and welcome to my personal monitor dilemma! After years of using 1 27" 1440p display I thought it is finally time to start something new.
So I hooked a 32" 4k display up to my desktop. I liked the additional real estate and sharper fonts but somewhat the image quality was a bit lacking. Then I worked (Admin and hobby Media Production) with this solution for 3 weeks.
Still did not feel satisfied and thought well might as well try the multi monitor route and hooked up a 27" 4k together with my 27" 1440p. Was a bit shocked how much sharper fonts appear on the 27" 4K display compared to the 1440p and even to the 32" 4K one. With a lot of “bigger” displays I worked on very briefly in the past it always felt like the fonts looked like “shit” even if they have “okayish” ppi. I am not an expert on display technology so those are just my observations.
Long story short now I really do not want anything that is less sharp than this 27" 4K display but I think still need just a tiny bit more real estate. A second full 27" display seems too much and I move my head way too much for my liking also I am not making the best use of all the available pixels. Thinking about getting an older 24" 4k display as secondary screen but maybe there is a better solution.
There is a LG “5K ultrawide” but it seems that it is a terrible products with lots of issues reported online and only one of those kind being available does not inspire much confidence.
Also I am quite sensitive to flickering and certain types of color schemes (classic darkmode is pain in the ass for me to read). So I need something with a decent backlight. Oled offerings would be really interesting as well but it appears none of the ones I would be interested in will surface in the foreseeable future.
I hope this was not too much rambling for you guys and you might have some valuable input for me.
I dropped back to 1080p monitors. 4k at 27" was horrid for my ageing eyes. For the price of one good 4k monitor I got three 1080p 24" monitors and a three monitor stand. Two I have in portrait with the middle one in landscape. For coding and working on my dissertation (for my masters) it’s been a god send. The portrait monitors work great for working in the shell and for reading data sheets and academic papers.
I’m on Linux. Windows, for me, has always seemed to be better at high density displays.
IMHO 4k for 27" is about right. If your fonts are too small or whatever that’s your OS being shit at display, not the monitor’s fault.
If your OS is NOT shit at DPI scaling, fonts look clearer with more definition - not smaller.
But yeah, going much above 27" - this is why 5k and 6k displays (regular 16:9 or 16:10) exist
The other thing - depending on your OS (well, certain versions of windows combined with certain apps) if you have two different DPI displays connected, windows can fuck things up and make stuff blurry on one or more monitors in an effort to “fix” scaling to be approximately the same size widgets on both displays.
Not sure if it still does it a heap but early win10 (and win8.1) was terrible for this.
On Windows and Linux I have no Issues with scaling and fonts at the same physical size of my low res display are just sooo much sharper if I compare them side by side. Seems like scaling was an issue for you
Where do 5k and 6k displays in that size exists? I can only find 5k 27" and that one Apple display which does not play nice with other operating systems. Am I just blind?
I’m 45, your eyes aren’t the problem - if the OS scales things properly its easier on your eyes than 1080p chunkovision because the fonts have more detail.
I have to agree the sharper fonts as I mentioned in the OP are such a bliss on the eyes. Now I dream of a 32 " 5k OLED panel. But like with all good things the industry is not interested in producing those.
