[asdff]

I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable. Maybe you'd notice it in lab setting but not irl. Kind of like 120hz and 4k; just useless to most peoples eyes at the distances people actually use these devices. I've only owned matte external monitors as well and again, no issues there.

The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.

[coldtea]

>I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable.

They were absolutely noticable. Contrast was crap. I immediately went with glossy with my next MBP around that same period.

[musicale]

I can't go back to the low contrast and washed-out look of matte screens unfortunately. The nano texture isn't terrible but I'd only use it if I had to work with a bright window or other lighting source behind me. If you go to an Apple store you can A/B test glossy vs. nano-texture and glossy wins for me.

OLED glossy on the iPad Pro is even better.

[ra]

It became more of an issue when retina came out, that's when they stopped non-reflective screen options.

[javier2]

Yeah, what on earth. Go back to one of these old displays, I guarantee you want to gouge your eyes out at how terrible they are. 2006 should put you firmly in 720p land.

[daymanstep]

120Hz is absolutely a noticeable improvement over 60Hz. I have a 60Hz iPhone and a 120Hz iPhone and the 60Hz one is just annoying to use. Everything feels so choppy.

[asdff]

I can't tell at all when my mbp is in 120hz or 60hz. I tried to set up a good test too by scrolling really fast while plugging and unplugging the power adapter (which kicks it into high power 120hz or low power 60hz).

[embedding-shape]

One of those things that some people notice, some people don't. I'm definitely in the camp where I feel differences between 120hz and 60hz, but I don't feel 60hz as choppy, and beyond 120hz I can't notice any difference, but others seemingly can. Maybe it's our biology?

[acjohnson55]

I would bet most people would fail a blind test.

[dgfl]

Basically everyone who has played videogames on pc will notice the difference. I easily notice a drop from 360Hz to 240Hz.

I also use 60Hz screens just fine, saying that getting used to 120Hz ruins slower displays is being dramatic. You can readjust to 60Hz again within 5 minutes. But I can still instantly tell which is higher refresh rate, at least up to 360Hz.

[LtWorf]

Videogames also do the input every loop so there's a big difference there. It must be evaluated with a video only.

[Forgeties79]

60 to 120? Generally there are tell tale signs. If I quickly drag a window around it’s clear as day at 120.

Most people who’ve used both 60 and 120 could tell, definitely if a game is running. Unless you’re asking me to distinguish between like 110 and 120, but that’s like asking someone to distinguish between roughly 30 and 32.

North of 120 it gets trickier to notice no matter what IMO.

I can live with 60 but 85+ is where I’m happy.

[codedokode]

It's super easy, put your finger on a touchpad and move it fast in circle so that the cursor also moves in circle. As the eye is not that fast, you will see multiple faint mouse cursors images. With 120 Hz there will be twice more cursors than with 60 Hz.

On a perfect display you should see just a faint grey circle.

Another test is moving cursor fast across the white page and tracking it with eyes. On a perfect display it should be perfectly crisp, on my display it blurs and moves in steps.

So basically on a perfect display you can track fast moving things, and when not tracking, they are blurred. On a bad display, things blur when tracking them, and you see several instances otherwise. For example, if you scroll a page with a black box up-down, on a bad display you would see several faint boxes overlayed, and on a perfect display one box with blurred edges.

[zozbot234]

You could replicate a "perfect display" by analytically implementing motion blurring (which is really just a kind of temporal anti-aliasing) in software. This wouldn't let you track moving objects across the screen without blur, but that's a very niche scenario anyway. Where 120hz really helps you is in slashing total latency from user input to the screen. A 60hz screen adds a max 16.667ms of latency, which is plenty enough to be perceived by the user.

[seanmcdirmid]

I think it’s more noticeable if you are touch interacting with your screen during a drag. If you are scrolling using the mouse, you might not realize it at all like if you were scrolling with your finger.

[DANmode]

Display quality should be measured in eye-strain and fatigue after your intended workload.

[PhilipRoman]

I believe refresh rate/FPS is one of those things where it doesn't really matter but human eyes get spoiled by the higher standard, making it hard to go back. I never saw issues with 30 FPS until going to 60, etc. Hopefully I never get a glimpse of 120 or 144Hz, which would require me to throw out all existing devices.

[rkomorn]

Best take in this thread.

The jump forward doesn't even necessarily feel that huge but the step backward is (annoyingly) noticeable.

[DANmode]

Quality of life adjustments are all like this.

Especially wellness.

[vladvasiliu]

I'm not convinced. I have an iphone 14 pro which has a 120 Hz screen. I can absolutely see the difference when scrolling compared to my older iphone 11 or computer screens.

However, I'm typing this on my Dell monitor which only does 60 Hz. It honestly doesn't bother me at all. Sure, when I scroll long pages I see the difference: the text isn't legible. But, in practice, I never read moving text.

However, one thing on which I can't go back is resolution. A 32" 4k screen is the minimum for me. I was thinking about getting a wider screen, but they usually have less vertical resolution than my current one. A 14" MBP is much more comfortable when looking at text all day then my 14" HP with FHD screen. And it's not just because the colors and contrast are better, it's because the text is sharper.

