27inch 4k? Too much for the screen size?

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Jalseng

Limp Gawd
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Dec 10, 2012
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What are your guys opinions on a 27inch at 4k?

Gaming/ professional/ everyday email and movie

I'm asking because of the supposedly release of acer and asus 27inch 4k 144hz coming early next year.

O just feel like 4k is being squeezed into a screen not ment for it. It's like 2560x1440 at 20inch or so screen.
 
In My opinion it's definitely too much. I have 40" 4k tv and sometimes icons and letters are too small.
QHD resolution would be best for 27"
 
I have a 4k 15 inch laptop at work. It's fantastic, in those applications that scale well... I keep it at 175%.

I also have a 4k 40 inch TV I use as on my desk at home. For my setup it's great without any scaling IMO.

With a 27 you would have to use some level of scaling. How many of your day to day apps scale properly?
 
My opinion, if you want to run native resolution WITHOUT scaling @ 4K, then anything smaller than a 40” screen isn't going to work all that well. I run a 32” 4K as my main monitor and without scaling, it would be pretty much unusable when it comes to text/menus/icons. It would be much worse with a 27”. All that extra resolution is nice, but really not all that usable when crammed onto such a small screen. Sure, with scaling it will look fantastic, but it’s like over-engineering a solution to a problem that isn't really a problem on a smaller screen (lack of resolution)... And games/apps that don't play nice with OS scaling capabilities will be very frustrating to use. It's like watching a 4k movie on a 5" 4k capable phone screen - what's the point if your eyes cannot physically resolve the fine detail? Once you go past a certain pixel density, you begin to surpass the human eye's physical threshold to easily perceive the added detail without straining. A much better direction to take is to start applying all that resolution to a larger, quality display where you can actually appreciate and use it all without having to resort to massive scaling.
 
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Two words: diminishing returns.

On a positive note, if you plan to game at 4k on a 27", then running without any sort of anti-aliasing might be viable. It's certainly not going to be the visual shit show 1080p would be on a 27".

Speaking from experience, a 14" laptop with a 3200x1800 resolution is perfectly fine for general use. Scaling, while not always perfect, is not a puke experience. That said, an overabundant amount of pixels in such a small space seems like a total waste since I'm always finding excuses not to have everything rendered at native resolution.

I crunched the numbers:

27" 16:9 2560x1440 = 108 ppi
27" 16:9 3840x2160 = 163 ppi
14" 16:9 3200x1800 = 262 ppi

For fun, here's an iPhone X:

5.8" 2.17:1 2436x1125 = 458 ppi

As a footnote, 300 ppi is what Steve Jobs considered "Retina".
 
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I recently upgraded to a 27" 4K from a 24" 1920x1200. Scaling set at 150%, I think it looks great. Take an old pre-retina iPhone or iPad, hold it next to a new one ... the difference is like that and you won't want to go back. The extra resolution isn't there for more space it is there for better space. Pixels are nearly gone. Text is crisp and easier to read. Images and video at native resolution look amazing. You do end up spoiled as any non-native images (most of them on the web) will look soft next to the text. The worst is images with text on them like logos or graphs.

However even today not everything will respect the OS scaling. This can result in blurry, tiny, or mangled applications. You can test your applications before hand by just bumping up the scaling with your current setup and seeing how they look.

For gaming it does depend on what you play. Games with detailed/geometric settings, like a modern city, and attention to high-res textures then the extra sharpness looks great. Older games or games with softer art styles or natural settings, like a forest or old city, actually look odd running at 4K. The organic textures clash with sharp edges from the geometry. Bumping down to 1440p softens the image slightly to solve that and can give you back some performance.
 
I guess another thing that really should be mentioned and not get overlooked when deciding to upgrade to a 4K monitor, be it a 27” or larger is the simple fact that your graphics card is going to have to process and deliver a full 4K signal regardless of what size screen you end up picking. Driving 4K graphics when gaming is quite a chore, so if you are upgrading from a lessor resolution display to 4K, you are going to need either a fairly powerful GPU to begin with or an upgrade in that dept. as well. (Or you’ll need to set your GPU to play at a much lower, non-native monitor resolution, which depending on the quality of the 4K monitor’s built-in scaler can end up looking like crap). What played and looked good at 1080 or 1440 resolutions will turn into a slide show if driven at 4K unless you have a beastly GPU like a 1080Ti or Titan X pascal.
 
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stephen2002 said:
However even today not everything will respect the OS scaling. This can result in blurry, tiny, or mangled applications. You can test your applications before hand by just bumping up the scaling with your current setup and seeing how they look.
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For legacy apps integer scaling is better. But for that you would need 5K @ 27", not 4K...
 
