I have 3 27" 5k monitors in portrait and a 32" 4k horizontal above those. It is all mounted with vesa cheeseplates to manfrotto magic arms on t slot aluminum attached to a C stand with manfrotto super clamps. I also have two genelec studio monitors which sound amazing.

All of that cost less than this one monitor.

All the brand naming makes this read like something from American Psycho.

Or Fight Club

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.”

I get bonkers annoyed using just two monitors with macos or windows. multi monitor management... nothing behaves how i want it to, apps never open where they should etc etc. I havent tried it on desktop linux enough to know if it's any better - maybe at least id assume have the most configuration control on linux.

How do you do it? I always give up in frustration. 100% would keep the genelecs :)

I can only speak for the Cinnamon desktop environment on Linux Mint, but it’s very simple:

- Apps always launch on the monitor your mouse cursor is on

- Switching the focused window to the other monitor is Win+Shift+Arrow Keys

So if I clicked to open an app, it’s on the monitor I’m already looking at. If I used a keyboard shortcut, win+shift+arrow is super easy and simple.

The fact that it’s a stupid simple rule means I can get way better at just doing things by muscle memory… I don’t have to worry about being outsmarted by the window manager.

On KDE and things like opening app on active monitor / desktop work fine. Only complaint is that on older versions, the taskbar on secondary monitors would sometimes disappear.

For reference I have 3 monitors (2x 4k, 1x 1080p) and am currently using Debian / Wayland and Ubuntu / X11.

I really miss kde generator of shift click in maximize window icon. It would expand a window just vertically.

Does windows has anything similar?

Win+shift+up

There seems to be grey deny button at top-right on first view but it disappears if you select the details. You need hide the details first if you want to click it.

Thank you. ALLOW SELECTION is still a mystery though.

I'm not sure what your point is. This monitor is less than 1/2 the price of Apple's Pro Display XDR with nano texture glass.

what's the make/model for the monitors? my setup is getting long in the tooth.

What Genelecs are you using??

Not OP, but I have 2 8020D + a subwoofer.

If I had to do it all over again I would have 2 8030C and no subwoofer.

Why? Just out of curiosity. Is it that you don’t need that much low end for the media you’re usually playing through your monitors or do the 8030Cs have enough low end to eliminate the need for a separate woofer?

I’ve been debating getting genelecs for a few years now but the price jump from something like JBLs or Yamahas is so huge that I can’t justify it. At least not on my current budget.

I have the smallest of both: 8010As and a 7040A sub.

I'm sending almost nothing to the sub, and I'm guessing the 8030s would provide most of what I'm using the 7040 for without the inconvenience.

I'm in a small room and going for accuracy, so don't need much bass.

I sport two klipsch towers on either side of my desk and a small tube amp ^^'

1. I don't think I'll ever buy Dell again. My current monitor is a Dell S3221QS 32" screen and it has vertical lines and starts flickering on both the Macbook M1 and the Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip after some time, which is a known issue[0][1]. It also defaults to YPbPr colors rather than RGB/SRGB, so the colors look off. I'm using HDMI to HDMI connectivity currently.

Part of it is also my fault as I thought a monitor would work with any computer.

2. That aside, what are you all using for window management on these large screens? I'm currently using Rectangle on Mac, but I was wondering if there's a better way.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/1221mz2/dell_s3221qs_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/n8ei34/dell_s3221qs_f...

I've gone the other direction - and after having struggled with other various monitors (the worst is easily the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - both cruddy capability (should have noted before buying it has no Power Delivery) as well as easily some of the blurriest text ever) - I've decided I will only ever buy Dell Monitors. Every one I've purchased (5 of them) in the last 15sh years has been a flawless performer - no hardware failures either.

Every monitor on every desk at work (around 3000 desks) is a Dell U3821DW - no broadscale systemic complaints that I've ever heard of.

I'm currently using my 4K 27" Dell P2715Q that I bought for $400 back in December 2017, and I've carried (physically) with me from office to office from Michigan to the Bay Area - thing runs for 10+ hours a day (minus weekend) for 8 years running. Eventually it's going to have to give in- and when it does - definitely going to buy another Dell (probably the U2725QE 27" 4K)

Yap I can confirm, Dell's P (professional) and U (ultra) lines are excellent and work flawlessly. The S (standard?) line not so much.

Counter-anecdata: I have 2 Dell U2720Q (Ultrasharp 27") bought in 2021 and they've been great.

That said, I've always stuck for Dell's upper-range Ultrasharp (U prefix in models) monitors, being slightly wary of their cheaper series which the S in your S3221QS implies.

I have a 13yr old 27" Ultrasharp still going well.

+1 to only buy Ultrasharp if buying from Dell. The others can be junk.

Spectacle for Mac and power toys for windows.

I’ve been using a single large monitor for a while and it’s been great with window managers. The biggest downside is when playing games full-screen.

