4K Is For Programmers 520
An anonymous reader writes "The 4K television revolution is upon us, and nobody is impressed. Most users seem content to wait until there's actually something to watch on these ultra-high-res displays, and also for the price to come down. However, Brian Hauer has written an article promoting a non-standard use for these displays. His office just got a 39", 3840x2160 display for each of their programmers' workstations. He now confidently declares, 'For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.' Hauer explains: 'Four editors side-by-side each with over a hundred lines of code, and enough room to spare for a project navigator, console, and debugger. Enough room to visualize the back-end service code, the HTML template, the style-sheet, the client-side script, and the finished result in a web browser — all at once without one press of Alt-tab.'"
Re:39" display for workstations? (Score:5, Interesting)
you're kidding right? a monitor will last you easily 6-7 years (my monitor at work is nearly 8 and it's still running just fine) and a large/high-res monitor will give you a noticeable increase in productivity, and you are angry about a $100/head/year expenditure? maybe you'd want his programmers not to have desks but just a sheet of plywood on some sawhorses since that'd be cheaper? stools instead of ergonomic chairs?
If anything, if I was an investor I'd be more angry about him cheaping out on a repurposed tv and not spending $2-3k for a 'proper' 60Hz 4k monitor (mouse lag would drive me nuts) but that's just me.
Video Card Question (Score:3, Interesting)
So what sort of video card do I need to drive a few (2 to 4) of these at one time?
Re:Character size? (Score:2, Interesting)
4k makes sense at half that size; we just don't expect it yet. High-DPI monitors look beautiful, provided the interface displayed on them is similarly high-dpi. I've been watching them make their way up through phones and tablets to laptops, waiting for the day that I could have one at my workstation.
I never want to see a pixel again.
Re:39" display for workstations? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you really like large workspaces, you may like future generations of the Oculus Rift displays.
Once they get the latencies really low, fix the image quality issues (and maybe reduce the weight - no one's complained yet but maybe for hours of work they might), you'd have as big a "screen" as you can manage.
Check this out: http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598 [gizmodo.com]
Then imagine you are looking at huge virtual workspaces as large and as many as you can handle. Even better if there's tech to fade in and out of virtual/actual reality without removing the goggles - so you can do augmented reality, switch to full virtual or full "real world".
So I'm not really that excited by these large high res physical screens. To me we should already have had high res screens a decade ago, but we were stuck on or even regressed to crappy resolutions for too long.
Yes I'm impatient- I'm not getting any younger and it's disappointing to know that so many things should already be possible but aren't implemented yet.
Re:39" display for workstations? (Score:4, Interesting)
A PWM should never reach 100% since that means it has run out of headroom to adjust to input voltage fluctuations and therefore cannot regulate output anymore. A plain backlight PWM will be firing at well over 1kHz, far beyond anything the human eye could possibly detect and with LED-based backlights, the PWM's output may very well be filtered to DC current. On a display with Lightboost enabled though, the strobe rate is proportional to vsync and could yield perceivable flicker.
With my camera on 1/800s shutter speed, I'm not managing to capture any signs of flicker on my LED-lit LCD set at 20% brightness, which tells me either the pulse rate is much higher than that (otherwise I would have wild fluctuations in brightness between shots depending on the -1/0/+1 pulses in a given exposure) or the backlight LEDs are receiving filtered output from the PWM. (Most likely both since it is much easier and cheaper to filter higher frequency PWM output and it eliminates the need to shield the LED array for EMI compliance.)
Re:Why not just multiple monitors. (Score:5, Interesting)
> There are in principle NO advantages to a multiple monitor setup. In principle you could essentially emulate multiple monitors with one big display. In fact it's better to have a single big display
I use 3 monitors for development on Linux:
27" @ 1920x1080 via HDMI
24" @ 1080x1920 via Dual-Link DVI (NOT a typo, monitor has been rotated 90 degrees), and
27" @ 2560x1440 via DisplayPort
My total horizontal resolution is 5560
When I click maximize on my rotated 24" 1080x1920 I don't have to worry about it accidentally wasting space on the ENTIRE workspace.
Uhm, sorry, but you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.