Hardware tonsky.me

Time to upgrade your monitor  ↦

According to my research among programmers, 43% are still using monitors with pixel per inch density less than 150…

Why is this a problem? Because the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter. That simple. In the past, the displays’ pixel count was small, so we learned to live with that and even invented some very clever tricks to make our lives better.

Nikita goes on to share more details of how text looks on a low-resolution display vs a retina display. I’d love to see a follow up poll of the 43% using 150 PPI or less monitors on “why” they haven’t made the move to retina yet.


Discussion

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2020-06-24T16:46:07Z ago

Because the only way to get good letters is by spending more pixels per letter. That simple.

Well no. To get good anti-aliased text yes. But my preferred coding font is fixedsys which looks off on retina. Ok-ish but worse.

2020-06-29T02:33:08Z ago

Good article, but I’ll throw out that one reason still is price. The “recommended” monitor is still almost a grand. I picked up a cheap 1080p Asus monitor that does the job for about $100. I guess I probably don’t know what I’m missing, but at the same time is the better experience worth 10x the cost right now?

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