One of my Dell's would randomly decide that the mini DP connection has no signal, and rebooting the MacBook Pro was the only way to restore it. HDMI would work just fine.

This has pixels the size of my hand, and it fully covers my field of view. Not my cup of tea.

What I do recommend (having bought one) is the Kuycon G32p, 32 inches @ 6K. Incredible quality and unbelievable value for money (https://clickclack.io/products/in-stock-kuycon-g32p-6k-32-in...).

> This has pixels the size of my hand

This is 128 ppi, which would be considered "retina" at a viewing distance of 70cm (27in).

Are you really sitting 2 feet from a 52" monitor? I'd have to cutout a curve in the front of my desk to sit that close

Curves in the front of desks is a thing.

https://www.upliftdesk.com/curved-corner-standing-desk/

I have the Apple 6K 32” Pro Display XDR and a Kuycon 5K 27”. Both are great. Apple was $6,500 and the Chinese version was $400 on EBay plus the $100 stand. Kuycon has more types of input, and a remote. Frame and display quality are on par for a dev.

$400 where? The cheapest I've seen the kuycon 5k is $800 before shipping, and the QA has been hit and miss with users having to pay to ship it back.

It's not to say it's a bad option, but it's definitely not $400 out the door.

Ebay so likely used.

yes, someone got it from a family member, and had no use for it, and sold it to me as is. It was brand new, unopened and in original packaging.

Reviews are saying the Asus has an aggressively matte display, causing the text to look a little blurry.

They aren't even close in comparison? Like 600 nits brightness vs 1000 (1600 peak) for one. Contrast ratios are very very different. It only supports HDR600. They are very different displays in person. Perhaps at low brightness on text they are similar, but outside of that they really aren't very similar.

Developers mostly care about text resolution, so anything 220+ is great

yes, I couldn't tell the difference. What matters to me is to not see the pixels, and the size of the canvas. I am running the XDR at 60% brightness.

If you just want 32 inches @ 6K there are cheaper options around, such as the ASUS ProArt PA32QCV: https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/pr... ASUS is a more well known brand. It doesn’t imitate the Apple aesthetic.

(It does seem like the resolution differs: 6016×3384 vs 6144×3456.)

I bought this right after it’s available, I like the screen but the Asus OSD is barely tolerable and I have to grow my patience because of it

OSD ?

On screen display

I recently got this after getting three copies of the LG 32U990A, which had serious light banding and uniformity issues. Loving the Asus.

In EU, have not seen PA32QCV ever in stock anywhere.

B&H has same-day pickup in New York.

Amazing, checked just now and seems that these are now in stock in many places. When I checked last week, they weren't, seems like some stock got released for EU then.

That has a lower resolution though. Not by much but it’s a weird panel.

Same resolution as Apple’s 6K panel.

For context - this 51" monitor has 22% less pixels than the 32" Apple Pro Display XDR.

good deal considering it's much smaller and twice the price

Not really. The Dell is 6144x2560 @ 1x while the Apple is effectively 3008x1692. The Dell can fit much more content on the screen.

Yes really. A pixel is a pixel. This dell monitor has pixels the size of boulders. Apple Pro Display XDR has 4.6m more pixels in a significantly smaller area creating a much denser display.

Denser pixels are worth less because you can't see them; in this case 3x-4x less.

Retina pixels what? Pixel is a pixel, density _of pixels_ is what you're looking for

"Retina" is Apple's marketing name for high PPI displays.

Exactly. Retina is not "pixels" though or type of pixel

6016 x 3384.

Dell monitor is twice the surface area with 3/4 the pixels … or in reverse: Apple display is half the size with 30% more pixels.

(edit: corrected dell pixel %)

First time I hear about this Kuycon, the pricing seems phenomenal and the quality as well. I will probably buy one by the end of the week.

It's odd that we don't get to see a lot of high quality OEM monitors.

> the pricing seems phenomenal

I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).

To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D

You must have really tiny hands considering the pixels are smaller that .2mm by .2mm

16:9 60Hz kinda sucks though :/

Yes I realize the Pro Display XDR has those same specs. 16:10 or 3:2 120Hz or 144Hz would be ideal to me.

I've got an eye on the CES Samsung Odyssey offerings at 32" 6k 165hz. I'd prefer 16:10 and currently run two 16:10 30" displays, but nobody making them.

Lg has a similar model: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lg-ultrafineevo-32-6k-nano-i...

Some people are complaining the matte finish on the LG ruins part of the experience.

Those look like the monitors used on the F1 movie, which is strange, considering it was an Apple production and they maybe should have used apple monitors for product placement . I guess it is a testimony about Kuycon from Apple.

You should look at pictures of Apple's Pro Display XDR. The Kuycon monitor is an obvious rip-off of that in terms of styling, especially the ventilation on the back.

LG has a 6K 32 inch also, although a few hundred dollars more.

Is this a grey box replica of the Mac 32in? Because I’d interested if it is.

clickclack?? sounds like a shady referral link. will not click.