For me 27" with 1440p is great. Lots of refresh rate options. 4k is seemingly stuck for a while. They've been saying they'll come out with high refresh rate 4k monitors for almost 3 years now and nothing has come to fruition yet. I'd just go with 1440p
 
systemvipers said:
So from what i am reading, if i try to move to 4k, it should be at least 40"?

I almost went with a 32" @ 4K from AOI ( i think) but read somewhere that it didn't make a good workstation.
I am also worried about my xbox which is only 1080p, i heard they look like crap on a 27" or 32" 4k screen?

So now i am really confused, i see a lot of 1440 at great prices at 27" which is about the biggest i would use for my single monitor gaming/work system
am i thinking correctly, i will game but i do programming also so i need a screen that looks and feels good not like i am sitting in the front row of a theater..

that's my worry
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Go with a quality 27" monitor at 1440 and save your $. I still feel like the market for good 4K monitors in the 32-40" range needs another year or so to mature. (Especially in the OLED dept.) That and going 4K requires a serious GPU investment as well like a 1080Ti if you are going to game at 4K as well.
 
Yes 4K at 27" is wayyyyy too small at native scaling and IMO windows 10 scaling still stinks.
 
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I have two 28" 4k samsung screens and I run them at 1600. Sometimes I even consider dropping to 1440 because I have a hard time with some apps.
 
4K at 27" is just fine, scaling at 150% works in most situations. Now 4K at 15" is a different story. Bigger is always better though so if you can afford the same quality in a 30-32 then I would go there. Personally I wouldnt' get something pricey now. Wait another year if you can though, hdr and/or 4k/120 and more 21:9 options will be here soon enough
 
I have not yet used 4K on windows before, but my work station is strictly Mac environment with 27" 5K monitors and a Retina Macbook Pro.

Every time when I use 27" 1440p on Windows, it makes me cringe to see all these pixelated tax and slight blurry at the edge of text.
 
stren said:
4K at 27" is just fine, scaling at 150% works in most situations. Now 4K at 15" is a different story. Bigger is always better though so if you can afford the same quality in a 30-32 then I would go there. Personally I wouldnt' get something pricey now. Wait another year if you can though, hdr and/or 4k/120 and more 21:9 options will be here soon enough
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I'm not sure what you're implying with the 4k at 15' remark. I have 3k at 13" (280 DPI) on my laptop. It's an absolutely wonderful display for all the same impossible to see the pixel reasons that similarly high DPI screens on a phone are awesome.

As far as spending now vs spending later the question is how much the 4k 144hz displays are going to cost. Everyone that's thrown out a SWAG has put them as well above current generation 4k displays, if they're $1500-2000 for the 27" one a lot of people're going pass on them for cost reasons next year.

And if your heart's set on a 32" screen, TFT Central doesn't think AUO's 32" 4k HDR screen is going to do more than 60hz because they dind't specify a refresh rate and it wasn't announced as a gaming panel. That combination has me leaning hard towards just getting Acer's 32" 4k gsync monitor in the near future.
 
4k at 27" is actually retina for the distance you should normally sit from a monitor this size. On 32" I would want 5k. Also price difference between 4k 27 and 1440p is relatively small now, Dell has some decent displays, LG has some pretty cheap ones as well (https://www.amazon.com/LG-27UD58-B-27-Inch-Monitor-FreeSync/dp/B01IRQAYPE) which will do the job if you are not someone who needs it for color critical work. I wouldn't buy anything lower res anymore with these prices. HDR and high refresh is another story, but those will cost a fortune anyway. I did buy a 32" 1440p 2 years ago and really regret that purchase now. Fonts are day and night between the 2, 1440p even on 27" will look much worse than 4k and the LG is actually cheaper than 1440p monitors 2 years back (even today you need to really look to find a 1440p at that price). I was hoping OLED would mature much faster but doesn't seems so, rest of the advancements will only be on refresh rate and I'm used to 60hz there mostly programming 4k is a far better upgrade than high refresh rate and a worthwhile for sure...
 
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To me using a 4K display (excluding those who use a big TV for that purpose) always means using scaling. So 27" is fine and with the right scaling factor will give you really pleasant text on the desktop. The only time it might become an issue is old games that do not scale their UI properly according to resolution. Expect tiny, tiny text on those.

I don't see huge value in having tons of desktop space nowadays. Resolutions are generally high enough that you can comfortably fit a lot of stuff on screen but most of the time what I have open on my machine is simply a web browser or two. Even on my work machine I can fit the windows I need to use simultaneously comfortably on the screen.
 
No. 4k 27" is fine. My primary 27" is a 2560 x 1440 and I often find myself wanting more pixels to work with.


My laptop has 4k in 15".
 
I'm still using my old HP lp3065 and the resolution is great but 60hz is limiting me with my 1080 ti. I was looking at the pg279q but they are releasing the new monitors early next year and I never played with 4k at 30inch or lower screen size.
 
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