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   Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 01:24:24 JST Tim Bray

   Question about 4K: I have a monster 77" TV with a Mac mini (among other things) plugged in, and even at that size, the full 3840 x 2160 is unusable unless you’re sitting close enough to get face-burn, and neck damage from head-swiveling.

   So in basically every situation, full 4K resolution is not usable. So why aren’t we all buying 1920x1080 screens like we did ten years ago? Is the fact that 4K looks crisper to my eyes just a placebo effect?

   I suspect I’m missing something obvious…

   • alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 01:24:23 JST Tim Bray

     in reply to

     Just to reassure people saying a 77" monitor is crazy: They’re right, it’s just a TV, used mostly for TV purposes. But it's got a Mac plugged in too because there are lots of nice TV-like things besides accessed through a real first-class browser. My actual monitor is a bog-standard 27" (also not running anywhere near native).

   • Embed this notice
     jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Jan-2025 07:13:02 JST jwz

     in reply to

     @timbray One thing to keep in mind is that those "resolution" settings are lies. Your monitor's pixels are physical objects, so you're just telling the Mac what kind of downsampling to do. Apple is conflating "I want my text and icons to be bigger" with "when a program tries to draw a pixel, smear that out to 3.7 pixels instead".

     It is *possible* that if you have your "display resolution" set to 1080p, a video player will still have access to native hardware pixels, but I haven't checked.