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Benefits of resolutions beyond 1080p

This is a genuine question, so please don’t do me like Vlad the Impaler. What is your opinion about the benefits of upgrading to displays beyond 1080p?

I have never watched a film or a video at 1080p and thought it needed to look better. When it comes to software, I feel like I would want a proportionally larger monitor to keep the same DPI PPI, otherwise older software might be a pain to use, and that maintained software UI won’t necessarily benefit. However, that line of thinking is probably a niche concern of mine? I don’t play first person shooters, so maybe that’s another thing I don’t get. I have read some people saying that text looks better, which I could buy I suppose?

I wouldn’t say the same for 800x600, but maybe if I were a boomer I would have made that post, too. Is this something I would get over if I start using a modern display?

e: thanks to everyone for great responses! Based on the popular sentiment, I’m thinking I would take to 1440p just fine, presuming I get a screen ratio, DPI PPI, and screen size that suit my preferences. I am really relieved that I’m not super weird for being completely fine with my ancient monitors. :)

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I have a 4k TV and don’t get it either. Watched the odd video in 4k and the colors are maybe a bit crisper, but that’s about it. I’d have to compare movies side by side to actually spot the difference.

Not worth it IMHO.

Can’t tell for screens though, I don’t even know whether mine does 4k or not. Was part of the home-office package from my company. I’ll have to check that tomorrow, only returning from a business trip tonight.

ReversalHatchery ,

The benefit of the higher resolution shouldn’t be about the colors, but that with bigger screens the movie does not start to get blurry.

For desktop use on a desktop display, I don’t see the benefit either. Even less on a phone, that is totally unnecessary.

BorgDrone ,

I have a 4k TV and don’t get it either. Watched the odd video in 4k and the colors are maybe a bit crisper, but that’s about it. I’d have to compare movies side by side to actually spot the difference.

The point of 4k is that you can have a TV twice as large as your 1080p TV before it without losing sharpness.

I can definitely tell the difference on my 77” OLED.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Mine is 65" and I really can’t, unless I switch between files rapidly. 720p to 1080p, definitely. But larger, hardly.

BorgDrone ,

What is your viewing distance?

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I’d say about 2.5 meters, maybe 3.

BorgDrone ,

You should see a clear difference at that distance. You may want to get your eyes checked, your eyes get worse as you get older and it can really creep up on you without noticing.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I just did during my annual checkup 2 weeks ago shortly after turning 40, still got 20/20 vision. No idea then…

BorgDrone ,

Strange. I used to have a 65” OLED, I sit farther away than you (about 3.5 meters) and could easily spot the difference even though I’m near sighted and at that time my prescription needed updating. Now, with new glasses and a 77” screen the difference is like night and day.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Maybe my TV is due for an upgrade then. Or the source movies I tried were 4k in name only but just some upscaled older ones… I’ll do some more testing with more recent ones.

BorgDrone , (edited )

Lots of movies sold on 4k bluray are upscales/‘remasters’ of the 2k version. Some are re-scans from the original 35mm film, those can be pretty good, depending on the source material. There is a huge variety in the quality or 4k movies.

If you can get your hands on it, try the LOTR 4k extended editions. If you get them from an ‘alternative source’ make sure you get one with untouched video (e.g. a remux). They are huge, about 100-120GB per movie but they look amazing. Wonder Woman 1984 also looks really good in 4k HDR, especially the opening scene.

4k content on streaming services varies a lot in quality, but is generally not as good as 4k bluray. Amazon Prime Video looks quite bad, terrible compression with lots of artifacts. Out of the streaming services, Apple TV+ has the best 4k video quality by far.

The LOTR 4k bluray is in my opinion on of the best showcases, especially if you compare it to the HD version. The HD bluray looks good, don’t get me wrong, but that’s all it is. Just a good movie with nice pictures. In 4k HDR with Dolby Atmos it’s something completely different. It’s like magic, almost impossible to look away from the screen. You end up starting it up just to see what the quality looks like and before you know it you unintentionally watched the entire extended edition.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I see, thanks a lot! I don’t have any devices that read physical discs, so it’s been streaming and alternatively sourced content exclusively. I don’t actually mind paying for media, but living in China significantly limits my access to unaltered, genuine discs that come with English audio tracks, unfortunately.

