If you prefer an ultrawide monitor, the LG 38WN95C-W is one of the best external monitors we have used. It has two Thunderbolt 3 ports and an additional 3 USB-C ports, giving you a ton of space to plug in your favorite accessories. If your workflow needs the fast transfer speeds or daisy-chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt 3, I would suggest the LG UltraFine 4K Display. It offers high-bandwidth data transfers between devices, with maximum transfer rates of 40Gbps - on a plain USB-C connection, you won't get transfer rates this fast.
The biggest and most significant difference is that Intel developed Thunderbolt 3. While a USB-C port and a Thunderbolt 3 port look the same, Thunderbolt 3 has some extra hardware compared to the more widely adopted USB-C. USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 both utilize the same reversible port, leading to a lot of confusion surrounding the two protocols. If you're jumping back and forth between desks and need to be constantly referencing the screen, you'll have a much better time without having to look at it head-on. It features a 2560x1440 resolution, which competes with any of the top monitors in its class, and its IPS panel gives it excellent viewing angles. Some apps and games might need specific resolutions to be used, for example.If you're on a budget, then Ben Q is the way to go with its 32-inch LED-lit monitor. If you need to know precisely which resolution you are using, the scaled options won’t cut it. Why Selecting a Resolution Might be Important But they’re vague, and there’s a way to select a more precise resolution. Some scaling options are made available by default, and they get the job done. It also gives you the flexibility of using a display’s native resolution at all times. That allows a larger display resolution to be used without shrinking on-screen items to the point of being difficult to see. Scaling works by taking something that would typically use a single pixel and making it use multiples of two instead. Everything looks great because of the high resolution, but because it’s scaled, you can still read it. You would expect everything to be tiny at that resolution, but because macOS scales everything up, it’s not. And it’s also where scaling comes into effect.Īn excellent example of how Retina displays change the way we think of resolutions is the 5K 27-inch iMac with a resolution of 5120 x 2880. Apple defines a Retina display as one whose pixel density is so high that your eyes can’t see individual pixels when you’re sitting at a reasonable viewing distance.įor you, that means a tack sharp image. The direct link between how many pixels a display has and how much space is available on-screen is broken by Apple’s use of Retina displays. Larger displays usually also have higher resolutions than smaller ones, especially if they are of good quality.
Because of the larger resolution, however, that also means all on-screen elements are smaller, which is something else to consider. Those things could be windows, icons, photos, or text in a document.
Higher resolutions mean that more things can be shown on-screen. How much information you can see on-screen at any given time is governed by its resolution. A 4K display has a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, or 3840 pixels horizontally, and 2160 pixels vertically. A display’s resolution is the number of pixels available both horizontally and vertically.