nctnico then says to avoid high ppi screens, and says that 93 ppi is good for engineering.

I will again point out that 2650x1600 30" is 100 ppi, which is virtually indistinguishable from 93 ppi and is, I think, a great resolution and size for programmers and engineers.

[james_s]

4k is nice with a huge monitor, the problem is that there is a sort of arms race where resolutions are increasing and UI elements in software are getting correspondingly larger thus negating the advantage of higher resolution, that being to fit more information on the same size screen.

I think your best bet is start scouring reviews on Amazon and other tech sites then shop around for the best price. There are lots of nice monitors these days, in fact it's harder than ever to find a really bad one. They are out there though so beware, they got new monitors at a former job I had and they were horrible. I got awful eyestrain looking at them and wasn't really sure why. Then I figured out that the backlights used PWM dimming at a relatively low frequency. I couldn't so much see the flicker as just feel discomfort from looking at it. A few other guys in the office had the same complaint, a lot of other people couldn't see it at all and thought we were making it up.

[3roomlab]

3roomlab then puts words in my mouth that I'm somehow advocating 330 ppi.

I am sorry that you have chosen that deduction

a 71ppi screen is what I use, a 12point font is roughly 7/10 size in 100ppi, the difference is quite obvious (just zoom your browser to 70-80%). @138ppi ... now this will be tiny.
but the bulk of the problem will come as most people have their keyboard on the desk and the screen is right there about 2 or 3 foot away. your eyeballs are slightly turned inwards to focus on the screen. if you move out to 5feet, some may notice a difference in the "inward turning" strain. some may like their eyes to be more relaxed, some may not even feel it.
the twisted naked eye sensation of looking at tiny smd for long hours with no optics. the cross eye effect.
it is the reason why people chose to use optics, blow it up bigger. look at it on a huge screen for hours with relaxed eyes sitting at 5 10 15 feet away.
on post #36, the ROG 30" is the same price as 55" on amazon. I will sell that ROG and buy the 55" 4k, but to retain 71ppi, this is more likely to be 65".

[james_s]

I typically have my browser zoomed out to 70-65%. It helps a bit to mitigate the pixel inflation that plagues modern design but it also breaks some pages somewhat.

[David Hess]

The first thing I look for in a monitor is wide horizontal and vertical viewing angle which goes with IPS and better panels.

[ogden]

240Hz vs 60Hz tests:

https://youtu.be/tV8P6T5tTYs

[BrianHG]

If your PCB cad-ing, since most PCB software doesn't render the with 4x or higher anti-aliasing during routing, so, the higher the resolution, the better.  Reading .pdf document will be a blessing.  60Hz is fine unless you specifically want specialized high speed gaming.

Going for a gaming monitor also means a much more expensive video card, especially if you want true 4k uncompressed color as such monitor have their higher refresh rates smear out the high saturated colored pixels to every 2 horizontal pixels.  This kills that 4k boost for your PCB work to half quality as when you work on PCBs with their layers shown with traces illustrated in pure saturated colors becoming bulky blurry 2 pixel wide chunks.  (A pitfall of many who buy economic 4k screens who claim 144hz support, yet with video and gaming, many just don't notice or care.)

[Simon]

240Hz vs 60Hz tests:

https://youtu.be/tV8P6T5tTYs

From the internets favourite crap peddaler. He is totally un technical and not equiped to deal with much other than plugging cards into motherboards, I unsubscribed as I got fed up with their brain dead videos full of misconceptions.

[Simon]

If your PCB cad-ing, since most PCB software doesn't render the with 4x or higher anti-aliasing during routing, so, the higher the resolution, the better.  Reading .pdf document will be a blessing.  60Hz is fine unless you specifically want specialized high speed gaming.

Going for a gaming monitor also means a much more expensive video card, especially if you want true 4k uncompressed color as such monitor have their higher refresh rates smear out the high saturated colored pixels to every 2 horizontal pixels.  This kills that 4k boost for your PCB work to half quality as when you work on PCBs with their layers shown with traces illustrated in pure saturated colors becoming bulky blurry 2 pixel wide chunks.  (A pitfall of many who buy economic 4k screens who claim 144hz support, yet with video and gaming, many just don't notice or care.)