I’ll see if I can get my hands on a full sized LOTR copy for testing purposes then. Thanks a lot for the lengthy response, much appreciated!

sk ,

It only matters when you are watching on something like a projector screen which is large enough that pixels are not dense enough, thats when more resolution improves quality. For a daily use 23 inch monitor 4k is not worth the cost over 1080p in my opinion.

lnxtx ,
@lnxtx@feddit.nl avatar

I have a 1440p 24 " monitor with 120 DPI setting.
Resolution is much better for fonts - helps with my astigmatism.

The 1440p is a compromise between price and performance.

If you can, go to the electronic shops and see in person.

tedu ,

I have some older laptops that are 1080p, which was great at the time, but they are now obviously inferior at displaying text, etc. 4k can be overkill, 1440p (or 1600, or thereabouts) is usually fine (for me).

WalrusDragonOnABike ,

On a 27" monitor, it makes a huge deal for things like web-browsing, spreadsheets, etc. For video games, its not something I generally notice the difference in (with a notable exception being Terraria). Having smaller UI (but still clear) to give more usable space is the main benefits imo.

wander1236 ,
@wander1236@sh.itjust.works avatar

I don’t really care about my TV being 4K, but I like the extra desktop space on my PC.

mbirth ,

This! My 32” 4K display is great for the screen estate. I’ve learned I can work much better with one large display than with 2-3 separate 1080p/1200p displays.

But on my 40” TV I couldn’t care less about it being “only” 1080p. That’s more than enough.

AeroLemming ,

I had a 1440p monitor and “downgraded” back to 1080p when it broke because I could barely tell the difference when gaming and I get a significantly higher framerate in most games at 1080p, which does make a big difference for me.

Klaymore ,
@Klaymore@sh.itjust.works avatar

You can also run the game at 1080p and use FSR to upscale it to native resolution, that’s what I often do on my 4k monitor.

AeroLemming ,

Yeah, but that doesn’t work well on 1440p because it doesn’t scale perfectly.

Crashumbc ,

Yeah this one of the cases where not upgrading is better.

If you mostly play FPS online and/or fast paced games, it can make a difference.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ve been on 1080p since highschool, over 15 years, works perfectly for me. I value high frame rate over resolution/fidelity. Luckily for me, even mid-tier hardware is so powerful now, AAA games on ultra at 1080p can easily hit 160+

I have an AMD 6700XT and a 5800X3D with a 240Hz 1080p monitor, it’s wonderful for me.

Shady_Shiroe ,
@Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world avatar

From my experience, I could only tell the difference if monitor was bigger than 27" like a 32" monitor but it wasn’t something that I couldn’t live without, well I think it’s cuz I run with 3 monitors so you are always looking at different things

lurch , (edited )

well, you get more pixels. -> more room.

i needed more pixels/room, so i got me a 4k 55" (139cm) tv for a display and it’s basically like four 1080p displays seamlessly fused together. of course, you can also sit far away and upscale everything and things will look slightly smoother, like pixels will be even less noticeable.

some details in fullscreen pictures become visible that would require zooming in on 1080p, because on 4k fullscreen basically is like 1080p already zoomed in.

a problem are color gradients: without HDR on 4k you can now see there’s not enough colors in 24bit colorspace (000000 - FFFFFF 8bit per channel without alpha/transparency) to fill large areas with gradients. you have to spread/dither to get a smooth gradient on a 24bit 4k wallpaper, but it’s a small price to pay for more room.

CrazyLikeGollum ,

My experience has been that 1440p is noticeable jump in quality on desktop monitors but less so laptops. On desktop 4K is virtually unnoticeable, a high refresh rate, HDR, and OLED are far more noticeable.

For TV, I’ve found that it depends more on distance from the screen and resolution and bit rate of the media. I sit about 8’ from a 65” 4K tv and the difference between Blu-ray quality at 1080p and 4K is night and day.

Contramuffin ,

The screen size matters significantly. More specifically, what humans care about is pixel density. A 24 inch 1080p screen does not look the same as a 27 inch 1080p, which does not look the same as a 32 inch 1080p.

A 24 inch 1080p screen is perfectly fine. A 27 inch 1080p, you can start to see the pixels more clearly. A 32 inch 1080p IMO is unacceptably bad.

I would say the standard should be 1080p for 24 inch or under, 1440p for 24-27 inch, 4K for 27 inch or above

I personally run a 24 inch 1440p screen because I’m pretty picky with pixel density, and the monitor was relatively good deal.

xia ,

1440p is kinda the sweet spot, for me.

andrade ,

There’s more to take into account other than just resolution, like

  • color space coverage (100% sRGB is quite affordable nowadays, I wouldn’t go less than this; on the other hand, >95% DCI-P3 or AdobeRGB still on the expensive side in comparison and not as widespread),
  • screen type,
  • brightness, and
  • refresh rate.

