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mini paired with Hauwei's new 4.5K 3:2 monitor = iMac killer?

theluggage said:
but when you're talking about the resolving power of optical instruments (as in, say, the Mk 1 human eyeball) the appropriate measure is angular resolution
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yes, of course, for simplicity I assumed that all desktop monitors are viewed at 24 inch / 60cm.

theluggage said:
Well it did happen - with the launch of 5k displays from Dell, HP, Philips etc. some years ago - and then it unhappened when those all sank without trace.
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not at a mass-market price. they were all expensive, and both Planar and Iiyama who persevered the longest had a lot of quality control issues as the yield on 5K panels was not great. Even the iMac panels floating around aliexpress are of variable quality. It seems to be a challenge for the fabs to make that particular panel reliably. Of course Apple can afford to only take the A grade ones for their purposes.
 
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theluggage said:
Thing is, 5k is just a bit better than 4k but (IMHO) not enough to be worth extra hassle and expense.
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5K is 77% more pixels than “4K”. I was able to snag my second-hand Dell UP2715K for like $500 and it has been worth every penny to me. If only there were 3:2 5K monitors…

tornado99 said:
Planar and Iiyama who persevered the longest had a lot of quality control issues as the yield on 5K panels was not great.
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Didn’t they use less-than-grade A panels to begin with? The Iiyama I briefly played with had lots of stuck pixels.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
5K is 77% more pixels than “4K”. I was able to snag my second-hand Dell UP2715K for like $500 and it has been worth every penny to me. If only there were 3:2 5K monitors…


Didn’t they use less-than-grade A panels to begin with? The Iiyama I briefly played with had lots of stuck pixels.
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OMG, a 5K 3:2 would totally rock! A man can dream!
 
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Amethyst1 said:
5K is 77% more pixels than “4K”. I was able to snag my second-hand Dell UP2715K for like $500 and it has been worth every penny to me. If only there were 3:2 5K monitors…
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According to that calculator referenced above, that just means you can sit closer to it (16") compared to a 4k screen (21") and maintain retina resolution. I don't know about you but I never sit that close to my screen. I guess you also get more screen real estate by running 1440.
 
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tornado99 said:
back view

View attachment 1786619
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From the back side, from that angle in particular that Huawei thing looks bad. You know Apple is not solely about productivity. It's about aesthetics, too.

Btw I use a polycarbonate Mac mini with Cinema Display 24" (1920*1200) mounted on iMac G5 VESA Mount Adapter upon my bedroom table. Rather than just a display, it looks like a piece of furniture inside the room. It looks just good from every angle.
 
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I'd rather have an amazing screen in a terrible case than the other way round. In fact my main display is a 4K IPS 24 inch in a cheap black plastic casing.
 
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aurora72 said:
From the back side, from that angle in particular that Huawei thing looks bad.
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The back is plastic. OK, metal would have been nicer. How often do you look at the back of your monitor though? I only look at the front — the panel to be exact. As long as the actual panel is good and the stand is ergonomical I couldn’t care less about aesthetics.

aurora72 said:
You know Apple is not solely about productivity. It's about aesthetics, too.
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Productivity is the only thing that matters to me.

aurora72 said:
Rather than just a display, it looks like a piece of furniture inside the room. It looks just good from every angle.
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If I want something that looks like a piece of furniture, I’ll buy a piece of furniture. :)
 
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@tornado99 — Perhaps editing the title and subsequently asking the mods to move this thread to the “Mac Accessories” subforum is worth considering. I don’t see why it should be buried in here where people looking for information on the MateView may not find it, especially given the title doesn’t include the name of the monitor.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
5K is 77% more pixels than “4K”.
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That’s 77% more cost and processing power, but the practical upshot is only a 33% increase in linear resolution, or a similar reduction in “minimum viewing distance”... on a 4K ~27” screen that already meets the “retina” criteria of not being able to see individual pixels at a reasonable viewing distance.

It‘s not that going from 4K to 5k isn’t an improvement - but you are in to “diminishing returns”. Then if you consider that it is only a peculiarity of the MacOS UI that makes 5k a “sweet spot”, it’s no real surprise that it hasn’t caught on in the PC world. Even Apple has never bothered to sell a standalone 5k display.
 
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theluggage said:
the practical upshot is only a 33% increase in linear resolution,
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What do you mean by “linear resolution?” The width or height on its own?

theluggage said:
Then if you consider that it is only a peculiarity of the MacOS UI that makes 5k a “sweet spot”, it’s no real surprise that it hasn’t caught on in the PC world.
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I fully agree. I’m still loving both my MateView and my UP27215K: the former for the awesome aspect ratio, the latter for the awesome resolution and pixel density. I only got the UP2715K because the price was too good to pass though.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
What do you mean by “linear resolution?”
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Well, pixels-per-inch, the physical height and width of a pixel... that’s what you actually see. Same thing goes to angular resolution, which is the basis for the “retina” criteria.