On the official Kuycon site, it says "Since 2023, Kuycon has partnered exclusively with ClickClack.io to bring its innovative line of monitors to customers outside of China[...]". I'm seriously considering getting one of these.

i bought mine from there

I wish they had an ultra wide with the higher resolution.

this looks like a rip off of another monitor that I can't quite put my finger on...

And no extra charge to have an adjustable stand! How do they make money?

No need to recoup R&D costs.

> everything is scaled way too large

The HiDPI/Retina bullshit is just bullshit. I've been running a 4K 43" 4:3 display at 100% scaling since 2018. It is neither blurry nor scaled too large. It can, however, comfortably fit 10 A4 pages simultaneously. Or 4 terminals + a browser + a PDF reader.

My arithmetic nodule is having a konniption fit. Does not compute. If this is 16:9 and you mistook your aspect ratio I can breathe again. √2:1 says 1.41:1 isn't 1.33:1

10 A4 pages do not fill a 4:3 or 3:4 aspect ratio box. They don't fill a 16:9 box either but it's more plausible, the wastage is different.

My comment (or at least that quote) was specifically about someone using a 30"+ TV at 720p as their computer monitor.

its probably a charity, no money there.

I’ve been using a single 24 inch 1080p benq usb c monitor after realizing 4k 27 inch scaling is just terrible and 5k 27 inch is just too pricey. It’s a budget monitor but it’s surprising what 140$ can get you these days cause the quality of the panel is really good. It supports daisy chaining so I can add another monitor to my m1 air (which I can’t otherwise I think). If it was 4k 24 inch I’d buy two as I find that size kinda perfect.

Personally I’ve found that a single monitor is enough 90% of the time while coding. It’s when I need to do something nitty gritty that I need a second monitor.

That being said working with only a laptop is painful and extremely uncomfortable for the posture. I don’t think I can get anything real done without a monitor keyboard and mouse. Going down to an 11 inch iPad sounds impossible.

I always plug in a keyboard and raise the laptop up 3-5 textbooks high. Can't work at a desk and just a laptop, too old for that.

I just setup mine today, and I am not sure I recommend it.

I went from a 40" to a 52", and I'm just moving my head waaay too much and my shoulders hurt. It is curved, but very little imo, it's almost like it's flat. I'm going to try it for a week before making the call on whether to return it.

I feel like this needs a workflow where you do work in the middle and use the fringes for other applications that you rarely look at. Otherwise you're moving your head waaay too much and squinting a bunch.

I've been using a 49" monitor for a couple of years now. I have the center window taking half of the screen, and on the sides I have my email, messaging clients and other things I like to monitor from time to time.

Kinda like this: [ | | ]

I am on mac and I use an app called Magnet to manage the windows. I will only change this setup for a larger monitor.

Based on personal experience, I think the upper bound for comfortably useful size at normal sitting distances is probably about 32", and even then I think there'd be better returns on adding vertical pixels to a ~27" monitor. A modern equivalent to the old 16:10 30" 2560x1600 monitors (ideally 2x scaling 5120x3200) would be great for example, but one could also imagine a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor with the same width (~23.5") as current 16:9 27" monitors.

I'm still rocking a couple of 30 inch dell 2560x1600 monitors. They're about the perfect size and not dealing with scaling in Linux is nice. I'd pay a ton of money for a modern equivalent.

Same! My employer offered a choice of 32-inch and 40-inch monitors. I “upgraded” from 32 to 40 but I regretted it. I just don’t make use of the extra horizontal space effectively.

That was my issue with multiple monitors years ago - I'd be cranking my neck over too often (looking at logs, etc). I vastly prefer an ultrawide where I can put logs / monitors on the side flexibly.

I have a 34 inch now, and feel like I could use more space - but it's nice to know there's an upper bound. Do you feel like there's still room to go beyond 40, or is that the sweet spot?

3x27” high-PPI displays in portrait orientation is the winner and no one does it

The center display is always actually centered. The short edge of a high-PPI 27” screen is wide enough for actual normal width browser or IDE usage, but now you get much more vertical real estate on that window.

Not nearly as much neck movement as an ultra wide and since the entire array is pretty square, the neck movement is way more balanced.

I honestly think 40 is the sweet spot.

Yeah, I'm on a Lenovo 5k2k 40" UW and it's never occurred to me to want something wider. Though I will admit I definitely noticed the loss of total real estate vs my old 3x 27" setup.

When I owned a 40" monitor, I had to get a deeper desk and sit pretty far from it. Even then, I couldn't game on it, because games shove the HUD and minimal into the corners, and they were too far to the side to keep an eye on.

Can't picture a 52" being usable as a PC monitor, really.

Seconding this. I have one for my work desk, where (surprisingly enough) it made a lot of sense. The DPI isn't as big of an issue as people make it out to be if your workflow doesn't depend on high density, but the curvature definitely could benefit from being a bit tighter. You need a fairly deep desk or a keyboard tray if you don't want to be turning your head a bunch.

