The Problem With Using 1440 Screens With a Mac

hi this is gary with macmost.com let me tell you why you should avoid using a 1440 display with a mac [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts now most macs come with a built-in display all macbooks of course and also the imac but some macs like the mac mini and mac pro you need to get an external display to even use the mac and other times with some of those other macs like macbooks you want to get a second display so when you shop online for displays you're going to find many different types most displays are going to be about 27 inches that's 27 inches diagonally although you'll find ones that are larger and smaller than that but the main difference between the displays is the resolution how many pixels are on the display and you're going to find two different types that appear a lot one is called a 4k screen lots of these types of displays out there the 1441s are a little bit cheaper and you're going to hear lots of people particularly gamers singing their praises so you're going to wonder why not go with one of those displays instead of a 4k display well let's start first by looking at the displays themselves this is what you get when you get a 1440 display it's 2560 pixels across and 1440 pixels high this gives you a total of about 3.7 million pixels on the screen but what about a 4k screen a 4k screen is 3840 pixels across and 2160 pixels vertically now these numbers may not look too different 2500 versus 3800 1440 versus 2160 but in fact a 4k display is in fact twice as many pixels more than 7 million pixels than a 1440 display and keep in mind these screens would normally be about the same size 27 inches so 3.5 million versus 7 million pixels on the same screen size let's take a look at what this would look like here is a 4k display and 4k display has got all these little pixels we're looking at the upper left hand corner and let's zoom in a little bit more so you can see these individual boxes that are pixels now if this is a 4k display and we were to superimpose on top of that a 1440 display this is what the pixels look like you can see how much bigger the pixels are so imagine the same things on the screen for both displays you've got a much finer look to a 4k display than a 1440 display again here's the 4k display here's the 1440 display now when you use a 1440 display you have basically two ways to use it one is at its full resolution so 2560 pixels across that's built into display that's the physical aspect of the display but if you use that as 2560 pixels across virtually in other words displaying all the interface elements of all your apps at that resolution you get something like this look how small the menu looks at the upper left look how small all the bits of text look you have plenty of space to put different windows and have different apps on the screen at the same time but everything is really small now macs are built to use screens as high dpi screens in other words more than one physical pixel representing a virtual pixel in the interface apple calls this retina retina display so if you were to use a 1440 screen in retina mode you would have to take two pixels across and two pixels vertically in other words a four pixel group as one pixel and you would get virtually this which allows you to see everything really nice text looks really nice images look really nice it's really easy to see except that you don't have much screen real estate you only really have 1280 pixels across or 720 vertically to display things all the physical pixels on your screen are being used but they're being used to make the text look finer and the images look clearer it looks great but everything is bigger so using a 1440 display optimally you really have a choice between everything being really small and there being lots of space or everything being really big and looking clear but not having a lot of space now wouldn't it be great if you could go right in the middle of that well that's actually what you get when you use a 4k display use a 4k display using high dpi or retina and you get 1920 pixels across and 1080 vertically you get this something right in between the too small and too big that you get with 1440. you have a nice compromise between having space on the screen but still having everything look good and text is easy to read so seeing this and seeing how much better 4k screens are why are 1440 displays so popular well they're mostly popular among gamers and for good reason first of all there's a little history there 1440 displays a period of time in 1920 by 1080 screens were more standard in other words non-retina displays so going to 1440 from 1080 was a jump in resolution things looked a lot better so for a while gamers had better resolution than people using their computers for like regular computing tasks in addition since they're fewer pixels you could spend money elsewhere instead of having higher resolution you could have higher refresh rates or better brightness or black or blacks that kind of thing gamers really value these especially since the screen is refreshing just about every pixel all the time at a really high frame rate and this is what makes games look good but if you're staring at a web page that isn't changing for several seconds or a minute or working in a word processor where the only thing changing is a space where you're actually typing new letters then that high refresh rate isn't as important it's much better to have more pixels also since 1440 has half the number of pixels of 4k that means the graphics card only has half as many pixels to deal with so it could be spending some of its power on higher frame rates rendering 3d graphics and textures and all of that rather than having twice as many pixels to take care of but if you're using your computer for regular computing tasks browsing the web word processing spreadsheets editing video as opposed to simply watching video things like that then you probably want to prioritize higher resolution have that 4k screen and have your mac screen right there at that sweet spot where things aren't too small or aren't too big for instance here's imovie running on a 1440 high dbi screen you can see everything is pretty big there's not much space there and you compare that with using a 4k screen and now it's a much better experience this is more what imovie is designed to look like here's xcode running on 1440 at high dpi you can see everything's pretty big it's easy to read and all that but you're really quickly going to get overwhelmed with all the little windows and panels and things