My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable."
At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out.
Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement.
I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel.
As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.
Yes this. I don't use screens below 200dpi anymore (right now I have 4K on 24", at 200% scaling) and many people say that it's a waste because it's way too high. But I can still see pixels that are off. I just love sharp text. Which everyone is used to on their phones, I don't understand why people don't want the same on their computer which they probably use a lot more hours per day (I sure do)
I'm sure I would notice and be annoyed by this fringing too unless the pixels were so small I really couldn't see them. Probably needs to be slightly higher than 200 then. But I haven't seen oled monitors with such high DPIs. The highest I've seen is 4K on 27" which wouldn't even do for me on LCD.
I have Dell P2415Q, from 2015. There are, like, 4 other (legacy) models of 24" 4K out there, and that's it. I've no idea why they don't manufacture them.
I also have one bought used. It’s the only way to have 4k and 200% scaling on Linux without everything being too big or too small. Size and ppi are perfect but sadly other aspects are becoming really dated (bad colors and contrast, high latency, low refresh rate etc).
I also have one, and it's holding up pretty well. A month or so ago I broke out my colorimeter and it had almost 100% sRGB at around 120 cd/m2. I don't recall the delta E, but it was very low.
While I didn't measure the backlight, it does seem to not go as bright as before, judging by the levels I set in the OSD. I never went above 70% or so when the sun was shining in the room (not directly on the screen, though), so it didn't have any effect on me.
I understand there are two version, I have the second one. But I don't think there's a difference in the panel itself, I think the change was related to HDMI support.
I can't comment on the latency, the only games I played on it were Civilization and Anno Something. Never had a problem for this.
I have been using P2415Qs for over 10 years by now. Replaced some, bought second hand, had to ship to Dell at one point because of the wake issues (pointless: they never really fixed them), so I know the drill. There are actually 4 versions.
The last new one I bought in 2018 I actually paid the same price for it than when I bought my first one in 2015, so it is one of those few computer accessories that significantly increased in price over its course rather than decrease.
If you cannot see the P2415Q degrading and/or being generally crap in any metric (EXCEPT DPI) when compared to even the non-IPS black Dell monitors from this decade, you are simply blind. They are early HiDPI-revival-era panels, and it shows.
Some of the newer IPS black panels are so good that it is tempting to just take the DPI hit and go 27''... albeit with care as it seems Dell has decided this last year to put some filter that further increases blurriness.
I don't pretend that I have the best vision out there, though I don't think I'm completely blind since I don't run into things. But I actually measured this display, and it's within specs. So maybe both I and my colorimeter are blind? Sure, it's not absolutely impossible, but how likely is it?
I actually have a newer "ips black" dell, an ultrasharp 3223qe and yes, it's much better.
But what I'm saying is that the old one is still good. However, I never pretended it was as good as current models. That's moving goalposts. The initial comment was about the display degrading, so comparing it to itself when new (not even other similar models from that era!). Mine only seems to have become somewhat dimmer, but not enough to matter in my day-to-day use since it's still brighter than I need.
I have the same Dell (since 2016) and love it. But eventually I transitioned last year to a 27" 4K monitor. Still almost as sharp (KDE at 175% works fine for me).
yeah, I've tried their 24" 4k monitor, was okay, but not great, so returned.
24" is the max size I can tolerate with short-sightedness, but avoid using glasses for the monitor.
Just a nitpick… it's ppi (pixels per inch). dpi is unit used in printing.
I have the same monitor and i believe over 200ppi is pointless for desk monitor unless you are very close to it. It makes sense for laptops which you have much closer but i think most people have desk monitors way way further from the eyes.
I have a dual 4k/1080p(480hz) oled monitor at home I mostly run at 1080p and 4k lcd monitors at work. I bounce between both and really don't notice much difference. I need the text zoomed on 4k anyway, so it is effectively 1080p screen area, but sharper. Growing up in Atari days I don't mind pixels and actually like them. Latency and the 480hz is more important to me than 4k pixels.
I grew up in the Atari days too but I really need the HiDPI. I run at 200% scaling too, so effectively also 1080p. But I really love not or almost not being able to see pixels.
When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.
If you buy a really nice monitor, which for me starts at 6K 32” - the eBay computer will no longer drive it.
What I find insane is how long companies issued 19” 1080 screens to their employees. I don’t think that was a well calculated choice given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit for their 50k year employees. It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
I wouldn't call a 6k monitor "nice", that's way above that. I would love on of those, since I can't stand blurry text, but even for me that's way too expensive to justify. So as the sibling says, if people are looking at old used pcs on ebay, they're unlikely to drop more than a grand on the screen.
A 32" 4k screen is nice enough and a reasonable one [0] can be had for a third of that. My I don't-know-how-old desktop I saved from the bin at work sporting an i5-6500 could drive that with no issues.