That being said, having this in combination with PowerToys FancyZones has been fantastic. At any given time, I'm usually running 1-4 main working windows plus Signal, Outlook, and an RSS reader. This gives me more than enough real estate to keep them all available at a moment's notice. I have roughly 40% of the screen real estate dedicated to Signal, Outlook, and my RSS client, with the interior 60% being hotkey-mapped to divide in different proportions. Compared to my old setup (one ultrawide plus two verticals) it's been awesome.

Maybe it's a head turner vs eye mover thing. It's a lot less fatiguing moving eyes, which might not be option for glass wearers. I sit 2 feet away from my 50 inch OLED and moving eyes is much less work than windows management. Otherwise it is very workflow dependant, i.e. working on visuals or schematic diagrams.

You'll get used to it. I have 3 24 inch monitors side by side. Center one is usually the editor, right one documentation or more editors, left one browsers with info.

Let me ask you ..Would it work better with a standing desk? It seems like moving around would feel more natural standing up.

I have one and while it makes you generally more movable, you shouldn't stand all the time; it's just as unhealthy as permanent sitting.

hmm, good to know. I have an lg 40in 5k2k that I rather like but this tempts me

I sometimes think that my 40" is too much because the extra space just ends up hosting distracting junk like Slack.

I also have a mild take that large screens make screen real estate cheap so less thought goes into user interface design. There's plenty of room just stick the widget anywhere!

It'd be pretty interesting to compare how much the amount of information one can cram onto their ~27" screen has changed between 2005 and 2025, with the comparison points between between a Mac running OS X 10.6 and a Mac running macOS 26, which I think is a particularly salient and apples-to-apples comparison since Apple was selling 30" 2560x1600 displays back then, which are close cousins to modern 27" 2560x1440 displays.

My gut feeling is that the difference would be around 30-40%. Information density of the UI of OS X 10.6 and contemporary software was much higher than today's tabletized "bouncy castle" style UI.

It would be interesting but I don't think that information density necessarily makes a good interface.

As a personal pet peeve example, developers love to cram a search bar (or browser tabs) into the top of the window. It's more dense but it's also harder to use and drag the window.

True. More accurately, it's a combination of high density, judicial allocation of whitespace, and layouts that have been thought through. The 2000s versions of OS X were better in those regards too, though.

This is why multiple monitors win: put the distractions on a whole other screen.

I've found ideal monitor size and resolution depends greatly on viewing distance and relative position. I use a 38" ultra-wide and it's almost too wide - but I have it 'floating' on an adjustable monitor arm so it's only about 24" from my eyes and a bit higher than most monitor stands would allow. The monitor arm is key because once I put a full ergo split keyboard at a comfortable arm-rest distance, a normal monitor stand sitting on the desk would force the monitor to be too far back.

For the full breadth of a 52" monitor to be comfortably viewable for detail work, I'd have to be farther back enough that the difference between 4K and 6K wouldn't be meaningful. It's kind of like how 8k resolution can provide meaningful value in a head-mounted display two inches from your eyeballs, but 8k on a 65" living room TV seven feet away from your couch viewing position is pointless because even those with 20/10 vision can't resolve the additional detail at that distance.

For detail work I find my best ergo seating position is up close with my legs tucked well-under the desk and my stomach almost touching the edge of the curved desk inset. This allows my forearms to be supported comfortably on the desk. I also have my desk surface a little lower than most and my Aeron chair a little higher, putting the top of my legs almost touching the underside of the desktop.

The smaller sizes would be nice if they had a 16:10 option. 16:9 just isn't a very nice aspect ratio imo, the extra height on 16:10 is much better.

Yes, I will never buy 16:9 again. On laptops 16:10 is already quite often and sometimes even 3:2 (Framework, Surfacebook).

For my desktop I am looking forward to getting a 3:2 monitor like the Benq RD280U

https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html

To whoever needs to hear it, I will never buy another 16:9 monitor. Vastly prefer the 3:2 on my Framework and also liked an old 4:3 I had. Also great in portrait.

Yep. I have a MacBook air 13 and a Framework, and miss the extra vertical space when I'm on the MacBook.

It's a shame that this 6K tunderbolt hub monitor does not support the latest thunderbolt 5 standard. Otherwise you can connect and daisy chain two of these 6K displays together.

I have dell with similar resolution and 32 inches. It is a decent matrix to work with code. But increasing diagonal without increasing resolution just makes it expensive tv and not something where you read text

The pixels per inch (ppi) density is 129.

Some other specs: refresh rate, 120Hz; brightness, 400 cd/m².

That's decent pixel density considering the size of the monitor. A 32" 4K monitor has slightly higher PPI at around 138.

I have a 40in 5k (32in 4k, but wider). IMHO, 138ppi is the bare minimum, but it really depends on a person's eyesight and preferences.

I would love a large-ish ultra-wide with > 160ppi. One day, maybe, that being said, by that time those things will exist and be reasonably priced, my eyes might not be able to appreciate the difference.

