I currently have a 30" Dell 2560x1600 monitor. Had it for maybe 7 years or so. It’s an IPS display with nice colors. It’s slow however due to its age but more important is the fact running at native resolution is not fun anymore as it’s too hard to make out details and text in games at the native resolution. Going non-native 1920x1200 is very bad since it makes everything blurry.
So I’m on a quest to find a large display that has a native res 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. Somewhere in the 27-32" range. Bigger is preferable but I’m not sure what kind of issues a large dot pitch will introduce as you get much larger. My gaming is only of two categories these days. Strategy games and flight sims, so monitor specs should fit those (will 60Hz be sufficient?). Also worth considering would be 4K if going to half resolution doesn’t introduce the level of blur I get with non-native res on this monitor. Sharp, brilliant graphics are what I’d like.
I used to use a 32" Sharp LCD 1080P HDTV and it was good. I’m sure there are cheap ones with good monitor modes still out there. Beware some have HDTV processing that can’t be turned off.
I bought this bog standard Acer 1080p 27" monitor at Best Buy for not a lot of coin some time ago and am happy with it. I share the same “I NEED MY PIXELS BIG” issue.
Math ahead! To get to a state where the pixel density Gods align I did a bunch of calculations:
Pixel Density= Root((Horizontal Number of Pixel^2) + (Vertical Number of Pixel^2))/Screen Size
When I switch my 30" monitor to 1920x1200 the size of units in games like Warhammer Total War and screen text feels perfect. That would be a pixel size/density of 75.4. I read some reviews of 32" screens that are 1920x1080 and people say they can see individual pixels too easily unless the monitor is way back. So a pixel density of 68.8 is definately too low. I never hear pixel complaints for the standard bearer of 27" displays at 1080P and that is 81.6. So the perfect pitch would be between 75-82. That means if I wanted to stay with the more standardized screen rez of 2560x1200 it would need to be 35"er - 2560 x 1440 = 79.4
Going for 4k tv and only using native resolution you need a very big tv for text and graphics to match. Even a whopping 48" is still 91.8 pixels per inch making things a little bigger than my current display at native resolution but still smaller than the above options and I certainly don’t have the horsepower to drive a 4k display. And of course a tv that big would be silly on a desk lol.
You probably don’t want to hear this, but probably the best way to get legible text today is with a large iMac. Only Macs do pixel doubling really right in a way that Windows has still not mastered (though it is better than ever). You can get razor sharp large text on an iMac display set to “larger texts”. I can send you examples if you want.
But… you’ve got to use a Mac. Which is both a cost in $$ and in OS.
In the meantime, try running everything at 1280x800? It should be twice as large on your current monitor and not be blurry, as now 1 pixel spread nicely across 4?
I don’t believe that would impact games at all, just desktop stuff. But I doubt you could tell any difference in games anyway, just run them at 1080p and deal with the monitor or GPU scaling.
I’ve been doing that for years and now with my eyes more blurry it makes fuzzy plus blurry. That’s why I need to run stuff at native resolutions (for my games).
Fuzzy is actually the opposite of blurry and would cancel it out or at least offset it. My suspicion is that someone has spread petroleum jelly very evenly on your monitor. What you need to do is take a spatula and sculpt the petroleum jelly into a lens matching your reading glasses prescription. If you don’t have a spatula, you can try using a very fine potato masher to sculpt a Fresnel lens, but mashers that fine are available only in Ireland and are not legal to export.
I have a 23" monitor and think anything larger would cause whip lash. For desktop use, why go bigger? (Except for Ultra Wide or multiple monitors which I can understand.)