[dontlaugh]

4K too, at anything over 15” or so.

I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.

[asdff]

At the distance I look at my TV screen (about 7 feet from the couch) I can't make out the pixels of the 1080p screen. 4k is lost on me. 2020 vision but I guess that is not enough.

[Tagbert]

Resolution is much less important for video than it is for text and user interfaces.

[rkomorn]

This is exactly why I went to 4K.

Used to have a 27" 2560x1440 monitor at home. Got a 4K 27" at work, and when I got home, the difference was big enough that I (eventually) decided to upgrade the home monitor.

[heavyset_go]

Unless the screen is right in front of your face, video codecs and their parameters matter more than FHD vs UHD, IMO.

At least to me, with corrected vision, a high quality 1080p video looks better than streaming quality 4k at the same distance.

[dalmo3]

Compare apples to apples, e.g. gaming, and the difference is glaring.

[madaxe_again]

I also have perfect vision in terms of focal length - but it turns out I have astigmatism in opposite axises in both eyes.

Glasses make a huge difference when watching TV, and are the dividing line between being able to tell the difference between 4K and 1080p and not being able to discern any.

[dontlaugh]

I’m 3m from my TV and I can absolutely tell 4K from 1080p, but it is indeed subtle.

But a fraction of that distance to my monitor makes even 4K barely good enough. I’d need a much smaller 4K monitor to not notice pixels.

[arcanemachiner]

I agree with this, but I use a 43" 4K TV as my monitor... which probably isn't what you meant.

[dontlaugh]

I notice it on my 27” monitor. I’ve seen 15” 4K displays and that’s about the limit where I can see the difference.

My eyesight isn’t perfect, either.

[BoorishBears]

To each their own but I have a matte M4 Pro and I don't like it, and the screen is noticeably worse than my glossy M2 Pro.

There's a graininess to the screen that makes it feel a little worse at all times, meanwhile I never had a problem in daylight just cranking brightness into the XDR range using Lunar.

It's especially noticeable on light UIs, where empty space gets an RGB "sparkle" to it. I noticed the same thing when picking out my XDR years ago, so it seems like they never figured out how to solve it.

[Zanfa]

I have the last gen 27” 5k iMac with nano texture as my primary monitor these days and you can immediately tell the difference between image quality, compared to a glossy MacBook pro. Don’t get me wrong, it’s by far the best quality matte finish I’ve ever seen and I would buy it again, because it works great in a room with south-facing windows, but it definitely affects the overall image quality noticeably.

[jasomill]

I still have my 2011 17" MacBook Pro, built to order with pretty much every available option available at the time, including the matte screen.

While it serves a useful purpose by diffusing unavoidable point light sources in uncontrolled environments, it's honestly not much of an improvement over its glossy contemporaries in sunlight and other brightly-lit environments, as diffusing already diffuse reflections has little effect.

[vladvasiliu]

I have a 2013 MBP retina with glossy screen and a 2020 HP with a matte screen.

What I've found, is that inside, the HP is much better at handling reflections. However, outside, the screen gets washed out and is next to unusable. Whereas on the MBP, I can usually find an angle where reflections don't bother me and I can spend hours using it.

[brians]

We have different eyes and different purposes, I think.

[acjohnson55]

The 2006 would probably have had 1080ish resolution. I think the GP's point is that at higher resolutions, matte has tended to have the issues they cited.

I am with you in preferring matte. For me, mostly because of reflections on glossy screens.

[wtallis]

Even at ~100 dpi, the grainy character of matte coatings from that era was noticeable; my 2006 iMac and a Dell Ultrasharp from a few years later were both unmistakably grainy in a way that glossy displays are not. At the time, the matte coatings were an acceptable tradeoff and the best overall choice for many users and usage scenarios. But I can imagine they would have been quite problematic when we jumped to 200+ dpi.

[Arn_Thor]

Your 2006 MacBook was pre-retina, a.k.a. High-resolution, displays though. Any kind of smearing effect probably improved the perception of the image because it masked the very visible pixels in the LCD

[charlie0]

That's what Lunar is for. Just bump up the brightness to HDR levels. Helps a lot with the glare, but will take a bite out of the battery life.

[waldothedog]

I also was matte in 06, and had that machine for 9 years (until it was stolen :/). Only option was glossy for my replacement, I was devastated. A few machines later now, I can’t imagine going back.

[thordenmark]

For professional graphic designers, cinematographers, photographers, and illustrators these subtleties in the screen is a big deal.

[scoodah]

The difference between matte and glossy displays in regards to their contrast and clarity is absolutely noticeable to the naked eye.

[dylan604]

> Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections

This is nearly my preferred setup, only I have wall lights on the wall behind the monitors so it's not truly a dark room (which is horrible for your eyes). No over head lights allowed on while I'm at the keyboard.

[nine_k]

Good for you! Not as good for a typical office though.

[dylan604]

Well, I WFH, so of course. Yet another reason RTO is a no go

[vladvasiliu]

Just make sure to not wear glasses or white clothes.

[esseph]

There is a large visual difference between 60hz/120-144hz.

[boredtofears]

Both 4k and 120hz were very noticeable improvements imo.