Monitors and DPI Scaling - What is your situation?
- Thread starter sityeuropa
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If 1080p or 1440p aren't "good enough", then I wonder why so many people are still using those monitors, and why 4k is still in <1% market share? What few people here in an enthusiast forum are using has no considerable relation to the actual sales.Who said those are good enough?
1920x1080 compared to 3840x2160 is as good enough as 800x600 was, compared to 1920x1080.
(Hint: The most ubiquituous resolution is still 1366x768 -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/487487/leading-desktop-screen-resolutions-uk/ -- http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/worldwide)
Ps. Good =/= Good enough
The tech supports it but there isn't a huge range of content that really does it justice - with the compression and mastering even many blu-rays don't particularly do decent 1080p screen justice never mind 4K - the only 4K content I find that really does it justice is the odd Youtuber who knows what they are doing.
4K is nice for some stuff but it isn't as straight forward a story as previous resolution jumps - DPI scaling in Windows has far less benefits than other OSes and specific tasks aside 1440p usually has plenty of screen estate to play with.
4K (and future 8K) is beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking.
I'd attribute this mainly to false people's values, lack of understanding and knowledge. Maybe strong feel of poverty too. Maybe priority to buy the latest and greatest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy instead of proper notebook. Also, severe interference and propaganda by some who have an interest to promote lower quality, lower resolution screens. For whatever reasons.
I can give you one very simple example.
I made the following experiment. In my city there are two main big household appliances store chains. I was looking for a notebook with 4K display.
In the first chain, there were several 4K notebooks but all of them were switched off. When I said that I wanna see their image quality, no one was there to show me - they said there was no enough battery power in the notebooks
In the second chain, there was a single 4K 15" Dell notebook present. And a miracle - it was working. But... the guys working there, had no clue how to fix the scaling. Thanks to my touch to the notebook, for the first time, they saw a proper 4K picture on a 4K 15" notebook
How much is the market share of 4K TVs?
I'd attribute this mainly to false people's values, lack of understanding and knowledge. Maybe strong feel of poverty too. Maybe priority to buy the latest and greatest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy instead of proper notebook. Also, severe interference and propaganda by some who have an interest to promote lower quality, lower resolution screens. For whatever reasons.
I can give you one very simple example.
I made the following experiment. In my city there are two main big household appliances store chains. I was looking for a notebook with 4K display.
In the first chain, there were several 4K notebooks but all of them were switched off. When I said that I wanna see their image quality, no one was there to show me - they said there was no enough battery power in the notebooks
In the second chain, there was a single 4K 15" Dell notebook present. And a miracle - it was working. But... the guys working there, had no clue how to fix the scaling. Thanks to my touch to the notebook, for the first time, they saw a proper 4K picture on a 4K 15" notebook
How much is the market share of 4K TVs?
OR: they are perfectly content with their current setups, because they are "GOOD ENOUGH".4K (and future 8K) is beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking.
...
I'd attribute this mainly to false people's values, lack of understanding and knowledge. Maybe strong feel of poverty too. Maybe priority to buy the latest and greatest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy instead of proper notebook. Also, severe interference and propaganda by some who have an interest to promote lower quality, lower resolution screens. For whatever reasons.
I can give you one very simple example.
I made the following experiment. In my city there are two main big household appliances store chains. I was looking for a notebook with 4K display.
In the first chain, there were several 4K notebooks but all of them were switched off. When I said that I wanna see their image quality, no one was there to show me - they said there was no enough battery power in the notebooks
In the second chain, there was a single 4K 15" Dell notebook present. And a miracle - it was working. But... the guys working there, had no clue how to fix the scaling. Thanks to my touch to the notebook, for the first time, they saw a proper 4K picture on a 4K 15" notebook
How much is the market share of 4K TVs?
And what you call "propaganda" or "interest to promote lower quality, lower resolution screens", some would call business sense. When the market share is <1%, why would the retailers stock more expensive niche products that don't actually sell? They want to make money, so they stock the units that they can sell.
As for your example, there might even be an intentional tactic in there:
For most people, 4k is too much for a laptop (unless scaling is working properly, which currently isn't the case), so they might actually sell better with only the "4k" ads, rather than the actual image. Note: With TVs it's different, because you can walk next to it, see an active video footage, and don't have to worry about GUI scaling, etc. Well, I guess you could loop a video footage on a laptop, as well. But that would just confuse the customer.