I'm using three 4k 32" screens arranged vertically, for 6480 x 3840 desktop size.

The only real monitor upgrade I'm willing to entertain is a ~50" 8k curved screen (basically a curved TV-sized screen), which has not been made yet AFAIK. I'm not into "ultrawide", for me it has to be "ultrawide" and "ultratall". I want all that screen real estate in high PPI.

I tried test-driving a 50" 4k TV for a week and the flatness of it was not what I wanted, it has to be a curved screen for workstation use.

100% I used to have a 43-inch 4K "monitor" (16:9). The lack of curvature meant that at the sides of the screen, there was noticeable color shifting due to variations in viewing angle. That's with an IPS panel.

Your dream is probably a ~50in 8K TV (with RGB pattern if you are on macOS), but curved. I don't know if that will ever exist.

Personally, I found that with a bigger 16:9, I would not use the top and bottom of the screen. When I "downgraded" to a 40in ultra-wide, there was not much difference in the space I was using.

It’s a fraction of what most Apple customers are used to.

The freakin stand alone is $1300 CAD.

What planet are those people on? That's Gucci bag territory. They can take their res and shove it, that's almost NINE GRAND (granted, Canadian pesos) for a freakin display! Who is this for, just Pixar employees?

It's a halo status symbol for price insensitive people. Lamborghini makes compromised overpriced vehicles but they have a market.

And how much do you think the Humanscale mount costs that you would otherwise use? The Pro Display XDR is too heavy for a $30 Amazon Basics mounting arm or anything similarly cheap.

In terms of pixel count it's between Apple's 5k and 6k monitors, and its pricing is between the two. It's also far lower pixel density. So, not really.

I'm an Apple customer and I'm used to 109 PPI. I imagine it's not that rare for Apple customers to buy monitors not made by Apple.

I really want more monitors that are taller and have 3:2 aspect ratio.

Eizo makes a square 1920x1920 monitor:

https://www.eizo.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/

... available on Amazon last time I checked ... they also make a square 2048x2048 monitor for ATC:

https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/atc/sq2826/

... although I think it costs $5k or so ...

Maybe this is the living room dumb-TV that I was waiting for

It has pretty poor HDR performance compared to similarly priced TVs.

https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/u3225qe

$2900 seems pretty reasonable to me considering the size. Works out to $416/sqft, which is much cheaper than Bay Area real estate.

I never understood the draw of these huge monitors until I had to do CAD for work and now I understand. Giant monitor + SpaceMouse is a gamechanger. My current monitor is 36” and I could easily use more width.

I've got big monitors, that I hook up to my work laptop and my own laptop. I make it work with a kvm hub. It's really sweet, for my use.

I keep a browser, an IDE, and a terminal pretty much side by side on the bottom one. I keep slack, email, and a clock on the top monitor. I also place pullout tabs from my IDEs on the top one.

Thing is, no matter the cost range, I generally have to replace the KVM hub about once a year. I've just come to accept that as a part replacement cost. <shrug> This thing has its own KVM hub internally. Maybe I'm just rough on my KVM, but if someone puts significant wear and tear on this monitor, I'd imagine that part would wear out, which seems like a potential money sink if you have to keep calling the warranty folks.

For me, it's too much of a risk, but YMMV.

If it’s at all representative, I had to replace 2 of the dell ultra sharp super ultra wides due to failing USB C hub / PD parts. I gave up at that point.

My 49 inch Dell ultrawide is failing too. One USB port is already dead, and the other ports have just now started to develop intermittent issues as well.

Exactly what I had via sunshine and moonlight in my Vision Pro ...

I run a pair of the 43" model listed on the page (U4323QE). Coming from a desk full of 24" 1080P screens which I used with no scaling, the selling point for me was that the DPI was similar (~114, no scaling needed) while the total real estate was larger.

This 6K panel seems like it would scratch a similar itch.

I use 2 32" 4K which cost about $800 for both monitors. The small gap between the monitors is annoying but I can't really justify paying $2k more. Also there is a samsung dual 4k that is about the same price as the dell.

Moving my head to see everything doesn't bother me. I also have a setup with 3 32" 4k which I find a little too wide but in that setup 1 monitor connects to different computer.

RTings has a very in-depth review[0] on this product line, ranking it tied for #6 for "best office monitor".

0: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/u3225qe

That’s the 32 inch, not the 52 inch.

Yes, thank you for pointing this out - I should have said it explicitly. It's why I said "product line" rather than "product". I thought the 32" vs 52" distinction would be clear for anyone who clicked through.

I also didn't realize that at the Dell store webpage, clicking the "32 inch" option actually slightly changed the product line - from U##26 to U##25 (as the 52" option is the only model associated with 2026), and generally I only consider UltraSharp's of different sizes to be "approximately equivalent in quality" if they share the same model year - and nothing yet shares the 2026 model year with this 52" option.

