amarko5 wrote:
as I keep seeing in all the discussion I read on this matter it seems the consensus is to "dumb down" i.e. run the monitor at 2560 x 1440 . but does that not then defeat the object of having a 4k monitor if you are working at 2.5k
The Retina "like 2560x1440" mode that I am talking about uses the full 3840x2160 resolution of the monitor. It just does not use it for cramming more and more, tinier and tinier, stuff on the screen.
An analogy: Commercial printing presses have much higher resolution than any display, even a 27" 5K or 32" 6K Apple Retina display. It would be possible for book publishers to print books exclusively in 2-point or 3-point text so as to "use all of the resolution of the printing press". Yet they do not.
all this talk of retina this and retina that would appear to not apply to me being a non retina display .
If I go into Displays Settings, I see a row of five icons representing different settings that I can use with my 27" 4K display.
- Retina "like 1920x1080" (Larger Text) – drawing takes place on a 3840x2160 (4K) canvas
- Retina "like 2560x1440" – drawing takes place on a 5120x2880 (5K) canvas
- Retina "like 3008x1692" – drawing takes place on a 6016x3384 (6K) canvas
- Retina "like 3360x1890" – drawing takes place on a canvas with greater than 6K resolution
- 3840x2160 (More Space) – drawing takes place on a 3840x2160 (4K) canvas
No matter which setting I choose, the Mac draws on a canvas that has at least 4K resolution, and the signal that goes to the monitor has 4K resolution (as reported by the monitor).
sorry if I sound thick but why would I want to work in 2.5k when I bought a machine and a monitor capable of working at 4k ?? it would seem a simple fix for apple to just give us a global scaling option for the fonts
It would not be a "simple fix." It would require changing the APIs that applications use to deal with the operating system. Since no existing applications know about the control that you want, this would require updates to every application. Any application that wasn't updated would work poorly on any screen that Apple makes today – and would also work poorly on third-party 4K and 5K displays.
This would inflict the sort of pain on Mac users that I believe a lot of Windows users suffered in the early days of high-PPI displays, when there were major Windows applications that simply ignored the text scaling control and thus were not very pleasant to use on high-PPI displays.
The Retina system seems to have worked out pretty well for Mac users for many years now. There's a saying that goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