And sales personnel not knowing how to fix the scaling? Sales personnel aren't always tech enthusiast, by default. I wouldn't be that surprised if you asked them what panel type it has, and they'd answer "LED" or "LCD".
4k market share in TVs:
In 2016, the market share of new sales was ~25% for 4k. I don't know whether there are any statistics for the actual market share, but it would naturally be quite a bit lower. (http://4k.com/news/4k-tv-sales-expected-to-grow-almost-40-in-2017-19818/)
But indeed, TV market will the main venue for 4k growth. But that's because with TVs, you don't have to worry about GPU grunt or GUI scaling issues. So, if the pricing isn't totally outlandish, there should be no downside to choosing a 4k TV over a FHD TV. Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply to computer monitors. Quite the opposite, really.
Why is scaling an issue for you? And have you considered a portrait-mode monitor?
Market share is a result, not a reason. How can it possibly improve when we are arguing here that the white is black. The scaling for normal daily usage, web browsing is perfectly fine.
Why do you keep distributing lies?
??
You apparently don't have much work experience or education background in retail business?
Here, let me quote the full sentence:
"When the market share is <1%, why would the retailers stock more expensive niche products that don't actually sell?"
Are you contesting the market share being <1%? Or are you contesting the retailer behaviour with niche products? Just so we're on the same page here.
And market share is indeed a RESULT of customers' purchasing decisions. But it's also a REASON for the retailers to promote one product more than the other. Heck, for some customers it's actually also a REASON for the previously mentioned purchasing decisions (if you can't figure out the logic behind that claim, I can also explain it to you). In summary, it's not just one or the other.
Furthermore, we should also forgo the idea that the 4k market share should improve, in itself. If it's a worthwhile feature, then its demand will grow, naturally. But on the other hand, if the consumers don't care about it, then it will manifest itself as a slower (or even diminishing) growth. I understand that 4k fans would love the tech to grow in demand, so that competition would bring down the prices and increase the overall quality. But if the great majority are not willing to pay the current premiums for it, let alone make compromises because of it, then shoving them down our throats will be futile.
No it's not! There are lots of quirky GUI behaviour when the OS has to work in anything else than the system's native resolution and 1:1 scaling. Just google "4k scaling issues", and you'll find plenty of stories regarding it. Why do YOU keep distributing lies?
No it isn't. Higher DPI is better. Even if it's just for desktop usage.
The problem is really 2 problems, the way windows deals with scaling and how resolution is linked to the size of your desktop. These really shouldn't be issues with windows today, but annoyingly they still are.
300 DPI is the sweet spot for ensuring that you can't see any pixels up close, as well as mitigating most resolution scaling issues. Because the pixels are so small, scaling to non-integer resolutions (as long as monitors stopped smoothing non-native resolutions) would still look nice and crisp due to the pixels being so small.
At a normal viewing distance, a 300 DPI display would look very good and there would be increased detail available for higher resolution textures and meshes in games. But even if your graphics card isn't fast enough, you can run the games as a lower resolution and not suffer the usual issues associated with non integer resolutions.
I run 2 computers with UHD displays at 2.0 Windows scaling. It isn't perfect, but for every day use it's fine. There are a few quirks, but they aren't issues that make the system even close to being unusable. It's mostly some items being slightly bigger or smaller than they should be. Microsoft has no excuse why this is still an issue on Windows 10, but ultimately it isn't this huge Windows breaking issue that you seem to think it is.??
You apparently don't have much work experience or education background in retail business?
Here, let me quote the full sentence:
"When the market share is <1%, why would the retailers stock more expensive niche products that don't actually sell?"
Are you contesting the market share being <1%? Or are you contesting the retailer behaviour with niche products? Just so we're on the same page here.
And market share is indeed a RESULT of customers' purchasing decisions. But it's also a REASON for the retailers to promote one product more than the other. Heck, for some customers it's actually also a REASON for the previously mentioned purchasing decisions (if you can't figure out the logic behind that claim, I can also explain it to you). In summary, it's not just one or the other.
Furthermore, we should also forgo the idea that the 4k market share should improve, in itself. If it's a worthwhile feature, then its demand will grow, naturally. But on the other hand, if the consumers don't care about it, then it will manifest itself as a slower (or even diminishing) growth. I understand that 4k fans would love the tech to grow in demand, so that competition would bring down the prices and increase the overall quality. But if the great majority are not willing to pay the current premiums for it, let alone make compromises because of it, then shoving them down our throats will be futile.
