Comment by criddell
20 hours ago
> when 1920x1080 is perfectly fine for 99.999% of use cases
A lot of people here work with text all day every day and we would rather work with text that looks like it came out of a laser printer than out of a fax machine.
Of all places, HN should not be the one to casually conflate resolution and DPI!
The comments silently imply that they are talking about the same screen size, so 1920x1200 vs 4K is indeed a conversation about DPI.
The conflation was that 1920x1080 is a automatically poor clarity so that's why 4k is needed (at the same size). I.e. there is no resolution that is clear or unclear in and of itself, but that's how it is discussed.
One person talks about a laptop, another talks about their big coding desktop monitor, a third talks about a TV they use. None agree how much 1080p clarity makes sense for usage because the only thing quoted is resolution. This drives the assumption everyone is talking about the same sizes and viewing distances based on the resolution, which is almost never the case (before the conversation even gets to the age old debate of how much clarity is enough).
I'm sure if you ask the original commenter, they don't mean 1080p looks great for reading books at 34" just as much as GP wouldn't mean to compare screens of different sizes either.
I read their comment in the exact opposite way, and that your comment is exactly their point.
Of course that's what I meant. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise.
But who's going to use such a tiny display that would make 1080p look good?
E.g. 1080p on a 15" laptop is still sharper than 4k on a 32" desktop monitor. People do work on both modalities, they talk to the one they use, chaos ensues.
The implicit bit is that some of us also like to work with decently sized screens.
Unless you are using a tiny 4k monitor (>9") its not going to be laser print quality.
The comment you're replying to made use of a simile, which is a figure of speech using "like" or "as" that constructs a non-literal comparison for rhetorical effect.
A 21" 4k monitor is around the same resolution as a fax, so it was not really clear to me that it wasn't a literal comparison.
A 24" 1080p monitor is perfectly fine for working with text of any kind. I still use mine at home, even after a decade.
As others said, resolution is not everything. DPI and panel quality matters a lot.
A good lower resolution panel is better than a lower quality larger panel. Uniformity, backlight color, color rendering quality, DPI... all of them matters.
--
This comment has been written on a 28" 1440p monitor.
My theory is that people complaining about text on low resolution displays are using Macs. Apple has seriously gimped the text rendering on low-dpi displays essentially just downscaling a high-resolution render of the screen rather than doing proper resolution aware text hinting.
For some reason people then blame their old displays rather than apple for this.
Makes sense.
I sometimes connect the same 24" monitor (an ASUS VZ249Q) to my M1 MacBook via USB to DP (so no intermediate electronics), and the display quality feels inferior to KDE, for example.
Same monitor allows for unlimited working for hours without eye fatigue when driven from my Linux machine. I have written countless lines of code and LaTeX documents on that panel. It rivals the comfort of my HP EliteDisplay.
Yes we are! Macs don't play well with low dpi screens. However on high dpi screens they are better than anything else.
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"A lot of people are in meetings all day, and we would rather look at something that looks like we're there in person than at a limited webcam."
This depends a lot on whether you really want to be in these meetings, and what you're supposed to do in them.
The first part is obvious, for the second part if you're looking at slides and docs during the whole meeting, getting a super high fidelity view of all the other participants also looking (probably) at the slides doesn't help in any way.
I mean, Google Meet has a spotlight view exactly for this reason.
"We have this amazing revolutionary tech, and there only thing we can think of is sitting in meetings all day, working with Excel sheets, and answering emails"