Lately I’ve found myself trying to keep track of a lot of information simultaneously. I’m tracking appointments, virtual office spaces (Slack App), skype, research databases, incoming email etc. I need more screen real estate but here is my problem: I don’t know how to compare the ‘real estate space’ provided by monitors of different resolutions. Specifically here are the two I am struggling with:
What’s interesting is that the Apple monitor is 7" smaller but I think theoretically it can still fit more apps on the screen than the larger-but-less-precise LG monitor, but I’m not sure and that’s why I’m asking you all.
For bonus points: I would use the 5k monitor by itself, but if I got the LG 34" I would use it simultaneously with my Macbook Retina with a 2880x1800 resolution
So which of these setups would allow someone to have the maximum number of application windows simultaneously viewable? How does one figure out this math problem?
The 5K monitor is going to be able to display more content at the default size, but it will be physically smaller, very noticably so. There is a possibility you’d need to magnify the content for usability depending on how far away you keep your screen and how good your vision is, especially if it’s difficult to distinguish like databases. If you’re sure you wouldn’t need to do so, then you would be better off using the higher resolution screen, even compared to the pair of displays, because the fixed space taken up by things like borders, icons, graphics, etc. are taking up proportionally much less of the screen. Even added together, the actual displayable pixels are noticably less with those two displays- consider that you’d have to chop the curved screen in two and stack the halves on top of each other to equal the 5ks vertical resolution, for 1720 pixels of width, and then flip the laptop monitor on its side to do the same, for 1800 pixels of width. Total is 3520 wide vs. 5120 comparitively- the 5k monitor is extremely dense, packing a huge amount of displayable pixels into a smaller space. But that’s only a good thing if you’re actually comfortable working at the extremely high level of detail that it’s providing.
Note that some of the thinking behind ultra-dense dot pitches like on the iMac (a Retina display in the Mac world) is not that things all get smaller in a massive amount of real estate, but that things more or less stay the same size and get sharper. You’ll be able to adjust the scaling to your preference, but is suspect the ‘default’ view is similar to a 2560x1440 display in size with a tremendous uptick in detail.
A colleague of mine has a new 5k Mac and an older standard res 27" iMac. He slaves the old Mac as a second screen to the 5k Mac. (Which you can do over Displayport - the old Mac is silent now, just the display operating.)
The two monitors are generally used displaying similar amounts of information. The 5k display is noticeably sharper, and you can, if you want make it display insane amounts of information, albeit rather small. There is no doubt, they are stunning displays, and a 27" display fills your vision.
However, the above doesn’t really answer the question. My experience is that people vary enough in their use cases, visual acuity, and general preferences, that the only way to decide is to actually look at the screens. You need to sit in front of them, and view them from your usual working distance. See what you feel comfortable with, and don’t get wowed by size or detail, but by cold hearted ability to feel that you could work long hours with the displayed data.
It’s more information in a smaller place, which means that you have to blow it up to see it.
If all monitors would be the same physical width of 20" (50.8cm) a 100x100 pixel image would be approximately as wide as:
1024x768 = 4.96cm / 1.95"
1440x900 = 3.52cm / 1.38"
1600x900 = 3.17cm / 1.24"
1920x1080 = 2.64cm / 1.03"
3440x1440 = 1.47cm / 0.57"
5120x2880 = 0.99cm / 0.38"
As you can see, the physical dimensions on the screen will be much smaller or the pixel count increases - meaning a sharper picture.
The sharper image with text being the same physical size is very much the point of the high DPI screens. I have a laptop with a high DPI screen. With the scaling the text is nicer to read than my desktop monitor. But if I make the text the same height in pixels it is pretty much unreadable without magnification.
Multiple monitors is the solution. Larger screens and higher resolution are always nice, but when you want a lot of pages, apps, etc. open at once you’ll get a better result by adding monitors.
This may be a silly question, but are you sure the Macbook could run those displays, and if so, without getting too hot?
Perhaps you could plug the Macbook into one or both and run a YouTube HD movie at 1080 resolution for half an hour to see how hot the machine gets to the touch.
I have thermometer software with fan-speed control (called smcFanControl) in my old (2008) iMac, and running a YouTube video at 1080, and even 720 (which, in reality, makes little sense on this display), cranks up the temperature to such an extent I turn up the fan speed, which cools it down to normal temps.
There’s a vast difference between my old iMac and your Macbook Retina, but laptops, new or old, can get far beyond toasty, especially when lots of processing is involved and over a long period.
First of all, you guys know the iMac is a computer, not a monitor, right?
The next thing to be aware of is that the iMac has a high resolution screen that runs in HiDPI mode. This means that you should divide its resolution in half for the purpose of comparing that resolution to other screens. I.e., if you have an old application that opens a 1000 by 1000 pixel window and fills it with text, on the iMac’s screen that window will actually be 2000 by 2000 pixels (and 1000x1000 “points”) and the letters will be twice as big, but because the pixels are physically very small, what you see is a regular size window with extra sharp text.
