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People that think they don’t need 4K either haven’t seen a 4K display in person or have poor eyesight. It’s a leap like upgrading from HDD to SDD, in the display world.

Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.




I have a system with 7200 rpm HDD and system with SSD. Not so much difference. It was a waste of money. Just like 4K display.


I don’t believe you. There must be something pathological with your SSD or something else in your system.

SSDs have an order of magnitude faster random access performance (both read & write) and you can measure that. NVMe drives additionally increase parallelism by a significant margin. Typical workloads are very sensitive to this metric. At least at cold boot you should see significant improvement in performance.

Font rendering, likewise, you can just see[1]. See the full page[2] for more examples.

If you have good eyesight, you will see a difference. I could see how 4K to “retina” (>260 PPI) might not be worth paying extra to some (though I personally want the highest PPI I can afford), but 96 PPI to ~185 PPI is a world of difference. It goes from blurry to sharp.

That’s not all—because LoDPI text rendering often involves subpixel rendering techniques, HiDPI also brings significant improvement in contrast.

For crying out loud, some people even get headaches from the blurry subpixel rendering! [3]

[1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5....

[2] https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understandin...

[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html


HDD fast enough for my needs. Just like full HD resolution. Of course there is may be difference, but in very specific cases. So, just waste of money, as I said.


Alright, you might not appreciate it, but it’s not a waste of money.

Maybe that’s arguing semantics, but to me a waste of money is something like a $150 HDMI cable… Or 64GB of RAM you’ll never use. Things that you can brag about but that don’t actually improve your life in any way at all.

However, the $100 extra I’ve spent on a 4K vs FullHD monitor was, I’m certain, one of the best purchasing decisions in my life.

My 4K display[1] makes spending time productively so much more pleasant, and so much less tiring, both on eyes and mind. And it just looks gorgeous.

The first time experience of watching BBC’s Planet Earth in 4K on this thing was mind-blowing. It must look absolutely incredible on an actual big screen with full range of HDR.

I also have a very cheap Chinese netbook with a 3K display (260 ppi), and I have, on occasion, used it to read books etc. I would have never even imagined doing any extended reading, of any kind, on my old laptop. The font would need to be huge to make that experience at all bearable. At least that’s an option for something like ePub or HTML, but a lot of things are available only as a PDF. On that little netbook it’s no bother to have multiple columns of tiny text on the screen, all at once, just like in a real book.

I wear glasses and with the old LowDPI devices I was always unsure if I need a new prescription or if it’s just the crappy display.

As for SSD I can strongly recommend getting one in addition to your HDD. For my workstation, I’m running a bcache setup (in writeback) with a 60GB old SATA3 SSD + 1TB HDD RAID1 and I’ve been extremely pleased with that so far.

I can only tell I’m not running an actual 1TB SSD right after I do a major upgrade. It takes at least one cold boot to promote files in the boot path to cache[2]. Every time that happens it reminds me just how much faster SSDs are for certain things.

Nevertheless, you almost get to have your cake and eat it too. Bcache (or dm-cache, a fine choice as well) will intelligently sync all the randomly accessed and most used data with the SSD and stream anything bigger (like movies etc.) directly to/from the HDD.

In writeback mode it will also use the SSD to buffer random writes, until they can be written sequentially, all-at-once, to the backing device.

It makes both your SSD and HDD so much more valuable. Strongly recommended :)

[1] http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-24UD58-B-4k-uhd-led-monitor

[2] It’s something that could be solved, though. An explicit interface to promote certain extents would do the trick. So far I think only bcacheFS offers something like that.


Moving from a 7200 to a SSD would have made a big difference. Your boot time and program load time were cut in half or better. A lot of inconvenient actions like file search became easier to do frequently. I can only guess that you do almost everything via web on a newer machine to not notice much difference.


That's not a need though. My computer needs a CPU and by extension so do I, but at the end of the day, a 4k display is a nice to have.


Sure, but once you use one for even 15 minutes, it pretty much becomes a need ;)

That’s why I have an adamant rule about never trying hardcore drugs or displays capable of refresh rates higher than 60 Hz.




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