Best monitor for Programmers
An important factor one needs to take into account while buying a monitor is its PPI (Pixels Per Inch) value. This tells you how crisp the text and images will be. The minimum PPI that a normal person (with 20/20 vision) would be comfortable with, is 163 PPI. That’s the reason Kindle has the same for e-reading. Now, coming to computer monitors,
FHD or 1080p (24″) display will have 92 PPI
2K or 1440p(24″) display will have 122 PPI
4K or 2160p (24″) display will have 184 PPI
Now, I know everyone wishes to have a monitor with a retina display like that of a MacBook Pro, which is IMO the best till date with 226 PPI. To achieve this amount of clarity, Apple basically does the following.
- First, it uses a 2K screen (2880 x 1800) on the 15″ laptop. Now at that resolution, all text and images would appear way too small to be legible to human eyes.
- Next, it does resolution-scaling. i.e. It basically scales all text and images to 200% of their original size. (In technical terms, it maps every logical pixel to 4 physical pixels). Now all text and images would be legible to human eyes.
And since every logical pixel would now be represented by 4 physical pixels, the text and images would become very crisp and beautiful.
So, with a 4K on a 24 inch display (184 PPI), you could have a HiDPI display (Apple’s Retina display) on your commodity monitor. And not everyone codes for more than 10 hours a day or skims through 100s of lines of logs every minute. So, having a monitor with a PPI similar to Apple’s Retina display would definitely be a programmer’s delight.
Note: In recent times, there’s a lot of craze in buying 4K monitors. 4K is mostly a marketing gimmick. TV manufacturers have been driving sales using ‘4K’ as a flashy catchword to indicate a very high quality display. Now, the monitor manufacturers have joined the 4K bandwagon to cash-in on this existing demand. One needs to understand that 4K (aka UHD) just indicates that there are 3840 × 2160 pixels on the screen. Although it enhances the display quality, in some cases it will be an overkill affecting both the display clarity and performance. It’s time the manufacturers understand this and try to strike a balance between display resolution and optimal performance. BTW, Apple recently collaborated with LG to produce a 24” 4K display scaled (integral) to FHD resolution and a 27” 5K display scaled (integral) to 2K resolution.
Coming to the monitor sizes. A larger display is not necessarily better. From too close up, your field of view will not be large enough to really take advantage of it and you will end up craning your neck all over to see. But of course, it would look wonderful in your room and you can marinate in the aesthetics for a while, but soon enough you will want to get back to your comfort. So choose your monitor size appropriately. The following site can be used to get an idea of an appropriate monitor size.
Then choose the resolution and scaling, according to the chosen monitor size.
24" will be appropriately sized for FHD (1080p). This gives you 92 PPI. To achieve HiDPI, go for 4K display, then scale it to 200%, which gives you 184 PPI. Thus giving you same screen space but twice the sharpness compared to the FHD with minimal performance impact. It can take advantage of the integral scaling which in this case is just pixel-doubling. i.e. As both 3840/1920 and 2160/1080 equals to 2 (integer), thus substantially reducing the sub-pixel approximation and anti-aliasing burden on the GPU’s scalers and shaders.
28” will be appropriately sized for 2K (1440p). This gives you 105 PPI. No need for scaling, as its preferable to go with the native resolution. For most this would be fine as they will be sitting 3.7 ft away anyway. I’ve seen programmers who do not have 20/20 vision, tend to struggle at this distance and tend to change the font sizes often to match their comfort. On the other hand, graphical artists would generally prefer to go for a higher pixel density. In that case, go for 5K display, then scale (integral) it to 200%, which would basically be a 2K with 210 PPI (HiDPI).
34” will be appropriately sized for 4K (2160p). This would give you 120 PPI. Better to go with native resolution because you will be sitting 5 ft away anyway. At this distance you won’t be seeing any pixels.
Never go for fractional scaling. For instance, 28" 4K display scaled to 2K. In order to display 2K (2560x1440) scaled resolution on the 4K display, MacOs first renders a 5120x2880 canvas, then downscales it to 4K. Since this is fractional scaling, it is further subjected to a substantial amount of sub-pixel approximation and anti-aliasing (blurring). Remember that this is done 60 times each second for a 60 FPS panel and likewise. Such insane amount of processing just to display a simple screen at 2K, seems pretty messy. And even though the pixel density will be slightly better than having a native 2K resolution at this size, there will be some blurred edges due to the anti-aliasing, thus overshadowing the former benefit.
Thus if you are programmer, you need to pick your sweet spot considering various factors such as resolution, scaling, viewing distance and performance, before you make your final decision, after all, this is the one thing that you are going to be staring at for several years. So let it be a worthy one.