I still don't buy over 60Hz, it's not the CRT scenario anymore, we are not relying on phosphor percistence. The image will remain until changed so the refrest rate is just about how often the image is changed.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah. Whereas LCD panels don't suffer from the brightness decay of pixels as on CRTs, they are still affected by the opposite problem: persistence. Not all panels are created equal. Excessive persistence will definitely be noticeable on fast moving images. It's not directly related to the refresh rate, although obviously any serious manufacturer wouldn't build and market a panel supporting 144Hz refresh rate or higher if its inherent persistence doesn't allow it. That wouldn't make any sense (not saying that some lousy manufacturers don't do that...)

Now on the refresh rate itself, whereas 60Hz is completely unnoticeable for most humans on a decent LCD panel with still images, this is not the case for fast moving images. At 60Hz, this is a ~16.67ms period. This is significant and most of us can definitely perceive a difference compared to higher refresh rates. Again on fast moving images. Our peripheral neural system performs much better (and faster) at discerning "changes" and "contrasts" than at discerning absolute values.

Of course if your main use is CAD and office software, a high refresh rate would be completely useless.

[David Hess]

Now on the refresh rate itself, whereas 60Hz is completely unnoticeable for most humans on a decent LCD panel with still images, this is not the case for fast moving images. At 60Hz, this is a ~16.67ms period. This is significant and most of us can definitely perceive a difference compared to higher refresh rates. Again on fast moving images. Our peripheral neural system performs much better (and faster) at discerning "changes" and "contrasts" than at discerning absolute values.

Is that because of the refresh rate or because the latency on some monitors is multiple frames in duration?

[SiliconWizard]

A several-frame latency would of course make things even more obvious.

But I can assure you that you can perceive a difference, depending on each individual, down to a couple ms when the image is moving so fast that each frame is different enough from the other. Again that's because of our ability to sense differences much faster, but much less accurately than static events. Of course we can't "see" individual frames, but we can perceive a change happening pretty quickly. Same with many other species. Probably to optimize the detection of a danger rather than getting an accurate analysis of it.

Of course that means that the underlying video stream would actually generate video with changing frames faster on the faster refresh rate. If you're feeding a 144Hz display with only 60fps or so, it's not going to be any better. It's probably going to actually look worse.

Except for the decreased latency and usually shorter persistence that comes with panels with higher refresh rates, that you can notice, if the computer only streams video to it with actual frames that are not updated as fast as the refresh rate, it will not make a difference obviously.

So yeah pretty much the only applications where you're bound to be exposed to this difference are games. Keeping the following in mind though IMO:

First, the game in question must be able to generate frames at the elevated refresh rate. With modern games and high resolution, this would often require a monster graphics card and CPU, and a very well written game engine.

Second, and probably most important for the average user: even though many people, as I said above, are able to perceive a difference with increased frame rates when looking at fast moving images, when they are focused playing a game, which is usually a pretty intense focus, they won't necessarily be able to notice any difference because their brain will be focused on something else entirely. So whether it makes a difference in real use cases, is, I admit, questionable.

Apart from how we perceive fast moving images (with movements appearing possibly smoother with higher frame rates, etc), latency itself would make a difference.
Many people can definitely perceive even a 16ms latency between a physical action on a button and the result of this action on screen. Well written games have rich graphics effects that help make this latency not very noticeable though. Tricks!

And then you can expect an overall latency when playing a game on a typical computer, between the action on a game pad, and the reaction on screen, that is significantly higher than just the display latency itself, so again here... yes this makes an objective difference. But will you notice it?

[Simon]

I'm still not buying it, you talk as though you can process over 60 images per second. So how about you run 60 different images per second past your eye and tell me what some of them are......

With the capabilities of graphics now and the huge bluray capacity why is the film industry not rushing to 60Hz and has remained at 30 - ish Hz?

What is the average movement is a scene? how many pixels does stuff actually mave frame to frame? on HD? as 4K does not support these speeds.