Ask HN: Why is a 5K monitor exciting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8469342

by tenpoundhammer • 12 years ago

5 8 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Why is a 5K monitor exciting? I don't see any huge benefits...

It's not. It's just another toy. Here's a picture of Thompson and Ritchie creating Unix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#History. I don't see any 5K monitors.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

When we read text on a monitor, lots of tricks are needed to make it look acceptable given that the number of pixels involved are so few: anti aliasing, font hinting to remove display artifactsm and so on. These are only partially effective, and you can usually see the pixels in some way. For vectors it's even worse...no font hinting, sub pixel alignments are common, plenty of crappy artifacts. Compare to reading from a high ppi laser printer...everything looks so nice and smooth. Today, our displays are still dot matrix.

Basically, a 5K monitor gives you the experience of not being able to see the pixels...what you see looks more like a high quality printout and less like pixel art.

Throwaway12830• 12 years ago

Agreed. Then we can finally send Arial and Verdana to the grave and use other fonts. We're tied to these fonts at the moment because they're the only option for sharp body text on low PPI displays.

pedalpete• 12 years ago

At 27", I don't think it is. You can think about pixel size and then how many pixels are on the screen, as screen sizes get larger, so do pixels. On a 27" 1080p monitor, are you really looking at the pixels and thinking they are too large? How about 4k? We barely touched the surface of 4k at 27" and then we go and squeeze an extra 40% more pixels into the same size. I'd say at 50"+ screen maybe that would be noticeable, but at 27"?

Also, what content is going to be made for 5k? We're just getting 1080p and 4k is on the horizon. Will media companies jump to Apple's 5k? How good are website images going to look (depends on dpi I suppose), but that's a lot of pixels.

Then comes what I find the strangest part. Yesterday there was a question on Quora about why Apple only has an 8megapixel camera in the iPhone. http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Apple-use-an-8-megapixel-camera... almost all the comments say "pixels don't matter", and on 1080p monitors, I'd tend to agree with them.

But now you've got photos with essentially a 4k resolution, and everybody jumping up and down that pixels don't count. Then today, we have all this talk about how the new iMac has so many pixels on the screen and how great that is. So which is it? Pixels don't count, or pixels do count? How can they not count on capture, but count on presentation (I would accept that the reverse could be true).

orangecat• 12 years ago

On a 27" 1080p monitor, are you really looking at the pixels and thinking they are too large?

Yes, absolutely. Pixels are too large on my 21" 1080p display, let alone 27". That's probably because I've been using a retina MacBook Pro for a while now, so normal DPI displays look bad by comparison.

We barely touched the surface of 4k at 27" and then we go and squeeze an extra 40% more pixels into the same size.

5120x2880 lets you have the same real estate as 2560x1440, with exactly twice the DPI which allows better scaling.

almost all the comments say "pixels don't matter"

Apples (sorry) and oranges. A sharp 4MP image is better than a grainy 10MP. That's not a factor for displays.

joesmo• 12 years ago

I agree. The whole "retina" idea of cramming pixels till they're too small to see adds very little if anything to a display. I'd much rather have a 32" or 36" display that's 5k where I can actually use all those pixels to place windows and such and still read the text than have the software scale down graphics and essentially give me a display I already have (1440p).

paulmatthijs• 12 years ago

The only use I can think of is Media Production, and I'd buy one in an instant. 5K means you can have a 4k preview with stuff on the side (mixer, bin) or a 8k RED source that you crop with more than enough real estate to have a proper view of the end result. Sounds a lot better than working with a 8K stream on 2.5K. The sound guys are going to happy too: more plugins in view, and more faders in Pro Tools. Who said Apple isn't targeted at the Pro's anymore?

TobbenTM• 12 years ago

Compared to the standard 4K or compared to 1080p?

Ask HN: Why is a 5K monitor exciting?

Related Stories