I’ve just got a new Kogan 5120*2160 40″ curved monitor. It cost $599 including shipping etc which is much cheaper than the Dell monitor with similar specs selling for about $2500. For monitors with better than 4K resolution (by which I don’t mean 5K*1440) this is the cheapest option. The nearest competitors are the 27″ monitors that do 5120*2880 from Apple and some companies copying Apple’s specs. While 5120*2880 is a significantly better resolution than what I got it’s probably not going to help me at 27″ size.
I’ve had a Dell 32″ 4K monitor since the 1st of July 2022 [1]. It is a really good monitor and I had no complaints at all about it. It was clearer than the Samsung 27″ 4K monitor I used before it and I’m not sure how much of that is due to better display technology (the Samsung was from 2017) and how much was due to larger size. But larger size was definitely a significant factor.
I briefly owned a Phillips 43″ 4K monitor [2] and determined that a 43″ flat screen was definitely too big. At the time I thought that about 35″ would have been ideal but after a couple of years using a flat 32″ screen I think that 32″ is about the upper limit for a flat screen. This is the first curved monitor I’ve used but I’m already thinking that maybe 40″ is too big for a 21:9 aspect ratio even with a curved screen. Maybe if it was 4:4 or even 16:9 that would be ok. Otherwise the ideal for a curved screen for me would be something between about 36″ and 38″. Also 43″ is awkward to move around my desk. But this is still quite close to ideal.
The first system I tested this on was a work laptop, a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1. On the Dell dock that did 4K resolution and on a HDMI cable it did 1440p which was a disappointment as that laptop has talked to many 4K monitors at native resolution on the HDMI port with the same cable. This isn’t an impossible problem, as I work in the IT department I can just go through all the laptops in the store room until I find one that supports it. But the 2in1 is a very nice laptop, so I might even just keep using it in 4K resolution when WFH. The laptop in question is deemed an “executive” laptop so I have to wait another 2 years for the executives to get new laptops before I can get a newer 2in1.
On my regular desktop I had the problem of the display going off for a few seconds every minute or so and also occasionally giving a white flicker. That was using 5120*2160 with a DisplayPort switch as described in the blog post about the Dell 32″ monitor. When I ran it in 4K resolution with the DisplayPort switch from my desktop it was fine. I then used the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor directly connecting the video card to the display and it was fine at 5120*2160 with 75Hz.
The monitor has the joystick thing that seems to have become some sort of standard for controlling modern monitors. It’s annoying that pressing it in powers it off. I think there should be a separate button for that. Also the UI in general made me wonder if one of the vendors of expensive monitors had paid whoever designed it to make the UI suck.
The monitor had a single dead pixel in the center of the screen about 1/4 the way down from the top when I started writing this post. Now it’s gone away which is a concern as I don’t know which pixels might have problems next or if the number of stuck pixels will increase. Also it would be good if there was a “dark mode” for the WordPress editor. I use dark mode wherever possible so I didn’t notice the dead pixel for several hours until I started writing this blog post.
I watched a movie on Netflix and it took the entire screen area, I don’t know if they are storing movies in 64:27 ratio or if the clipped the top and bottom, it was probably clipped but still looked OK. The monitor has different screen modes which make it look different, I can’t see much benefit to the different modes. The “standard” mode is what I usually use and it’s brighter and the “movie” mode seems OK for the one movie I’ve watched so far.
In other news BenQ has just announced a 3840*2560 28″ monitor specifically designed for programming [3]. This is the first time I’ve heard of a monitor with 3:2 ratio with modern resolution, we still aren’t at the 4:3 type ratio that we were used to when 640*480 was high resolution but it’s a definite step in the right direction. It’s also the only time I recall ever seeing a monitor advertised as being designed for programming. In the 80s there were home computers advertised as being computers for kids to program, but at that time it was either TV sets for monitors or monitors sold with computers. It was only after the IBM PC compatible market took off that having a choice of different monitors for one computer was a thing. In recent years monitors advertised as being for office use (meaning bright and expensive) have become common as are monitors designed for gamer use (meaning high refresh rate). But BenQ seems to be the first to advertise a monitor for the purpose of programming. They have a “desktop partition” feature (which could be software or hardware – the article doesn’t make it clear) to give some of the benefits of a tiled window manager to people who use OSs that don’t support such things. The BenQ monitor is a bit small for my taste, I don’t know if my vision is good enough to take advantage of 3840*2560 in a 28″ monitor nowadays. I think at least 32″ would be better. Google seems to be really into buying good monitors for their programmers, if every Google programmer got one of those BenQ monitors then that would be enough sales to make it worth-while for them.
I had hoped that we would have 6K monitors become affordable this year and 8K become less expensive than most cars. Maybe that won’t happen and we will instead have a wider range of products like the ultra wide monitor I just bought and the BenQ programmer’s monitor. If so I don’t think that will be a bad result.
Now the question is whether I can use this monitor for 2 years before finding something else that makes me want to upgrade. I can afford to spend the equivalent of a bit under $1/day on monitor upgrades.
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