[jpstewart]

Last month I (finally) upgraded the monitors on my daily-driver Linux box.  I got LG 27UP600 IPS displays:  27 inches diagonally at 4K (3840x2160) resolution.  Two of them!  Man that's a lot of pixels!

I had been using a pair of Acer 24 inch 1920x1200 displays that I bought way back in October of 2009.  They were OK at the time, but never great.  DPMS power saving never worked right.  They'd go into power saving mode but never come out.  I had to power cycle them to get them to wake up.  Rebooting was long enough to put them into their "forever" sleep mode.  And in the last couple of years they'd started developing some "quirks" shall we say.  It was time to replace them.  They'd served me well on 3 or 4 different computers over the years.

The LGs work fine in that respect, of course.  But they also have vastly better colour definition.  Subtle shadings that I didn't notice before have become clearly visible in various applications.  I had a bit of difficulty getting Linux (well, X.org specifically) to handle the resolution properly.  It took me a while to realize I had to tell X.org the DPI manually; it wasn't autodetecting it correctly.  Once I did that, most stuff has worked correctly.  I'm amazed at how tiny 1920x1080 HD video looks on these things!

I had thought about going to triple screens, but decided to start with two for now for budget reasons.  There never seemed to be enough space on the dual Acers.  Now I think I'm quite content with the two LGs since they're physically slightly larger and have vastly higher numbers of pixels.  I'm quite happy with them.

The downside is that dragging windows around can be really slow now.  I'm really tempted to upgrade to a better graphics card to handle all these pixels.