Monitor for new M4 Mac Mini

Hi,

As shared in another thread, I'm not too happy with the more limited resolution choices my Mini M4 offers.

I'm using Thunderbolt 3 and connecting to an LG 5k monitor. This is great on my M1 MBP, but it isn't on my Mini M4.

Would using a DisplayPort cable make a difference perhaps?

Or even HDMI? This might be a silly question; I'm looking for a solution, though.

Thanks in advance,

If this is a 5120x2880 pixel monitor, it very likely requires Thunderbolt input. While the latest versions of DisplayPort and HDMI offer a lot of bandwidth, Macs have supported 5K and 6K monitors for some time with older versions of DisplayPort by wrapping two DisplayPort sessions, each carrying enough data for one half of the screen, within one Thunderbolt 3 connection.

I also purchased the LG 40WP95C Ultrawide monitor to use with my M4 Pro Mac mini just last week. I was sorely disappointed with the outcome. Using HDMI the display was nowhere near sharp or bright enough. Messing around with the monitor controls didn't help much, when set to HDR on the Mac display panel the display was noticeably duller. I increase contrast which brightened the image but it was impossible to use due to excessive sharpness.

I switched to Thunderbolt and things improved markedly. Still not really bright enough but definitely clearer.

Compared to Mac 2017 iMac unprocessed images in Photoshop were less bright and particularly the shadow details were all but gone.

The monitor is all packed up and waiting for collection as it's going back to the retailers.

I did like the Ultrawide screen, particularly nice for FCP which I feel became so much more useable on this footprint. Im now researching this as a replacement Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt™ Hub Monitor - U4025QW

It boasts more screen brightness and better refresh rate but still not sure what the Mac mini with OS 15.2 will allow in resolution. Id be interested to see what others are achieving.

That LG display is a good choice, plus you have a few options for connecting it to the Mac mini.

an HDMI to HDMI cable, a USB-C to HDMI cable, or a USB-C to DisplayPort cable

see > Connect a display to Mac mini - Apple Support

I use an LG 32UN880-B 4K HDMI UltraFine Ergo display with my current M2 Mac mini Pro and it will be used with the replacement M4 Mac mini Pro that arrives this Friday (11/8). I specifically use this Belkin UltraHD HDMI 2.1 cable with this display and the results are visually excellent.

FWIW, I have the cheaper brother of that model, 27UP600 (no adjustable stand but other wise the same) on an M1 Mac without any issue at all.

I use it at a Retina mode (HiDPI in the rest of the world) 3008x1692 which to me is a good compromise between desktop size and element and text size and is razor sharp. Note, internally the Mac maintains the screen map at 6K and then scales this to the 4K screen resulting in the "3008x1692 display value". Note that with this methodology the display is actually still receiving 4K data.

Functionally it performs just fine in all other respects.

There is one quirk with any Apple computer and displays that generally you can only adjust display brightness with the monitor with the vast majority of displays and the LG s one of those. I believe there are some work arounds for that but never investigated that since my work requires a constant display brightness.

ataeb wrote:

Thank you very much for your response. Since I haven't used a Mac device before, I wasn't aware that screen size, resolution, and PPI values of the monitor I’ll purchase are important for proper scaling.

I assumed it would automatically adjust the scaling, just like Windows devices. However, after seeing warnings that I might experience blurry visuals, especially with fonts, if I don't choose the right monitor, I wanted to ask for advice.

I believe the high-PPI transition is a case where Apple put more effort into maintaining backwards compatibility.

I believe on Windows, you would set the Control Panel resolution for your display to match its native resolution. Then you would set a separate scale factor (e.g., "150%" for a 27" 4K display) to tell applications what to do in terms of sizing things. However, I'm not sure that there is anything in Windows to actually force applications to honor that setting, and in the early days, there were applications that didn't play well on high-PPI displays.

On Macs, Apple set up a system where you have a nominal ("UI looks like") resolution and a drawing canvas that has twice as many pixels in each direction. Retina-aware applications tell macOS that they are Retina-aware and, in return, get to fill in things like photo areas in higher detail. If an application is not Retina-aware, macOS lets it believe that the "UI looks like" "resolution" is the actual resolution. Behind the legacy application's back, macOS modifies drawing requests so that things will still have the "expected" size and placement on the screen – even if they lack the extra detail a Retina-aware application could have provided.

Although virtually all Mac applications today are Retina-aware, changing APIs when you have a huge code base that depends on existing APIs is something that can be very hard to do. I believe this is why Apple continues to use the Retina scaling approach. It works well enough in a practical sense (even if it can be difficult to explain), and the application compatibility pain of changing it would be enormous.

I also purchased the LG 40WP95C Ultrawide monitor to use with my M4 Pro Mac mini just last week. I was sorely disappointed with the outcome. Using HDMI the display was nowhere near sharp or bright enough. Messing around with the monitor controls didn't help much, when set to HDR on the Mac display panel the display was noticeably duller. I increase contrast which brightened the image but it was impossible to use due to excessive sharpness.

I switched to Thunderbolt and things improved markedly. Still not really bright enough but definitely clearer.

Compared to Mac 2017 iMac unprocessed images in Photoshop were less bright and particularly the shadow details were all but gone.

The monitor is all packed up and waiting for collection as it's going back to the retailers.

I did like the Ultrawide screen, particularly nice for FCP which I feel became so much more useable on this footprint.

I tried the LG Ultrawide display but it wasn't bright enough.Has anybody tried or seen how this

Dell UltraSharp 40" U4025QW 5K WUHD

monitor performs with M4 Pro Mac mini ?

That’s the display I’m using on my 2018 Mac mini and I intend to keep it when I upgrade to the new M4 mini in a couple months. It is the 3rd LG display I’ve purchased in the last 10 years and I’m still using all of them in various capacities

27" 5K would be ideal – unfortunately, there aren't many monitors with that combination of size and resolution.

I'm using a 27" 4K monitor, running in Retina "looks like 2560x1440" mode (one notch down from "Larger Text"). The Mac draws on a 5K canvas and then downscales that for the 4K panel, so it is taking advantage of the full 4K resolution of the display. There's the same amount of workspace as on a 27" 2560x1440 monitor, but with more detail than an actual 27" 2560x1440 monitor would offer, and less than a 27" 5120x2880 monitor could display.

I can also choose Retina "like 3008x1692" mode, to get a bit more workspace, at the expense of making text and objects smaller. In that mode, the Mac draws on a 6K canvas, then downscales it for the 4K panel. It sounds like even the base M4 Mac mini is capable of running a 3-display setup where the "like 3008x1692" option would be available on the first two displays.

I did like the Ultrawide screen, particularly nice for FCP which I feel became so much more useable on this footprint. Im now researching this as a replacement Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt™ Hub Monitor - U4025QW

It boasts more screen brightness and better refresh rate but still not sure what the Mac mini with OS 15.2 will allow in resolution. Id be interested to see what others are achieving.

Thank you for that info. I didn't know that running a 27 inch 4k monitor in 3008x1692 resolution brings it into a Retina mode, but it makes perfect sense because I have a 27" 4K Samsung ViewFinity S8 and after experimentation I chose that resolution as my favorite as well.