So this means you’re comparing 2560x1440 (iMac) to 3440x1440 (LG). So they fit the same number of points height-wise, but the LG has a third more points/pixels horizontally. This will fit more stuff on the screen next to each other, but you really don’t want to set your browser to 3440 pixels wide…
However, another important difference is the physical size of the screens. The iMac’s screen is 27 inches (69 cm) diagonally, the LG 34" (86 cm). But because the iMac’s screen is a 16x9 screen and the LG a 21.5x9 screen, the diagonal doesn’t tell you much about the difference in size. Pythagoras to the rescue: the height of the iMac’s screen is 13.2" (~34 cm) and the height of the LG screen 13.1" (~33 cm). So they’re virtually the same height, it’s just that the LG is a third wider.
There is one final consideration: what if you want to run your screen at a different resolution? If you’re going to do that with the LG, it’s going to look super blurry and it’ll be unusable. So you’re stuck with 3440x1440. But because the iMac runs at double the resolution, you can scale up or down and the result will still be pretty good—text will still be sharper than on the LG in its native resolution. It looks like you can also run the iMac at 2880x1620 or 3200x1800 (still with pixel doubling for some extra sharpness).
Personally, I ordered a 24" (61 cm) “4k” 3840x2160 screen, which should be more than enough (room for two browser windows side-by-side if you don’t make them too wide), or I can use my MacBook Pro’s internal screen alongside and/or an additional 1920x1080 screen.
For text-based work like you describe, the screen size is going to be more important than the dpi. As others have said, dpi helps it to be sharper, but your eyes depend more on apparent size than on the sharpness.
One of your comparison options is 27", which is the size of one of my monitors. It’s a great size for viewing applications at a relatively large size, but I find that it’s just a little bit too small for trying to put most applications/windows side-by-side. On the other hand, I find it taking up a lot of desk space. So the 34" would definitely be better for side-by-side applications and definitely worse in terms of desk real estate. (Even if you put monitors on a stand so they’re not physically sitting on the desk, they still limit the numbers/kinds of things you can put there.)
More directly to the point, there is no 27 inch standaloneRetina monitor in Apple’s lineup. There is the 27 inch Retina iMac linked above, but at this point it does not support target mode, regardless of the machine driving the video output.
[QUOTE=Apple]
Note that the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014) does not support Target Display Mode.
[/QUOTE]
The key phrase is target mode. An iMac can usually run in target mode - that is it makes its screen look like a monitor - it can do this because Display Port is bi-directional. So one Mac can be a monitor for another Mac. However, the retina (5k) model has too high a resolution for the current capabilities of Display Port - there isn’t enough bandwidth to be able to feed the monitor over the link. There is a new version of Display Port, and it will support the needed bandwidth, but both ends need to support it, and as far as I know, the 5k iMac was released before it became available (if indeed actual silicon is available yet.)
Those monitors are silly. For $450 or so, you can get a 27" 2560x1440p monitor. Buy two. Or three, whatever that particular Macbook supports. You’ll get more usable screen real estate because that is an appropriate balance of resolution vs physical size. The 5k is too sharp, meaning you can fit many applications into the pixel resolution, but it’s unlikely you’ll be able to read any of them comfortably. The LG is good for movies, but it’s not particularly high resolution and you’ll just waste desk space for low-res big movies.
OSX also has crappy window management out of the box. But with something like Spectacle, you can easily make applications snap to 1/2 of one monitor or another, and move them between monitors, without manually dragging to resize them.
I just wandered past my colleage, and had chat with him about the relative merits of the 5k 27" screen versus the normal res 27" screen he has next to it. They are identical in physical size. He runs a single desktop across the pair (Mac OS can do this, it automatically scales depending upon the screen, and a window can straddle the two different resolution screens with no obvious issues.) I asked whether he used the increased resolution for additional information, or additional sharpness, and he basically said, it was good for sharpness, but he already used pretty small fonts, and there was no gain in additional rows of columns of data. He mostly uses the old screen for simple stuff like keeping a mail client open, and other peripheral things, and works mostly on the high res screen, rather than splitting workflows across the two screens. One’s ability to work like this obviously depends upon the particular workflows you have.
Yes. They’re absolutely nicer to look at. I have a 4k phone and laptop for that reason. They just don’t really give you more space to work with.
You either leave the scaling in place and have sharper text but same size apps, or you tweak the scaling so you can fit more within the raw pixels but not be able to read it, or find an awkward compromise between the two that doesn’t really work either. I’ve tried it.
If you have unlimited money, multiple 5k monitors and a computer that can drive them is great. But if you had to choose between one of those apple displays and 2 to 4 regular 1440p monitors, the latter would do more for multitasking even if it isn’t as beautiful.