No it's not! There are lots of quirky GUI behaviour when the OS has to work in anything else than the system's native resolution and 1:1 scaling. Just google "4k scaling issues", and you'll find plenty of stories regarding it. Why do YOU keep distributing lies?
Maybe you can say this seriously when you stop using "4K" and "8K". Because it means that you've allowed marketing departments to teach you how to count. 3840 isn't 4 thousand. 7680 is absolutely not 8 thousand, yet you keep saying 4K and 8K...
For every day use if you stick to modern, mainstream apps the issues are minor irritations at best but beyond that it can be a lot more problematic. Quite a few - not that old - games will just crash on starting up in Windows 10 with other than 100% "scaling" quite a few less mainstream programs have problems with rendering their GUIs sometimes with stuff cut off or the wrong size blocking other stuff, etc. then there is the fact that a lot of the source media (icons, etc.) aren't particularly high res so you end up just pixel doubling, etc. and aside from text rendering not really making that great use of the extra pixel density. Windows 7 had a lot of 256x256 versions of the icons that nicely added detail when used instead of the normal 32x32 or lower icons but Windows 10 doesn't seem to have as much coverage so you end up with blown up versions of the original icon then there is the fact that for compatibility Windows 10 extensively uses "DPI virtualization" which just blows up the application window resulting in fuzzy text, etc. instead.
EDIT: For instance: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2...on-displays-reveal-windows-10-blind-spot.html
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The more you scale the less desktop space you have.
I'm not saying there aren't problems. It was in support of general usage it being fine.
4K is the right term because it combines a set of several resolutions. And yes, 3.84=~4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
Apparently, with lower than 4K resolutions, there are other problems and bigger problems.
Soldato
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35" i think is the biggest 2560x1080 panel available.
I dont use scaling on my ultrawides and 29" 2560x1080 is so close in DPI to a 32" 2560x1440 panel that i'm struggling to understand why anybody would have an issue with one but not the other.
Oh, and scaling ranges from OK to OMFG MICROSOFT WHAT ARE YOU DOING>?! depending on what resolution/scaling ratio/monitor setup you are using.
I don't know about that, 300dpi is insane on a monitor. ON a phone maybe. Put it this way, if you double the horizontal and vertical resolution on a 34" UWQHD panel to 6880x2880, then that gives you a PPI of around 215-220. At a 30" viewing distance that equates to 135PPD and that's higher than people with 20/10 vision can resolve which something like only 2% of teenagers can achieve. 6880x2880 should allow some decent 4:1 down-scaling. if you triple UWQHD and go for 10,320 x 4,320 then that's 320-330dpi and >190ppd at 30", or higher than the theoretical limit of human visual acuity. It could also cause some awkward scaling issues if you're trying to view regular sized content.
I dont use scaling on my ultrawides and 29" 2560x1080 is so close in DPI to a 32" 2560x1440 panel that i'm struggling to understand why anybody would have an issue with one but not the other.
Oh, and scaling ranges from OK to OMFG MICROSOFT WHAT ARE YOU DOING>?! depending on what resolution/scaling ratio/monitor setup you are using.
Spoffle said:
I don't know about that, 300dpi is insane on a monitor. ON a phone maybe. Put it this way, if you double the horizontal and vertical resolution on a 34" UWQHD panel to 6880x2880, then that gives you a PPI of around 215-220. At a 30" viewing distance that equates to 135PPD and that's higher than people with 20/10 vision can resolve which something like only 2% of teenagers can achieve. 6880x2880 should allow some decent 4:1 down-scaling. if you triple UWQHD and go for 10,320 x 4,320 then that's 320-330dpi and >190ppd at 30", or higher than the theoretical limit of human visual acuity. It could also cause some awkward scaling issues if you're trying to view regular sized content.
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I'm looking at my smartphone from approximately the same distance at which I'm looking my notebook and my PC monitor.
Both of which look very crappy once I sit in front of them, after using my smartphone.
It has a PPI of ~350.
In such short distances, you need higher PPI.
A smartphones with a high res screen will be using around 300-400% DPI scaling IIRC. Not really comparable to what you'd be doing with a PC monitor.
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There is a difference between having a DPI level you can see a difference with photos/video and having a DPI level you can actually read text size.
Sure I could make out the text with a high DPI but at 100% scaling it is not fun to read.
Sure I could make out the text with a high DPI but at 100% scaling it is not fun to read.
Ah, so Wikipedia tells you how to count now? So 3.84 is 4 and 7.68 is 8?