And resolution itself should be paired with monitor size for it to be meaningful. For example:

  • 24 inch monitor at 1080p = 92 PPI
  • 24 inch monitor at 2160p = 184 PPI
  • 32 inch monitor at 2160p = 138 PPI
  • 46 inch monitor at 2160p = 96 PPI

In Windows and Linux anything around 92 to 98 PPI gives you easily readable text at 100% scaling. This is a good baseline. There are PPI calculators online: dpi.lv

The 24 inch screen at 2160p (which is 4K) has twice the pixel density of the 24 inch screen at 1080p. That means if you would set your display resolution scaling in the OS to 200% you’d get the same font size as <24 inch, 1080p, 100% scaling>. However, because the density is much higher, everything looks much clearer.

The benefits are larger when reading text, IMO. You still notice an improvement with movies, of course. Mobile phones and tablets, even the cheaper ones, usually have significantly higher pixel density than computer monitors which is one reason they look better.

Of the three examples above, the 24 inch monitor at 4K will look better than the other three monitors because it has higher PPI. (Assuming all else is equal like screen type, color coverage, brightness, etc.)

I feel like I would want a proportionally larger monitor to keep the same DPI

Let’s say you want a new monitor. I suggest looking at the PPI and not just the resolution or monitor size in isolation. These two units should be paired.

For example, a 32 inch monitor at 4K has 138 PPI. The font will be tiny at 100% scaling but that’s expected. In this case it so happens that 1.5 x 92 PPI = 138 PPI. So by going to the OS display settings and increasing scaling to 150% you get the same font size as <24 inch, 1080p, 100% scaling> but everything looks clearer.

The 46 inch monitor above is 4K but because the screen is so large this comes out at only 96 PPI. So in terms of quality it would be quite close to the 24 inch monitor at 1080p.

PPI is one of the most important characteristics but don’t disregard the rest. Try at least full sRGB coverage. And for panel type IPS is a good choice if you can afford it. (I’m afraid of OLED because of burn-in issues and I can’t afford to replace monitors like they’re socks. And mini-led is very expensive.)

About the refresh rate, I don’t game and for movies it’s kind of useless. But I do notice a difference moving the mouse and scrolling pages on the browser. (My external monitors are 60 hz and my laptop is >100 hz.)

On a side note, Apple laptop screens tend to look nice because they have high PPI and good color coverage (among other things) whereas PC/Linux laptops for the most part have low spec screens. This doesn’t have to be the case, of course. My work laptop (I’m using Linux) has >200 PPI with near 100% DCI-P3 and fonts look great on it.

087008001234 OP ,

Eeerp. Yep, I meant PPI not DPI. Thanks for the write-up about text scaling, though, I will note that when I end up upgrading. The PPI calc also looks interesting.

andrade ,

They’re usually used interchangeably.

For what I understand, PPI is pixels per inch in a digital image, and DPI are dots per inch on a printed image. So we can use PPI or DPI for the same image depending on whether its on our computer screen (PPI) or printed on a sheet of paper (DPI).

eugenia ,
@eugenia@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m using a 32" 4k monitor without scaling, even if my eyesight is not the best. I have no trouble at all with it. It’s the more common 27" 4k monitors that have tiny fonts and need scaling. But 32", 4k it’s fine at 100%!

As for 1080p, it’s enough for most things. You mentioned the dpi comparing it to a 24" 4k monitor, but why would you need 24" for a 1080p monitor? Anything above 20" is a waste for 1080p.

andrade ,

How much someone scales the display is of course subjective. I could use a 32 inch 4K monitor at 100% scale but it would be uncomfortable to read.

The Windows operating system used 96 DPI/PPI as a default (Mac was 72 DPI/PPI) and a 23 inch monitor at 1080p is exactly 96 PPI. So it’s no accident I like PPI at the mid-90s.

The reason I used a 24 inch monitor, instead of a 23 inch monitor, as an example it’s because I have a monitor that size.

N0x0n ,

Nobody is talking about how games look sharper? Looking at 1080p vs 1440p side by side, you can clearly see the difference on how the textures look less “pixelated” and more rounded up.

It looks like you have a better AA effect and better color management (depends on your pannel though).

I really enjoy/see the change from 1080p to 1440, but you clearly need good enough hardware to make it run smoothly. It’s vram hungry and GPU demanding.

It wouldn’t be that way if there wasn’t any reason to eat that much more vram and GPU resources… Higher resolution textures

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