Article: Time to upgrade your monitor

Hi All,

I found the following article very important/useful for all of us who work many hours in front of a computer monitor, especially programmers dealing with text:

It’s long but a very detailed read about text rendering and perception with a great deal of useful info.
Sharing it.

3 Likes

Thanks for the share. The author makes statements about how he doesn’t care about gamut or nits or color accuracy, but only how good the text looks. This is probably what most programmers care most about, but good text probably comes in a good monitor with high ppi, high nits, and good color accuracy. Being a photographer (novice) - I am constantly trying new monitors to get better results, and the better ones do display text better than the cheaper ones.

My main problem is dropping them on the floor (three in past year). Last one I dropped didn’t die completely but had only about 15 percent of display area wiped out. It wasn’t leaking any liquid crystal (probably poisonous, but don’t know for sure). I thought - good - I’ll just duct-tape its cracks, and all will be well. Wrong! Over about two weeks, the bad spot slowly grew until it was half the screen! Also, the cracks show super-high intensity blue/white, which is probably bad for eyes. So, my suggestion is not to do as I did … LOL. Doesn’t seem very safe thing to do.

Interesting read, indeed… I need to upgrade my “work laptop” first, as it is a 10-year old HDMI 1.4 only PC that can’t even output 120Hz (which the monitor does support) :laughing:

But in my living room I have my main gaming PC connected to a 4K TV (with 2.5x scaling) and the difference is incredible. Texts looks so much smoother it is absurd!

That being said, this guy doesn’t work much in Windows. In Windows non-integer scaling is a non-issue with recent and well coded apps, as it does no scaling AT ALL. It just informs the application whatever scaling the monitor uses (and even informs if the app changed to another monitor with a different DPI setting), and the application itself draws its UI with scaled font sizes and scaled (hopefully vector) graphics, with no burring.