Their best office monitor is actually another Ultrasharp....

Interesting! If you sort their monitor reviews[0] page by "Office Rating" the top monitor is the ASUS ProArt Display PA27JCV with a score of 9.0

But their "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026"[1] lists a Dell Ultrasharp in the #1 rank and the Asus ProArt does not appear in the recommendations at all. The info cards imply that the recommendation rankings might result from a weighted blend of "Office Rating", "Text Clarity" and "SDR Brightness". However, the ProArt outscores the Ultrasharp in both "Office Rating" and "SDR Brightness" while exactly matching the Ultrasharp's score in "Text Clarity".

So the "The 5 Best Work Monitors of 2026" appears to be a somewhat subjective list, rather than purely a result of objective measurements.

0: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews

1: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/busines...

I have a 34" ultrawide and it is huge. I can't imagine a 52" - the edges would be so far away that it must be hard to read text without physically moving left/right

Do you... usually read content in a full-screen window on that thing?

I only have a 27" monitor and sit about 2.5 feet away from it and I move my head _slightly_ to focus on different windows. But that's the reason I have a larger monitor, so I can have a bunch of normal-sized windows open at once.

Their point may be about viewing distance.

If the edges of the screen are further from your eyes than the center, the content and text doesn't appear at the same size. If you wear glasses, the edges might even fall out of focus unless you physically move closer.

I like having three columns of code open in my editor, but the left edge of the leftmost column (since code is left-justified) gets pretty far away from my face. Or I need stronger glasses, one of the two.

I think it depends on vision. I have a single 27" 4k monitor with vscode set to about 80% zoom.

But I'm getting older, so I might have to make it a big bigger soon.

I used to use a 40" 4k TV.

Now I use a 38" ultrawide, which is roughly the same width (in pixels and in inches) but doesn't require my head to move up/down as much.

I could imagine using a 52" ultrawide if it were placed further away from me (i.e. deeper desk). The extra pixels would make it effectively a retina display.

I have a 42" 4k TV that I use as a monitor (in gaming mode). Not sure I would want anything shorter than that. (Of course, I have an eye issue, so the side-to-side is even more pronounced for me.

52" at that aspect ratio isn't just wide, it's also >50% taller than a 34" ultrawide.

It's akin to a 55" TV - basically the same width, but only 70% of the height.

I think you would have to sit further back, almost tv watching distance.

And that would strain your eyes or force a bigger font. At that point, you'd be wondering, like me, on why I spent $$ to buy a bigger screen in the first place.

I got an open box lenovo 24 inch QHD monitor for years and it just works solid across windows, mac and various docking stations. I could imagine upgrading to a 27 or 30 inch but beyond that is just too much IMO.

Maybe taller, more square could be of more use than wider.

I have a 57” ultra wide and it absolutely requires you to look around

Very large monitors are amazing. I’ve been rocking a single OLED 48” monitor for my MacBook Air M3. It is killer and I can not go back to smaller screen sizes. I just wish it was 6K or 8K instead of my current 4K. And if I do upgrade it will be to a 52/55”.

I use a 49-inch LG ultrawide. 5120 X 1440, at 60Hz. Had it for a number of years. I think it was about $1,100, when I got it.

It seemed too big, at first, and I split it, but got used to it at full width.

I don't really care that much about pixel density or super-high framerate. I'm old, and don't really game. For software development, it's great.

How far are you sitting from that monitor then?

I'm only like 2 feet from my monitor so it doesn't make sense to go any bigger than 30"

Yes, but there's got to be some point at which it makes more sense to switch to a VR headset.

I never got into the ultra wide thing. Where the 8K monitors at?? We've been stuck on 4K for ten years!

I have a Samsung neo g9 57" which is like 1/2 an 8k monitor (or 2 4k monitors side-by-side) which is sweet since I use picture-by-picture mode to have my work computer on one side and my personal computer on the other side.

I have the SAMSUNG 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA - but despite spending literally dozens of hours - I was never able to get text to work clearly on it - either Mac or PC - tried both the DisplayPort, HDMI - tried all the (many) HDMI cables I had at home, and a couple expensive Monoprice cables, firmware updates, monitor resets, every setting I could figure - no luck. Text is just ... fuzzy in a way that it isn't with any other monitor I've ever owned - kind of a deal breaker when I spend all day in tmux.

they’ve been around for a few years, as well as 5K and 6K

Sadly they're not super common which makes them expensive, and I don't think I've seen any that wasn't 16:9. The world has decided to go with refresh rates rather than resolution.

Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.

Past 2880p on most desk monitor viewing distances or past 1080p on most TV viewing distances, you hit steeply diminishing returns. Please, please let's use our processing power and signal bandwidth for color and refresh rate, not resolution.

This is also why I think every console game should have a 720p handheld 'performance' and 1080p living room 'performance' mode. We don't need 1080p on handhelds or 2160p in the living room. Unless you're using relatively enormous screens for either purpose.

