Monitor Discussion

[Overly Serious]

If I had the money I would buy this:

Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD Monitor - U4021QW | Dell USA

Redefine productivity on this revolutionary 40-inch curved WUHD 5K2K monitor that delivers exceptional color and clarity.

www.dell.com

That's a 5K2K monitor. Slight curve to stop your eyes looking like a toad's, excellent colour reproduction. Maximum refresh of 60Hz is the only downside, not really for gamers for a few reasons. But productivity? Incredible. Here's what's so good about it. The height. Most ultra widescreen monitors are very narrow. If you write code, documents, anything other than game really, you want a lot of vertical space. This has that whilst still being wide enough to have a lot of windows side by side. Imagine you're a programmer and you have say, your output window / website to the left, full-height code window in the middle and reference webpages to the right. It would be fantastic and without the low-level re-focusing and context break of switching between multiple monitors. Glorious.

I have similar feelings about laptops which is why I favour the Microsoft surface line. Not because they're the best hardware (though they're decent) but for the simple reason they have taller aspect ratios which is rare to impossible to find elsewhere.

The whole widescreen thing came about through marketing for monitors that could display movies and then later for games. Earlier monitors were square for the very simple reason that for a lot of tasks that really is the best format.

I have a TV for watching movies and videos. My monitor is for work first and I'll happily prioritise that over not having some barely noticed black bars when I dip into a video on my computer.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Am I the only one that wants taller monitors instead of wider ones?

edit: shit @Overly Serious just brought it up

 

[Uber driver reviewer]

The 4.5K screen built into my 24” iMac is pretty damn nice.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Am I the only one that wants taller monitors instead of wider ones?

No. 16:10 and 3:2 is really where it's at from the productivity standpoint. With 16:10 you'd think "what are these few pixels gonna do" but it somehow really makes a big difference, not to mention that 16:10 is pretty damn close to the golden ratio. The biggest problem with 3:2 is that most "multimedia" content isn't optimized for it and widescreen movies just don't scale to it that nicely. Besides that, notebook and tablet manufacturers have long since realized this, just monitor manufacturers seem to want to go wider and wider. 16:9 has the mass advantage and most people that use desktops just don't seem to care about shitty pixel density. (maybe because they sit farther away from the screen on average, who knows) Especially interesting since both modern browsers more or less have broken RGB subpixel rendering implementations now because of 3D acceleration and fonts have never been blurrier on low-DPI screens. (If you ever wondered why some websites just seem to be really, really blurry on your average 1080p, that's the reason)

I've been looking for a small (but not too small) 16:10 or 3:2 oled portable monitor, such a thing just doesn't seem to exist outside of inbuilt into a high-end notebook or tablet.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Okay so I went and got the hp x34. If there's anyone that can help me with a couple of things that would be cool:

1. How I do I prevent programs, for example Brave, from stretching my stuff out. As I'm typing this it's obvious that KF is stretched out more than it should. Is there any way I can 'compress' stuff so it looks a bit normal, even if it means empty space? For an I'm gay and retarded.

2. for a laugh I want to use nvidia surround to combine my displays. My issue is that despite my monitors being 2 different resolutions (3440x1440 and 2560x1440) it seems to think my monitors are the same size. How do I explain to the program that one monitor is longer than the other?

 

[ForgedBlades]

Tangentially related.

Should I be worried about burn-in on a modern LED television? I've been using my TV as a PC monitor for the last few months and it's always in the back of my mind.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Should I be worried about burn-in on a modern LED television? I've been using my TV as a PC monitor for the last few months and it's always in the back of my mind.

LED is basically only different from older flatscreens that they don't have fluorescent tubes behind the panel but use LEDs as backlight, which are more power saving and also live longer. You don't have to worry about burn in more than with any other modern flatscreen, which you don't have to worry much about. Only with Plasma and OLED burn-in is really an issue worth thinking about.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

2. for a laugh I want to use nvidia surround to combine my displays. My issue is that despite my monitors being 2 different resolutions (3440x1440 and 2560x1440) it seems to think my monitors are the same size. How do I explain to the program that one monitor is longer than the other?

If you could talk to it, what would you ask the program to change?

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

If you could talk to it, what would you ask the program to change?

"Monitor 1 is not the same size and monitor 2, you stupid nigger. Monitor 1 is longer so the middle point is in Monitor 1, not at the bezel."

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

"Monitor 1 is not the same size and monitor 2, you stupid nigger. Monitor 1 is longer so the middle point is in Monitor 1, not at the bezel."

Surround is a wrap-around thing for flight sim spergs. Use the regular windows/linux screen options to configure that correctly.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I've been looking for a small (but not too small) 16:10 or 3:2 oled portable monitor, such a thing just doesn't seem to exist outside of inbuilt into a high-end notebook or tablet.

I've spent some time on researching oleds. I wasn't really aware that the situation with them isn't all that great. Even Apple has turned away from them in favor of more traditional IPS screens in their current devices. Lots of oled failure content on youtube, too, from burn in (which really is more of a "burn out" technically, as the pixels diminish) to complete pixel failures. It ain't pretty. There's apparently technology in the pipeline to make them more reliable but who knows, maybe it's another plasma dead-end. It's like god doesn't want us to have perfect blacks.

