Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise.

Why is this? 5k/6k at 27" would be the sweet spot for me, and potentially 8k at 32". However, I'm not willing to drop $2k per monitor to go from a very nice 27" 4k to 27" 5k.

You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now. And an Quest 3 headset has 2 displays at far higher PPI for $600.

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K.

There's been a bit of a 'renaissance' of 5K@27" in the last ~year:

> In just the past few months, we've taken a look at the ASUS ProArt Display 5K, the BenQ PD2730S, and the Alogic Clarity 5K Touch with its unique touchscreen capabilities, and most recently I've been testing out another new option, the $950 ViewSonic VP2788-5K, to see how it stacks up.

* https://www.macrumors.com/review/viewsonic-vp2788-5k-display...

There are 15 monitors discussed in this video:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINM4EysdbI

The ASUS ProArt PA27JCV is USD 800 (a lot less than $2k):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojwowaY3Ccw

> You can get 8K TVs for <$1000 now.

8K at jumbo TV size has relatively large pixels compared to an 8K desktop monitor. It’s easier to manufacture.

> And an Quest 3 headset has 2 displays at far higher PPI for $600

Those displays are physically tiny. Easier to deal with lower yields when it’s only taking a few square inches.

Ultra high resolution desktop monitors would exist in the middle: Very small pixel sizes but also relatively large unit area.

However, the demand side is also not there. There are already a number of 5K, 6K, and 8K monitors on the market. They’re just not selling well. Between difficult software support for scaling legacy apps, compatibility issues with different graphics cards and cables, and the fact that normal monitors are good enough, the really high resolution monitors don’t sell well. That doesn’t incentivize more.

If we get to a place where we could reliably plug a 6K monitor into any medium to high end laptop or desktop and it just works, there might be more. Until then, making a high res monitor is just asking for an extremely high return rate.

Because the vast majority of Monitor Sales-Volume are (public) tenders from companies buying huge volume, and those companies still mostly look for monitors <4K (without fancy specs and without i.e. USB-C).

If 4K reaches mass-market for those, the specs will shift down and there will be room in the (much smaller) Premium-Tier monitor segment

Heck, even if you just want USB-C and an integrated webcam on an average display, the price-hike compared to one without it is crazy, because everything except those basic office-monitors is still niche-production...

as a gamer 8k makes me sweat because i can't imagine what kind of hardware you'd need to run a game :O probably great for text-based work, though!

> and potentially 8k at 32"

What's your actual use-case for this? I run a 32" 4K, and I have to stick my nose within a foot (~30cm) of the display to actually spot individual pixels. Maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be

I'd kill for a 40" 5k or 6k to be available - that's significantly more usable desktop real estate, and I still wouldn't be able to see the pixels.

The likelihood of dead pixels increases quadratically with resolution, hence panel yield drops correspondingly. In addition, the target audience who has hardware (GPUs) that can drive those resolutions is smaller.

One of the best things I've done for my setup is convert old 5k iMacs to work as external display.

Only downside are the massive borders by todays standards, but it still has the Apple aesthetics, the 5k resolution is beautiful for my use cases (spreadsheets, documents, photo editing), and has HDMI inputs so I can play PS5 on it.

30 or 32" 5k is what I'd love - maybe 6k at 32

The Asus PA27JCV is rather less than $2k...

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise.

Multiple reasons.

The first one being yield - yes you can get 8K screens, but the larger they get, the more difficult it is to cut a panel with an acceptably low rate of dead/stuck pixels out of a giant piece of glass. Dead pixels are one thing and bad enough, but stuck-bright pixels ruin the entire panel because they will be noticeable in any dark-ish movie or game scene. That makes them really darn expensive.

The second reason is the processing power required to render the video signal to the screen, aka display controllers. Even if you "just" take regular 8 bit RGB - each frame takes up 33 million pixels, so 796.262.400 bits. Per frame. Per second? Even at just 30 FPS, you're talking about 23.887.872.000 bits per second - 23 gigabits/s. It takes an awful, awful lot of processing power just to shuffle that data from the link SerDes around to all the control lines and to make sure they all switch their individual pixels at the very same time.

The third is transferring all the data. Even if you use compression and sub-sampling, you still need to compress and sub-sample the framebuffer on the GPU side, transfer up to 48 GBit/s (HDMI 2.3) or 77 GBit/s (DP 2.1) of data, and then uncompress it on the display side. If it's HDCP-encrypted, you need to account for that as well - encrypting and decrypting at such line speeds used to be unthinkable even two decades ago. The fact that the physical transfer layer is capable of delivering such data rates over many meters of copper cable of varying quality is nothing short of amazing anyway.

And the fourth is generating all the data. You need absurdly high definition textures, which requires lots of VRAM, lots of regular RAM, lots of disk I/O, lots of disk storage (your average AAA game is well beyond 100GB of data at-rest for a reason!), and then render power to actually render the scene. 8K has 16x (!) the pixels of regular FullHD (1080p).

What's stopping further progress? Other than yield and simple physics (similar to microchips, the finer the structures get the more difficult and expensive it is to make them), the most pressing issue is human visual acuity - even a human with very good vision can only make useful sense of about 74 of the theoretical 576 megapixels [1]. As we already established, 8K is at 33-ish megapixels, so the usual quadratic increase would already be far too detailed for 99.999% of humans to perceive.

Yes, you could go for intermediate sizes. 5K, 6K, weird aspect ratios, whatever - but as soon as you go there, you'll run into issues with video content because it can't be up- or downscaled to such intermediates without a perceptible loss in quality and, again, a lot of processing power.

[1] https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html

> Me and a friend were just chatting how annoying it is monitors stalled out at 4K. I think I got my first set of 4k monitors ~15 years ago (!) and there's been no improvements since then apart from high end pro monitors resolution wise.

It's mostly because the improvement over 4k is marginal. In fact, even from 1920x1080 it's not so big of a deal, which is why people keep buying such monitors in 2025.

A the worse is that the higher spending consumer segment of PC parts, the gamers, can't really use high resolution display at their full potential because it puts such a burden on the GPU (DLSS helps, but the results is even smaller of an improvement over 1920x1080 than regular 4k is)

Ah yes. It’s the same with memory… 8gb/16gb is incredibly common, even though 16gb memory was a thing in like 2008 already. It’s only with high end machines that you get 64/128gb memory, which should be much more common in my opinion.