>Which is the right choice

No damn it, it's not!

Everyone I know can immediately see a clear difference between 120 ppi and 200 ppi, but I've yet to encounter anyone who can reliably tell 120hz from 200hz. We have monitors that render lego-sized pixels at 500+ hz now, it's enough.

Gamers have been gaslit to believe they have the reflexes of spider-man and are a lost cause, but their preferences have been listened to by monitor makers for 30 years. Enough already!

Millions of office workers are working all day reading text on screens optimized for playing games at low resolutions. It's just sad.

Steve Jobs showed a decade ago that 4x resolution could be sold at great profit for normal prices. Text on screens can be as crisp as on paper.

Sadly it only became the standard on phones, not on productivity desktop monitors. It so easily could be, and it should be.

I've recently gone from 60hz to 240hz to 480hz. Refresh rate in games is not just about what it looks like. It completely changes game mechanics, like movement, recoil etc. It is such a big difference between 60hz and 240hz that you're not really playing the same game. There are things you can do at 240hz that are impossible at 60hz. At 480hz, there's also so much more time to react, so you really don't need fast reflexes to take advantage of it.

I wonder if this would work for me. I sit 36" from 43" 4K TV, I run it scaled at 125%

I think I'm already at the edge of how big of a monitor I could use without spinning my head all around. But the curvedness of it might make up for it.

Is 130PPI useable at a 1:1 pixel ratio or would this monitor need to be run at a 2:1 ratio

I had a Dell thunderbolt hub monitor (not sure if that was the exact name for it but functionally the same thing) in idk 2018? 1440p. Loved it. It played so well with my 2016 MBpro too. Even had HDD’s running through it. It worked fantastically from top to bottom.

For 2 years.

Obviously this is not the same product and it has been a long time. But man I hadn’t thought about that in years and now I’m all bitter about it again ha

Interestingly it has Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb), 6K typically saturates 30-31Gb, which leaves less 10Gb/s which isn't a lot especially assuming 2.5Gb network. Looks like a perfect case for TB5 and given its price.

I can recommend the 45-inch LG Ultragear too. Nice OLED. 5120x2160 resolution. Perfect curvature for me, coming from a G9.

Just don't be an idiot like I was. I connected my monitor to my dock with both DisplayPort and some random USB-C cable. Worked fine initially. One day, cleaning my office, I swapped out that USB-C cable with a higher-quality one. Took me a bit to realize that the consequent Wayland post-resume resolution flakiness came from a race condition enumerating the real-DP and USB-C-alt-mode "separate" monitors that my machine thought I now had.

It's not often that downgrading a USB cable fixes a problem.

Too bad it's not using IPS Black 2 (https://www.lgdisplay.com/eng/product/monitor-display/ips-bl...) like the U3225QE/U2725QE or iiyama's new ProGraphics.

Imagine living in a so-called "civilization" in which your productivity is limited not by time or tools but by how much it costs to buy photons to shoot into your eyeballs.

is there something special about it to make the front page?

I have the 40" (5K) and it's perfect. Replaced a 27-32-27 setup (the 27"s being portraits, the 32" landscape). For my coding and office work, absolutely no reason to go wider. Highly recommended.

Note the 40", and probably this one too. support MST which makes the display appear as two monitors to the OS and is great in terms of window management without going too fancy with custom software.

Likewise. I've had the 40" version for about a year. Higher DPI than the 52". It replaced 2 x 27" monitors and I'm glad I made the switch. I generally have 2 apps running side-by-side just like before, but with the ability to go full wide-screen for movies or gaming.

This monitor really does everything. It's crisp enough to read text on all day, unlike many gaming monitors. But the 120Hz is decent for gaming whereas most 5K+ monitors are only 60hz.

Interesting, I'm on 3x27" 2K monitor (same setup as you, portrait, landscape, portrait) and while it works very well for me, I'd like to replace it with just 1 screen (or 3x 4-5K monitors but that is less interesting to me). I already have custom window management software that I use so it wouldn't be hard to switch to sub-dividing 1 monitor to get a similar experience (I think).

Maybe I should look into the 40" 5K monitors, thanks!

Losing the bezel is great, and the Dell 4025qw that I have has also an IPS Black panel which is a vast improvement over what I had before - Dell U27-something (4K IPS), 3219Q (4K IPS). And it's 120hz. I really enjoy it.

Could almost get 2x Apple Studio Displays for that $. Then you got 10240x2880. The Dell is only 2" taller and yet 320 less vertical pixels.

Nice. I have the predecessor 40" U4025QW and it's outstanding.

I second the U4025QW. It's fantastic and the built in KVM is great.

Would the latest Mac minis work with this?

Yes.

Expansive and expensive at the same time!

I have a smaller version of this and it's pretty good as a display.