I got to see such an current iPad last weekend in person and the screen was gorgeous anyways. It doesn't do micro-LED like the pro version but in a screen of such a small size it doesn't really matter as you rarely get any backlight bleed and black levels are always pretty good anyways, if the screen isn't incredibly shitty. I kinda have a 3:2 portable monitor in sight, 13.5" with a resolution of 3000x2000, 267 dpi. It's probably the panasonic panel from the Microsoft Surface Book 2 somebody built some monitor electronics around, as that seems to be the only 13.5" panel in existence. The pricing is pretty attractive at around a hundred bucks and I might bite.

 

[werbwub]

I've spent some time on researching oleds. I wasn't really aware that the situation with them isn't all that great. Even Apple has turned away from them in favor of more traditional IPS screens in their current devices. Lots of oled failure content on youtube, too, from burn in (which really is more of a "burn out" technically, as the pixels diminish) to complete pixel failures. It ain't pretty. There's apparently technology in the pipeline to make them more reliable but who knows, maybe it's another plasma dead-end. It's like god doesn't want us to have perfect blacks.

I got to see such an current iPad last weekend in person and the screen was gorgeous anyways. It doesn't do micro-LED like the pro version but in a screen of such a small size it doesn't really matter as you rarely get any backlight bleed and black levels are always pretty good anyways, if the screen isn't incredibly shitty. I kinda have a 3:2 portable monitor in sight, 13.5" with a resolution of 3000x2000, 267 dpi. It's probably the panasonic panel from the Microsoft Surface Book 2 somebody built some monitor electronics around, as that seems to be the only 13.5" panel in existence. The pricing is pretty attractive at around a hundred bucks and I might bite.

Oled burn-in isn't an issue if you run your panel at normal brightness and don't leave your screen on 24/7. my c1 has 6.7k hours and has no burn in. I would definitely save up the money and splurge on a oled.

 

[CHARizard]

Necroing this thread. I am pulling the trigger on this monitor probably tonight, tell me if I am retarded.

Amazon.com: LG 45GR65DC-B 45-inch Ultragear Curved Gaming Monitor, QHD, 200Hz, 1ms, UltraWide Display, 32:9, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, VESA DisplayHDR 600, HDMI 2.1 x2, DP, UBS x3, Tilt/Height/Swivel Stand Black : Electronics

I currently have 2 27 inch 1440p monitors mounted side by side in a hybrid Mac\Windows set up (primarily Mac WFH). I use a KVM to switch between my laptop and desktop. I am looking at curved because currently I am turning my neck side to side while working from home and its getting annoying, plus the giant bezel directly in the middle.

This LG 45 inch is the same width as both of my current monitors, but curved to reduce neck tilt. It also has picture in picture mode, something that seems really cool to have if I wanted to use both my windows and mac at the same time, or I wanted to connect a game console. $700 is the price point where I have to sit and think before hitting checkout, I also need to add another $100 for a monitor arm on top of it.

If anyone has any thoughts let me know.

 

[hideandgoseekchampion]

WOOHOO! A NEW THREAD TO BITCH IN! LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOO!


Why are vertical monitors so fucking expensive? (unless im blind and retarded) It just seems that you add a latch that allows it to flip 90 degrees and thats it.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Why are vertical monitors so fucking expensive? (unless im blind and retarded) It just seems that you add a latch that allows it to flip 90 degrees and thats it.

If you put a normal LCD monitor vertical, it changes the intended subpixel arrangement which will not look too good. If your OS of choice uses anything other than grayscale aliasing, it will also make fonts look weird. Since most people seem to be perfectly happy with blur-o-vision ~100 ppi screens, I guess it does not matter to most. MacOS does grayscale aliasing with no hinting (which is the best way to do fonts on screens with high PPI -which Apple calls "Retina"- leading to that smooth font appearance in MacOS) while last time I checked, Windows has cleartype that doesn't deal well with non-standard subpixel layouts and is also very difficult to change in a sane way. Linux is the wildcard and can do whatever at least in X, if you know how to configure it.
--

Since it's impossible to tell in what reliability state current OLED is in from second-hand accounts and I did not want to wait any longer for a good offer you can buy locally, I finally took the plunge and bought a 16" "mobile" OLED monitor, 3840x2400, 16:10 from China. That's a PPI of ~280 and should be like looking at god's face. It's basically just a high end samsung AMOLED panel intended for big notebooks put into something resembling a monitor frame. I first wanted to buy a panel myself and rig something up but then I found out that the eDP connectors on these are a bit different and that there are no publically available datasheets. I also don't want to buy a notebook. The screen manufacturer claims AMD Freesync Pro capability (tbf I have my doubts, but hey, maybe) so at least theoretically, it should also support 50 Hz content, which is important for some old computers I intend to use with it and which just look wrong on bigger screens. I also really like small and sharp screens. We will see.

 

[AmpleApricots]

AMOLED

Everyone probably waited with baited breath on my trip report. I got my amoled screen and it is okay. The blacks are black and that is by far the nicest thing about it.

