Monitor Resolution?

[tilt]

28" - http://www.samsung.com/levant/consum...LU28D590DS/ZN/

[waldronate]

I've also considered the idea of multiple monitors of the same model to avoid visual change. Obviously I wouldn't be going 32" if I were to go that route

If you're not planning to move your monitors around from place to place a lot, you might want to consider a pair of VESA mount monitor arms. You need to get monitors equipped with VESA mounts, but that's the case with most higher-end monitors. Way back before I had kids, I spent too much on an Ergotron LX arms set. They are nice because they allow me to push the monitors to any height and aspect that I want without having to deal with the limitations of the built-in stand. I can even rotate them vertically when the urge strikes to look at things taller than wide. The arms that I have cost way more than the monitors currently attached to them, though...

So, as the monitor "physical size" goes up...do the individual LED's themselves get larger? (in the case of two monitors with the same resolution...one being...say...24" and one being 27"...etc.)

The dots per inch (dpi) or pixels per inch (ppi) metric is a product of the number of pixels across (or down) divided by the number of pixels in that direction. This metric is usually noted as "dot pitch" in the specifications for the device. For a given resolution, a larger screen will have larger pixels. Those 70" 4k HDTVs may have individual pixels on the order of millimeters across, for example, and an 800ppi smartphone has pixels on the order of hundredths of millimeters across.

There is one other trivial thing to watch out for that usually isn't a problem, but may affect text quality on Windows machines using ClearType: band order. At every pixel on a typical LCD screen there are three little color filters over the valves that go in the order red, green, blue. ClearType tries to use color perception and the assumed color ordering to make text look smoother than it would physically be (it's why you sometimes see weird color fringes on text when you zoom in on images). A few monitors on the market have their color filters in the order blue, green, red. As you might expect, this color ordering makes your text look awful with ClearType. There is a setting in Windows to reverse the ClearType band ordering or to not use ClearType at all that can help. I mention this solely in case you get one of those backwards monitors and it doesn't look nearly as good as you expect.

[tilt]

oh.. in reference to Waldronates post the screen I bought can't be moved in height which is a little annoying.

[WarBeer]

This new build will be my first round with Windows 10...how's the "scaling" feature with the 4k monitors? Does it increase the size of fonts on "menu bars" and such? If NOT...would a larger monitor help bring it up a bit?

[waldronate]

How well scaling works is entirely up to the program in question. If your program is fairly recent and supports the dpi features of Windows, then the fonts and everything will scale nicely, giving crisp text next to crisp graphics. If your program is old or isn't dpi-aware, then Windows will draw the program into an offscreen buffer at 96 dpi and then scale that buffer up to the physical resolution when it shows it onscreen, making everything blurry. The worst case is programs that are a little bit dpi-aware: they can draw some elements nicely, but other elements will be scaled improperly (e.g. tiny text) or clipped badly (e.g. half of the elements in list boxes may be clipped off, making it hard to work with).

As an example, I currently have my dpi set to 125% on my home machine. The attached image shows three programs: Illustrator 5.1, Notepad, and Photoshop 5.1 (note that these Adobe products are fairly old versions). Illustrator looks to be completely dpi-unaware, with everything a bit blurry, but at about the expected size. Notepad scales everything correctly, giving correctly-sized title bars, text, menus, and so on. Photoshop is not quite dpi-aware, but it's trying. Its menu bar and toolbar are scaled at 100%, making them too small, but the pop-up menu is scaled to 125%, making it nice and crisp. It will only look worse at higher dpi scaling settings. I would have used a higher setting to more dramatically illustrate the program, but it would have required that I log out and back in again to get the full effect.

dpi.png

The Windows 10 Creators Update that came out a few days ago offers some dpi compatibility features that are supposed to help for badly-behaved programs.

[WarBeer]

waldronate...thank you very much for that info!

[WarBeer]

Since we touched upon some "build" related topic....concerning large maps, with lots of layers (and rendering)...would I notice any difference in performance between 64g RAM vs 32g RAM ?

[kacey]

What size of maps are you planning on making? Just as an example, for me anyway, on my Surface tablet I can get away with maps that are around 6000 pixels across if I keep my layers organized. Some times if I get like 20 layers or allot of layer styles on the layers then I need to make a flattened copy of the image, work on a layer, then drag that layer back over to the master file or else I can start to get some pretty bad lag. I don't know how other people deal with those issue's that's just what I do, and it's not so bad. And I almost forgot to mention that's on 16 gb of ram, and I think allot of people make maps with 8gb and even 4. I think it's like I said earlier if you have the money to spend why not, but if you don't theres way's around doing things on a lower end machine. I'm putting 32gb of ram in my new computer, with space to make it 64 if I find I need it down the road though I'm not sure if thats overkill or not. It will be interesting to find out how you're new computer performs because it sounds very similar to what I'm building, only I'm getting AMD not Nivida for graphics.

[Mouse]

I have 4 GB RAM. However I draw maps that are about 8000 pi square, and have many layers. The way I get around it is to have many tiny layers, rather than full layers that cover the entire canvas. That way I can have 30+ layers without too many problems, which is usually enough for the kind of map I draw

[WarBeer]

The world-map I believe I going to work on next will be 7200x4200 pixels. (24"x14"@300 dpi)