Total number of pixels goes up with the square of linear/angular resolution - so it sounds like an impressive spec, but going from 4K, to 5k, to 6k (at the same size) gives rapidly diminishing returns especially since 4K is already in “can’t see the pixels” territory. With Apple systems, though, that usually goes hand in hand with a physically larger screen (e.g 27” 5k iMac vs. 32” 6k XDR).
 
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Amethyst1 said:
That’s pretty much the whole point of 5K, yep.
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Except I find 1440 to be too small in a 27" size and a non-integer resolution and thus less sharp and higher gpu demand. Since I would be running 1080 I probably wouldn't get much benefit from a 5k 27" screen and the extra cost would be wasted.
 
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This discussion has been enlightening (special tip of the cap to theluggage). It has made me consider going back to PCs because it appears there is more flexibilty with monitors and resolutions on Windows than mac os.
 
marstan said:
Except I find 1440 to be too small in a 27" size and a non-integer resolution and thus less sharp and higher gpu demand.
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2560×1440 is perfectly pixel-doubled (200%) integer scaling and thus, pin-sharp on a 5K monitor. No downscaling required by the GPU. Again: that's the whole point of going for 5K. :)

marstan said:
Since I would be running 1080 I probably wouldn't get much benefit from a 5k 27" screen and the extra cost would be wasted.
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Correct. If you want pin-sharp 1920×1080 real estate, get a "4K" monitor.

marstan said:
it appears there is more flexibilty with monitors and resolutions on Windows than mac os.
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Correct.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
2560×1440 is perfectly pixel-doubled (200%) integer scaling and thus, pin-sharp on a 5K monitor. No downscaling required by the GPU. Again: that's the whole point of going for 5K. :)


Correct. If you want pin-sharp 1920×1080 real estate, get a "4K" monitor.


Correct.
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You are right, I miscalculated that. Yes, if 1440 is comfortable for you, then 5k is optimal. Not for me, though.

PS: Appreciate the expertise from you and luggage.
 
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Can someone explain why mac os has this integer scaling straightjacket but Windows does not? I don't get it.

If I am understanding this correctly, if I run 1440 on Windows on my 27" monitor there will be no distortion of fonts like there would be under mac os? As Steve Jobs might say, "Why the f@ck does it do that?"
 
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marstan said:
This discussion has been enlightening (special tip of the cap to theluggage). It has made me consider going back to PCs because it appears there is more flexibilty with monitors and resolutions on Windows than mac os.
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Well, it's swings and roundabouts & please don't quote me as saying that Windows does 4k "better"!

On Windows it kinda depends on software being well-behaved, working on resolution-independent units, calling the correct OS routines to scale everything, having high-resolution bitmap assets that look good at high DPI etc.

The Mac approach is more robust with software that doesn't understand the high-DPI modes, coping with windows that straddle different-resolution screens etc.

The non-integer scaled modes on Mac really are very high quality (& there's a lot of misunderstanding - running at 'looks like 1440p' is much better than an actual 1440p display and nothing like the mess you get when running a standard def display at non-integer resolution.

What you get on the Mac in "scaled" mode is similar to oversampling or anti-aliasing - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

marstan said:
Can someone explain why mac os has this integer scaling straightjacket but Windows does not? I don't get it.
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Windows has a user-adjustable setting for the screen PPI, and well-written software uses OS calls to adjust the scale of their fonts, icons, vector graphics etc. to match - and that has been true since at least Windows 3.1. You've always been able to run the display at different "resolutions" (which made sense with CRTs but anything other than native physical resolution on an LCD looks awful).

MacOS just has two standard DPIs (standard def and HiDPI) which it treats as universal constants, and offers alternative "scales" by (effectively) having the GPU create a large virtual screen that is then downsampled to the actual native resolution of the display.

Back in the good old 68k days, all Mac screens were 72 PPI (so 1 point = 1 pixel*) and you couldn't really change the resolution without a hack. The practical upshot was that (say) 12 point text on the screen was actually the same physical size as 12 point text on paper. They've diverged from that since - but they still tend to keep the same ballpark PPI while changing screen size and number of pixels, as you'll see with the 21.5 iMac vs. 24" iMac, vs. 5k vs. Pro XDR. (Note the 21.5 iMac was "true" 4k - 4096 x 2304 - not "UHD '4k' 3840-is-nearly-4k-isn't it".

(*Well, only after Apple and Adobe re-defined the printer's point as exactly 1/72" rather than half of thrice the thickness of Guttenburg's underarm hair, or whatever, but, other than that, close enough)
 
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