My new camera produces better, sharper pictures, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good if I can only view them on a standard 90 dpi monitor. So I went out last week and bought a 4K monitor.
It rocks. Everything looks better and sharper, as if I’ve just put on a new pair of glasses. The resolution is good enough that I don’t need to bother with ClearType on Windows anymore. In fact, text looks better without it. Here’s what the New York Times looks like:
No anti-aliasing, no nothing. It’s nearly as sharp as a retina display on a tablet.
The monitor installed with no problems. Windows auto-detect worked fine, and scaling was automatically reset to 200 percent. So far, I’ve only run into two problems. First, my email client looked terrible. I guess it renders fonts internally or something. However, I’ve been meaning to switch clients anyway, so this was a good excuse to do it.
The other problem was with Photoshop, which you’d think would be highly attuned to high-res monitors. But one of its functions just doesn’t work right anymore. I tried it on my tablet and it failed there too. So it’s clearly something to do with the pixel density of the display.
Most people aren’t resolution geeks, but I always have been. If you are too, a 4K monitor is very much worth looking into.