you need when coding you have much more screen real estate when using a 4k screen but yet things still aren't too small so what about if you were to take a 1440 display and decide to actually set it to 1920x1080 in other words the same resolution that you would set a 4k screen to after all 2560x1440 is still greater than 1920 by 1080 so why not why not set it to that middle resolution well here's what you get on the left you'll see a 4k display and you'll see how it's normally used each of the blue squares is showing a physical screen pixel and each of the white squares is showing kind of a virtual pixel of your interface it's really nice at high dpi because a group of four equals one virtual pixel so you're just getting a higher resolution inside that pixel and the same thing when you're using a 1440 screen has 1280x720 you're getting four real pixels representing one virtual pixel you can actually show more definition in that pixel for a photo or for a font that's rendered as a nice curve because you've got four pixels for one virtual pixel but here's what happens if you try to set it in between if you try to set a 2560 by 1440 screen as 1920 by 1080. notice how everything overlaps in a messy way the physical pixel at the top left actually contains only data from one virtual pixel but then the pixel to the right of it the pixel below it and even the pixel diagonally to the bottom right contains an overlap of several virtual pixels everything's got to be kind of mixed up and it works but it makes things a little bit blurry it's not optimal for some people it may be okay and certainly for playing games where it's rendering stuff to the screen using the real physical pixels it's not going to make too much of a difference but if you're doing things like looking at text on the screen looking at photos it's going to give everything kind of a fuzzy feel to it which is why you want to stick with something like this to have it look the best on your mac so hopefully i've shown you why it's much better to only consider getting a 4k display not a 1440 display for your mac the prices are about the same 4k displays maybe a little bit more but it's definitely worth it to get twice as many pixels and have everything look really nice at the regular 4k high dpi resolution but let's say you're stuck with a 1440 display maybe you've got one lying around and you just want to use it as an extra display for your macbook you don't want to invest in a new screen there are a few things you can do first of course you can go into system preferences and then go into displays and then select your display and then hit display settings so here you're going to see default for display or scaled now 1440 screen default for display may actually display everything in that really small mode i showed you before everything's really tiny and you have lots of space so you're going to want to go to scaled and then you're going to want to look for a better option here try all the ones given to you out notice when i hover my cursor over one of these it tells me the actual pixel resolution so ideally you'd want to set it to something that's 1280x720 that may or may not be one of the options it really depends on your display and how well mac works with it but try each of these and see which one works best for you now you don't get that many options there when looking in system preferences so what if you need more options to try out more things like you want 1280x720 but it's not offered well you can use some third-party apps to get there i use switch res x which is a third-party app and it gives you these extra controls in here so under my display here in current resolutions i can set my screen to all these different resolutions so even though i have a 5k screen that does not give me the option of system preferences for 1280x720 high dpi i can actually use switch res x to do that to set my screen to that or try out some other alternatives if you like you'll find switch resects here at this site there's an alternative that some people use called better display you can download that from this website here and give that a try as well each one of these gives slightly different options but the general idea is that you can force your display into modes that maybe don't show up normally in system preferences now a few more things to add first is of course that resolution isn't the only factor when getting a display there are other things like refresh rate screen brightness how black is it black pixel and energy consumption there's lots of things to consider and certainly if you're into gaming and you want to get a screen that has good refresh rate you should be looking at that i'm thinking mostly of just using a screen as a second screen or using an imac or mac pro for computing type tasks not gaming the last thing i want to say is a very important tip i hear from a lot of people having trouble with external displays and it turns out that they're using hdmi to connect to the display some macs have an hdmi out port other times they're getting a converter to convert their thunderbolt to hdmi and then hdmi to the screen after all a lot of screens have hdmi input hdmi sounds familiar it's what your tvs have why not use it but in fact when you're using hdmi you're translating your max screen output to essentially another language hdmi and then that's going to the display and a lot of times you lose options and you lose quality when doing that instead just go directly from your mac to the screen most screens you get will have displayport connections and thunderbolt on your mac handles displayport natively for instance you can get a displayport cable that usbc on one side and whatever it is your screen is either displayport or mini displayport on the other side and then connect basically your mac directly to the screen i've had lots of people using hdmi and have had different problems with their screen and have that all go away when they simply swap out that cable for the simpler displayport cable and go directly to the screen so avoid using hdmi when connecting an external screen to your mac hope you found this useful thanks for watching [Music] if 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Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 173,651

Keywords: mac 1440, mac 1440p, mac 1440 monitor, mac 1440 screen, mac 1440 display, mac 2K, mac external display, mac external display resolution, mac external display blurry, mac external display resolution problem, mac external display text blurry

Id: jaWpq-dNVro

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022