So in my comfort range in price, I am looking at a 27" 2160P Mini LED vs a 27" 1440P OLED. I keep arguing back and forth with myself without coming to any solid conclusion. Soliciting opinions on what and why, please.
A good scouting trip starts with analysis…what will you be primarily using it for? Work, home?
Will you be working with, or developing, graphics, especially graphics focused on color?
Will it be used for gaming? Or for movies? Is size important?
And what’s your price range?
Will it be used for work? Or family?
What apps will you be using with it?
Does it need to come with a stand, or will you wanting to be using one you already have if so?
Once you’ve got your requirements set, you’ll be able to start focusing.
Home… not work as I am retired. No kids or others in my household. Yes for gaming, but also general computer use. 27" is the size I want. Yes, it must have a stand. Without being really able to do a side by side, I am in a quandary. I DO have a mini LED TV and it is superb. I do know conventional wisdom says at that size, 4k resolution is not as important as for larger sizes.
Given my eyesight, I insist on either 4K or 5K in my 27” monitors. The laser sharp text on my Dell 4k monitors makes everything so much more comfortable. Plus I can view the 4k videos I shoot on my iPhone in their native resolution.
Dell probably has at least 3 different models with 4k in the 27” size. I have had a pair of the less expensive ones for a few years and they’ve served me well. I can use them with either my M1 Mac mini or my small desktop Windows pc and I don’t even have to unplug or swap any cables, since each monitor has both an HDMI and a DisplayPort socket.
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Assume you’re talking about regular conventional backlighting… I had heard some complaints about text on an OLED display.
I would claim the main thing is to ensure you get no less than 4K on a 27" and make sure it’s an IPS panel. 5K is of course great, but there are to my knowledge only 3 such monitors. Two of those are questionable [1,2]. The remaining option is from Apple which means you need to spend >$2k to get it equipped with a reasonable stand, plus potentially extra cost to deal with glare.
If money is not an issue at all (and assuming you don’t care about only a single input), get the Apple display with a proper stand and ideally with the nano finish. It is a nice panel in a pretty and metal enclosure.
In all other cases, I can strongly recommend the higher end Dell 27" 4K displays. They are not expensive and they offer excellent panel quality as well as non-finicky controls. They are plastic but they come with fully adjustable stands, no glare, and they offer multiple inputs and input options. I’ve had different models over the years and have always been very satisfied with them all (which I don’t say lightly because as a company I find Dell annoying). The most current model is the U2723QE. Amazon has it for $449.
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Correct. Just a regular LCD panel with 4k.
Interesting, the consensus seems to be 4k. I DO have my eye on a 27", 4k Mini LED monitor from KTC. I’m not much of a fan of conventional backlighting systems, my current monitor (which got replaced once) has a slightly darker top third of the screen, I am sure this is a failure of conventional backlighting. Thanks for the input.
The Dell U2723QE was top-rated last month by The WireCutter.
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Maybe, but you may find issues at that resolution. macOS’s UI elements are designed for a display with about 110 pixels per inch or a retinal display with about 220 ppi (using double-sized graphic assets).
27" at 4K resolution is about 160 ppi - right in between. Which means you may end up dealing with one or more of these problems:
- Objects too small, if you pick an apparent resolution of 2840x2160 (no scaling). Unless you like that size, of course.
- Objects too big, if you pick an apparent resolution of 1920x1080 (2:1 scaling). Unless you like that size, of course.
- Significant GPU usage to implement non-integer scaling to bring the apparent resolution to 2560x1440. This may have a significant impact on the performance of GPU-intensive apps like video editing and gaming.
I’ve read, and agree with recommendation that at the 27" size, you should either get a 2560x1440 (1440p) resolution display (110 ppi, no scaling) or a 5120x2880 (5K) display (220 ppi, with 2:1 scaling) in order to avoid the GPU overhead of non-integer scaling factors.
See also;
- Mac external displays for designers and developers
- YouTube: Hunter King: Why I RETURNED my 4k Monitor // MacOS Scaling Explained!
- Best options for a budget display?
- Screen size, resolution, desktop size, and text readability
I generally agree here. IPS panels have very good color accuracy and very little color shifting when viewed off-axis. But they do not support the highest refresh rates (important for gaming, probably not for other applications) at 4K resolutions and they don’t exhibit the highest contrast ratios (good for watching movies).
VA panels tend to have higher refresh rates and contrast ratios, at the expense of color accuracy and off-axis viewing angles (but the good ones come really close).
So although I do recommend IPS panels for non-gaming applications, I wold also have no problem recommending a good quality VA panel.
FWIW, my (very old now) Dell 2405 FPW display is a (1920x1200 60 Hz) VA panel and I’ve never had any problems with it, even when viewing from extreme angles.
See also:
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Ah, that’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for. For the Mac side, it will be the GPU cores in the basic M4. Yeah, very tiny objects are an issue for me, got post age 70 eyesight! The card for my winblowz side will be a 4080 Super.
I am long retired and I don’t regularly use all those “creative” apps like I did a few decades ago (was heavy into Freehand before Illustrator came out). However, sharp on-screen text is a must, and while I have heard grumbling about the Mac scaling issues, I have also heard it in reference to OLED monitors.
Now looking at 1440 means I can go OLED. However I DO think mini LED is very close to OLED. What I’d really like to see if MSFS footage at 1440 & 2160. As in how much better the 4k is AT the 27" screen size.
Accumulating more knowledge is great, but I’m still not seeing some absolute direction… which is most likely impossible to find!
The GPU effort required is minuscule compared to even the M1 Pro’s GPU capabilities, both in terms of memory footprint and computational effort. Something I’ve benchmarked myself with our own codes.
