I've been happy with my two Huawei MateView 28" and their sweet 3:2 aspect ratio for years, but ever since I got an OLED 1440p monitor a few weeks ago to play CS2 with my friends, I started noticing the individual pixels more and more, probably something to do with the different subpixel layouts. This wasn't as life-changing as seeing a Retina MacBook Pro in 2012 for the first time and feeling I was staring at Medusa's gaze, unable to look at my adequately pixelated MacBook Air with the same appreciation again, but it got me looking into retina-class monitors again.

Jeff Atwood wrote about 4K displays becoming mainstream all the way back in 2015, but outside of a few niche pro options, truly HiDPI displays haven't made the same impact. It feels like once we got to "good enough" resolution the momentum shifted to higher refresh rates for gaming and OLED panels.

And hey, I love OLED: the contrast and super high refresh rates/instant pixel response times are amazing, can't imagine going back. I subtly influenced my friends, family and anyone who would listen to jump aboard the OLED train. But in my day-to-day job sitting in front of text all day? Give me ALL the pixels please.

The issue with 4K@2x is you get 1920 horizontal pixels that land you in an awkward spot: not wide enough for two windows, too wide for one. 5K should have been the next logical step, the chosen one, but it never gained mainstream traction. Without reasonable options I simply lost interest and got two monitors, only using about 80% of each width-wise. Now 6K brings a truly meaningful upgrade over 4K: 3008 horizontal pixels for two 1504px-wide windows side by side, no bezel in the middle.

Making display panels is very, very hard, and they all come from four companies with the resources and know-how to do it at scale: Samsung Display, LG Display, AUO and BOE. R&D gets very expensive fast: new fabs, material costs, lead times, panel defects crushing yields on larger display sizes, plus the smaller addressable market vs phones/TVs. We've been stuck for a long time in this weird middle ground where we got extremely decent 4K 27" 163PPI monitors for cheap, but no real push to drive that resolution further. This is about to change with a new crop of HiDPI displays:

• Apple Studio Display XDR 5K@120 (double the price of the others)
• LG 27GM950B 5K@120 (same panel as the Studio Display XDR)
• Asus PA32QCV 6K@60
• LG 32U990A-S 6K@60 via TB5
• Samsung G80HS 6K@165 (!)
• Kyucon G32X/G32P (these copy the Pro Display XDR chassis design and look the best of the non-Apple options, but QC, logistics and support can be spotty)

After browsing many hours of reviews and /r/HiDPI_monitors, I ordered the Asus monitor. Sure, I'm probably just trying to convince myself I needed the shiny new toy, but in this beautiful hi-res world my eyes can't tell the pixels apart anymore.