I'm somewhat disappointed with it as a hub/KVM. It's better than having to swap cables, but just barely. It can't handle any high bandwidth USB devices I've tried (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, a DSLR via capture card DSLR and a Logitech webcam). The downstream USB strangely isn't even sending down a keyboard and mouse to a PC, I ended up having to get separate dedicated KVM for those. It worked fine with a Thunderbolt to my Macs, but that's not surprising. I'm not sure how it would work with two Macs (one would have to be HDMI or DisplayPort and use that downstream USB port). I could try that but it's not my use case.

At 52" I now believe that there is a limit to the size of a monitor. This might have crossed it.

So I use a 49" Dell U4919DW (5120 x 1440 @ 60Hz) with an Anker 777 powered Thunderbolt hub to support a MBP, but also use it directly with a lab Windows box. I can't see spending $3k on a monitor because this one was $1100 + $157.29 tax and shipping in 2022. I threw on a 4 port USB-C hub that clamps on the front bezel, so it has reachable ports.

I guess this almost replaces the Anker, but lacks Ethernet.

Looks nice enough. But seems pretty steep. The 42" TV I bought five years ago for $260 does basically the same thing. Slightly more vertical space (albeit at a lower DPI) and somewhat less horizontal. But it still supports four 80-column text windows without a sweat.

Late stage FAANGery is watching 20-somethings try to find ridiculous junk to spend money on.

My old crt can show letters and numbers.

Still would love a true AMOLED monitor that's decently large. Doesn't need to be this big. One with perfect contrast ratio.

another meh display from dell.

if you truly want a great display for productivity, I can't recommend the Samsung 57 enough. 240hz, 2x4k in one panel. it's great.

dont believe them - this only has 1 thunderbolt port, not 52

> "Unlock unparalleled productivity"

LOL

Abysmally low pixel density. :(

No scaling required? Great!

Spot the Linux user ;)

More accurately, you have spotted not a Linux user in general, but a user of certain Linux distributions, which in my opinion have inadequate display configuration settings.

I am also using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, and I have never used any display with a resolution less than 4k, for at least the last 12 or 13 years.

Despite of that, I have never encountered any problems with "scaling", because in Linux I have never used any kind of "scaling" (unlike in Windows, which has a font "scaling").

In the kind of Linux that I have been using, I only set an appropriate dots-per-inch value for the monitor, which means that there is no "scaling", which would reduce graphic quality, but all programs render the fonts and other graphic elements at an appropriate size and using in the right way the display resolution.

I configure dots-per-inch values that do not match the actual dpi values of the monitors, but values that ensure that the on-screen size is slightly larger than the on-paper size, because I stay at a greater distance from the monitor than I would keep a paper or a book in my hand (i.e. I set higher dpi values than the real ones, so that any rendering program will believe that the screen is smaller than in reality, so it will render e.g. a 12 point font at a slightly bigger size than 12 points and e.g. an A4 page will be bigger on screen than an A4 sheet of paper; for instance I use 216 dpi for a 27 inch 4k Dell UltraSharp monitor).

Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.

Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.

I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.

Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.

The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.

If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor, so it uses a DPI value that corresponds to the obsolete VGA monitors.

A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.

Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.

In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).

I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.

For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.

I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.

I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.

I've tried most of the fonts here, but none of them really do it for me: https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads

But if you want to keep going on with the pedantry, have at it. Were you around in the Usenet days?

In the limit, as pixel density increases, regular, unhinted floating-point-x text looks just like it would on a printed page. How can you get better than that? With enough resolution, you free yourself from all the hacks we've devised to make text on a computer halfway tolerable. Shouldn't doing so be the goal?

If you want that blocky-font retro look, you can use vector art to make squares.

Yes, me too... also don't need GPU card, CPU integrated will do fine (at 120Hz). (I have 32" 1440p ... 1600p would be better, but that's it).

plasma 6 for example has really good fractional scaling, i'd argue it works nicer than windows, where some old apps do not get rendered in higher resolution, some apps do not properly take advantage of it.

4k at 33" is awful too. 5k text is visibly better than 4k at 27".

I mean, sure, but you're basically saying "anything other than the absolute top-end displays are absolutely awful". 133 PPI is going to be higher pixel density than >99% of desktop monitors that people are actually using.

e.g. The Steam hardware survey only goes down to 0.23% usage, and doesn't have any >4K resolution listed.

It’s a $3000 monitor, so yeah, other top end monitors are what I’m going to compare it to.

4k@27" is borderline too coarse. 5k@27" is preferred.

If compared to a smartphone, maybe.

No, it is a poor pixel density when compared with a printed book, which should be the standard for judging any kind of display used for text.

At the sizes of 27" or 32", which are comfortable for working with a computer, 5k is the minimum resolution that is not too bad when compared with a book or with the acuity of typical human vision.

For a bigger monitor, a 4k resolution is perfectly fine for watching movies or for playing games, but it is not acceptable for working with text.

Compared to a smartphone it's not just poor it's complete dreck. Smarphones are in the 400s.

Do you hold your 32" monitor the same distance from your face as you hold your smartphone?

Exactly, that’s the point