The rescaling IMHO is a completely overblown issue, no idea where that came from, likely the PC camp. Get the maximum resolution your wallet allows (assuming all other specs equal and decent) and then set macOS to display at the resolution your eyes are still comfortable with. The scaling will be fine. macOS is really good at this. Keep in mind, this is a desktop screen we’re talking about, not an iPhone. You’re never within inches of it so you won’t be resolving any faint changes in scaling unless you take out a pair of binoculars.
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I’m curious, what are the problems or issues with the LG and Samsung monitors, which, at least from the specs, look very good. Wasn’t Apple selling one of those LG monitors a few years ago as its recommended display before it came up with its own?
I’ve been using a 34" LG UltraWide curved monitor with my M1 Mac Mini for over 3 years now. Very satisfied with it and no problems.
Lots of screen real estate.
Then oversized objects might not be a problem.
At Apple’s preferred size of 110 dpi, the system menu bar is 24 pixels tall, which is about 0.22" or 5.5mm. And the height of the Apple icon representing the Apple menu (including anti-aliasing pixels) is 17 pixels or about 0.16" or 3.9mm tall. A 220 dpi retina display at 2:1 scaling will have the same physical size (with twice as many pixels, of course).
A 160 dpi display without scaling will still have a menu bar of 24 pixels tall, but it will be 0.15" (3.8mm) tall and that Apple icon’s 17 pixels will be 0.11" (2.7mm) tall, which is 32% smaller. That display with 2:1 scaling will produce a menu bar of 0.30" (7.6mm) tall and an Apple icon of 0.21" (5.4mm) tall, which is 36% larger.
But if you have vision problems, you might be happy with the larger size.
Ultimately, it comes down to what you prefer, which is by definition, subjective. We can provide facts, but the conclusion will depend on the particulars of your preferences and what kind of apps you are likely to be running.
Did you watch the linked YouTube video? Its author, Hunter King, is doing large amounts of video/photo editing on a Mac Studio, and the GPU load of display scaling is not trivial.
Using a 27" 4K display and scaling it to a 1440p equivalent size, his 3D rendering work (with Blender, a GPU intensive app) was taking a lot longer than running it with 2:1 scaling or on a 1440p native display. While I’d love to see concrete numbers (e.g. rendering times with each display), I see no reason to believe he making it up, and he’s definitely not “from the PC camp”.
Reading through the comments there, he’s not the only one who noticed this problem.
If you’re not doing work that consumes 100% of your GPU, then you may not notice any difference. What kind of apps were you using to benchmark this problem in order to conclude that it’s of no consequence?
Yes David, I did watch the video. Things like rendering times are immaterial to what I would use it for (which is about 85-90% dealing with text on screen). I seem to be getting the message that on a 4k monitor, text will be somewhat blurry (due to 160ish ppi), but on a native 1440 monitor, sharp and crisp? Do I have that correct?
Hard to wrap my head around somehow one is advised against using a 4k monitor 100% due to the fruit itself.
Oh, I have seen the “everything oversized” and I definitely do not want to do that, my eyesight is not that bad that I need everything enlarged.
My inexpensive, plain LCD Dell 27” 4k monitors display text laser-sharp on my M1 mini — I am very happy. In macOS Sonoma display settings, I have both monitors set to 1920 by 1080 resolution.
I’m not sure what PPI that equates to, but I don’t care. All I know is that most objects and text are large enough and sharp enough to make me very happy.
I don’t do anything that taxes my GPU, so I’m good there.
Remembering back to when I still had my 27” 5k iMac, I’d say the text on my current 4k monitors is just as sharp and legible as on the iMac. For viewing static images, like the Apple-provided wallpapers in Sonoma, I can tell that the 4k images are slightly less detailed than they were on the 5k iMac, but not enough to bother me.
My advice: don’t worry about the particular display technology unless you have very specific requirements. Just buy a quality monitor with the specs that will satisfy your use cases.
That’s not what I would worry about. If you’re not using GPU-intensive apps, then don’t worry about it.
Note that Apple isn’t doing simple scaling from 1440p to 4K - that would produce blurry images. macOS will instead render your desktop at 2x the apparent resolution (that is, 5K) and will downscale the result to your 4K display’s native resolution. So you should get a very high quality image.
A 1440p display with no scaling will render content at exactly that resolution, but note that all text is anti-aliased anyway. So there will always be a slight amount of fuzziness, but you want that because jagged edges look even worse.
Note a zoom-in on the corner of my menu bar (on a 1920x1200 display with no scaling):
All UI’s are designed around a particular DPI. Apple has been supporting 110/220 for quite a long time. Before that, 72 dpi screens were typical.
Microsoft’s UIs use much bigger objects, so they look good on a 4K display without scaling. At the expense of losing precious screen real-estate on lower resolution screens (like the three 1080p screens I use with my work laptop).
Note also that Apple doesn’t sell a 27" 4K screen. They use other resolutions that are designed to look good with 2:1 retina scaling. I wrote about this back in May.
- Desktop displays
- A 24" iMac has a 4.5K resolution - 218 ppi
- A 27" Studio display is 5K - 218 ppi
- A 32" Pro Display is 6K - 218 ppi
- Laptop displays
- MacBook Pro: 16" at 3.5K or 14" at 3K - each 254 ppi
- MacBook Air: 13" at 2.5K or 15" at 2.8K - each 224 ppi
And let’s face it, there’s nothing magical about “4K” for a computer display. It is popular because manufacturers can use 4K panels designed for use in televisions and get the economies of scale that come with it, but there are better options for computer screens.
That’s the 2:1 retina scaling. Your physical pixels are about 160 ppi, but the objects are the size you would see on an 80 ppi display without scaling. A bit larger than many people prefer, but if you’re happy with it, I won’t try to convince you otherwise.
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