Do you know the lifehacker site? It’s better you don’t. If you’re now curious and would like to check it out at least turn on adblock.
They wrote a comment about 4k monitors on their 4k monitor post yesterday before I went to bed since I just got my 4k monitor the same day and did not have a good experience with it.
I just got up and got a notification by email that someone also commented on their Google+ share of their post. I clicked it and saw that my comment was deleted.
Before I bought a 4k monitor I was reading reviews and watching Youtube videos. All those videos stated that the monitor was great and there was no blur or tearing or ghosting and that everything was great essentially. So I bought it and had a rude awakening.
Most Windows games didn’t run and had problems with the native resolution. When I was running a game in the previous 1920×1200 resolution the mouse pointer would fly around and was limited in its area of operation. Essentially I couldn’t click anything. Only through Nvidia’s Gefore experience I could set the resolution for some games, games it recognized. And when I did most games didn’t start or were missing the mouse pointer. So if you’re thinking about buying a 4k monitor for Windows games – don’t.
In Linux most UIs don’t even have support for HiDPI aka 4k monitors. Cinnamon was the exception, to my luck and they solved it but scaling the UI and fonts. However it’s unusable. Fonts are tiny. If you scale the fonts chromium refuses to start. I can show you a screenshot of what it looks like.
You need to see the whole picture. Where previously my monitor was 1/2 meter away it’s now “in my face” so I can read the tiny fonts. When using an editor or IDE instead of 17pt fonts my fonts are now 30pt so there really is no gain.
Then I was watching the powermizer of my nvidia, where previously it was at the lowest setting it’s now constantly on the highest setting. So that means increased energy consumption. It’s a net loss of money. 600€ is a lot of money and I don’t mind paying good money for something that improves the quality of my life. But it’s not improving the quality of my life.
I made a video of the ghosting or backlight burn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEfgsZIyQi0
If you look closely you can see there’s always a ghost image of the former image “burned” into the monitor for a bit. You could see that not only on text but also in games (the ones that worked, Everquest 2 for instance or Battlefield 4 or Skyrim). There was always a “white shadow” when I moved the camera (the in-game camera), no matter if horizontally or vertically.
Anyhow lifehacker, if someone deletes a truthful statement then they’re either paid to write a positive article or are writing it on some “free” platform. We don’t need more lies, we need truthful articles, posts and comments. You’re not doing the manufacturer a service if people buy a monitor on the premise that it doesn’t display ghost images and they receive the monitor and then have to return it because it doesn’t fulfill the stated requirements. The only ones benefiting from this are postal services. For me I will ignore Lifehacker in the future since they don’t care about the truth but spreading product hype. Get your priorities straight.