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[0] Around 2020 I bought an LG something-or-other for 350 Euros for work, 32", 4k, some form of VA panel. It had pretty good colors and better contrast than the IPS monitor I use as a Sunday-photographer.
that's a weird start. for me the start is 4k with proper blacks & proper color calibration
> given that a couple of hundred more over 5 years would have surely improved productivity by a little bit
no company wants the bulk of it's people to improve their productivity by even a little bit. you should be productive enough, that's it.
> It felt almost done out of spite to keep people in their place
otherwise amazon and the likes would have competitors in every country. but I don't think it's out of spite.
it's the 'established' interpersonal culture between employers and employees, like in packs without natural alphas: if one beta-beta steals the show of the beta-alpha a few times too many, he's a goner. in packs with alphas the performer gets commended and a chance to compete for the top because you want your team to be lead by the currently best. hasn't been the case in our species for a long while now.
companies don't treat their employees bad out of spite, it's so they can stick to low, moderate(d) standards and cultures, ... and have an easy work life
Many employees are doing text work and, until recently, operating systems and apps did a really bad job of working with Hi DPI displays. Your best bet was to target around 115 DPI on a monitor for decent text rendering without having to deal with font scaling. 19" 1080p is perfect for that. You just gave them multiple monitors if you wanted more real estate.
I have a ThinkPad T420 that is sufficient for most tasks that don't involve HEVC acceleration. It's got a mobile Sandy Bridge i7, booting off of a SATA SSD.
The only thing that really needed an upgrade was the display. I ditched the crappy 1366x768 TN for a 1440p IPS and an LVDS-eDP conversion board. Looks fantastic. Runs great.
I can see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on phone screens, and I think it's worth the impact on battery life.
I can see the difference in speed between VSCode and editors like Sublime or Zed, however in this case I prefer the additional features at the cost of speed/smoothness.
At some point there were LCD monitors that had very noticeable to me chequerboard pattern - like with analogue TV, only half of the screen got lit up/refreshed, but with an alternating pattern rather than scan lines.
After asking the owner of said screen how he could stand that... "stand what?"
It’s not necessarily picky - it’s sometimes about physically different perception.
When DLP projectors first came out, I couldn’t watch them. I would see colors breaking in fast motion scenes and whenever I would move my head even slightly (and … we all move our head slightly often when watching a movie).
When I told other people, some of them nodded in understanding, but the vast majority thought I was making things up - for them, it was a rock solid picture.
One of my friends replied: “I can see about 300hz. Not all the time - only when I have secadic movements; but that means many fluorescents, DLPs and other light sources drive me crazy. I guess you’re also a member of crazy club”
Some people can hear 26khz. Some people can see DLPs. Some people can see the alternating pattern….
I had a (regrettable) 19" 4x3 ViewSonic display that made that problem obvious -- way back in 2008 or so.
My homework at that time revealed a couple of things:
1. Liquid crystals are individually driven by AC waveforms, not DC as one might assume. This is the nature of the beast. The frequency at which the signal alternates is not necessarily very high. Thus, sometimes, this alternating nature is visible.
2. Some displays use dithering. A given display might support just -- say -- 6 bits per subpixel. To get the full 8 or 10 or whatever number of bits that are expected as a final output, the in-between steps are approximated by switching between two values -- sometimes (again) at a fairly low frequency that is visible.
...
But anyway, that ViewSonic monitor: Most people thought it looked fine, but it drove me nuts.
There was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough.
Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era.
Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it.
But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better.
Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
The curse of knowledge really. Or perhaps more accurately “awareness”.
You know about things that are to others unknown unknowns. Since ignorance is bliss, it definitely feels like a curse to you, and since what one doesn’t know can hurt them, others would see as a blessing.
At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.
I have a newer Thinkpad (T14, Ryzen 6850) and while the sound is clear it's shameful how much better my wife's Macbook Air is. I only headphones now. I can't unhear it.
I've learned to come to terms with this mentality, mainly due to time constraints. Before, I would always do an insane amount of research and benchmarking to find the absolute best in its category, even for mundane things like a coffee grinder. I would aggregate thousands of reviews and turn them into sentiment analysis, cross-referencing reviews, and so on.
Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets.
Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better.
For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.
I think it's still worth going down the rabbit hole but only when 1) You know you're gonna use the thing a lot and for a long time and 2) You have some real, objective ways (i.e. beyond the very influenceable MOS) of measuring a real, humanly perceivable difference.
This is how I became quite learned in sound reproduction (incl. acoustics and psychoacoustics) then bought Genelec loudspeakers, for example. But I don't care about finding Samsung B-dies (I think?) for my RAM.
> 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't.
I second this. I can tell, and I would never wish that ability on my worst enemy. Very glad there's a (slim, but exists) market catering to that — and that I no longer have to buy a monitor that costs as much as a small motorcycle to not be constantly infuriated at everything in my field of vision when working.
Out of curiosity can you tell the difference in font rendering on a 14 inch laptop between 1920x1200 LCD screen and a higher resolution one?
I mean during normal work in normal position not trying to look really close.
At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out.
Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement.
I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel.
As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.