Freesync was a bold lie by the Chinaman. It's on the box and the small description that comes with it even tells about a freesync option in the OSD but no freesync claim by the firmware. The screen does 60 Hz and that's it. You can feed it with a wide range of input refresh rates and it will dutyfully display them in the OSD but it doesn't matter, internally it gets up/downsampled to 60 Hz, with the judder/stutter/tearing that adds. This makes me believe the controller can probably do it, just the panel can't. Since the pixel refresh rate with oled is so incredibly fast, there is no blurriness when scrolling/panning etc.. Interestingly, this can make things look quite jumpy and stuttery, even if they shouldn't. Because of normal (e.g. IPS) inherent lower refresh, the blur makes things look smoother than they are. Never thought about it that way. Sadly, I wanted to use this screen for PAL and ~24 fps movies, and it not supporting vrr together with it's inherent "jumpiness" makes it look incredibly stuttery, which is a huge downside, especially since recent IPS panels introduced me to the wonders of vrr. I went down a rabbit hole because of this and actual support for any variable refresh rate technology seems to be very rare in oled land. Maybe because of the quick refresh, OLED always looks stuttery? Some people seem to think so. I tried it with 30 fps content via a vrr test program and yes, there is defintively some stutter my IPS screens don't have as apparent at 60 Hz, vsync on and all.

The colors are good. The contrast is amazing and blacks are black but if you had high quality IPS screens that were made recently, the colors won't blow you away as much as it would be the case for people that come from cheap VA screens. Set to sRGB color space, it looks really similar to any IPS screen I have. This speaks for the calibration of the screens. (otherwise they'd vary wildly) It's mostly nice if you deal with contrast-rich stuff e.g. colorful fonts on black or dark scenes in movies and here it really shines. I don't have a need for the extended color spaces and their coverage. I am pretty sure others do, but IPS panels are not behind here, quite the contrary even.

283 PPI is amazing and native resolutions basically do no matter anymore at that pixel density. Every resolution will look sharp because the monitor has tons of very tightly packed pixels to do interpolation. No surprise there.

After setting the monitor up, (still with factory defaults, so 50 brightness) I had a website up that had white, square like objects on black blackground. I then got a phonecall and went away to talk for approx. 15 minutes. When I came back and switched away from the browser to something else, there were faint dark shadows where those objects were for a few moments. They went away eventually, but it gave me pause.

I gotta say, I am slightly underwhelmed. The lack of vrr in this particular model is also a big downside. I mean, this is a very high quality and good panel and if you didn't know good panels before that, it will blow you away but it doesn't seem wildly better than some good IPS panels I have. For about 400 bucks, I don't really think it's worth it. Then I really wonder about the long term reliability. The same manufacturer has an almost identical model with IPS panel. Since I'm a sucker for punishment and chinese specials, I'm going to order that one too, as comparsion. It costs about half. Thanks for reading my blog!

 

[Cougar Pump]

Can't deal with anything 60hz, been too spoiled by higher-hz units for too long. Had 120hz since the early 2000s (with CRTs) and only made the leap to LCD once they caught up (around 2010). GtG response time is my new demon to slay though.

Had an eye on LG's new 32" panel 32GS95UE - 4K at 240hz, or press a button and it'll do 1080 at 480hz. However, it's stupid money and I can't justify the jump upgrading from my current 240hz 2k, although the motion blur is starting to annoy me.

Panel tech feels like it's going pretty crazy lately, hard to keep up. Shame there's not as much progress on GPU speeds and games are clearly bifurcating into competitive high-fps titles and everything else that's not going to get close.

 

[Archeops]

I ended up buying this MSI-branded 27" WQHD IPS Nvidia G-Sync gaming monitor from Costco after seeing it in-person and not being impressed by the ones that Best Buy had.

I just wish I could find a nice IPS monitor with the clarity of a VA monitor.

 

[WULULULULU]

Can't deal with anything 60hz, been too spoiled by higher-hz units for too long. Had 120hz since the early 2000s (with CRTs) and only made the leap to LCD once they caught up (around 2010). GtG response time is my new demon to slay though.

Had an eye on LG's new 32" panel 32GS95UE - 4K at 240hz, or press a button and it'll do 1080 at 480hz. However, it's stupid money and I can't justify the jump upgrading from my current 240hz 2k, although the motion blur is starting to annoy me.

Panel tech feels like it's going pretty crazy lately, hard to keep up. Shame there's not as much progress on GPU speeds and games are clearly bifurcating into competitive high-fps titles and everything else that's not going to get close.

This hits me hard. My rig has a Gigabyte GS27QC and 165Hz is pure smooth. Making it curved only makes this sentiment more agreeable.

 

[Pascal's Wagie]

CLEAR!

If I had the money I would buy this:

[Dell U4021QW]

I got the updated version of this, the U4025QW. It's pretty sweet, and hits 120hz. I wanted a 2160p work/production monitor and didn't want to go with OLED yet. The only complaint I had was ghosting in some games, but my eyes have gotten used to it. I have it with two other monitors on arms, both 1440p. It sits above a Gigabyte M34WQ with a vertical ASUS PA278CGV to the side.