I am using an LG Ultrafine 5K 27 inch Monitor with an M1 Macbook Air. The UltraFine 5K Display features a native resolution of 5120-by-2880. It has a default resolution of 2560-by-1440 (Retina pixel doubled). The Dell display is 3840 by 2160 and I would like to see more open windows with calendar and reminders on the left part of my screen while still having enough real estate for my other programs.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance.
gswpitt
I don’t have any experience with either, but it seems that no matter how much screen real estate you have, it’s never enough - especially if you’re using a single display.
Just in case – you can change the display scaling in System Preferences | Displays to get more space or larger text, which ever suits you.
My problem is that I want more space and larger text 
Luckily I don’t want it that badly.
I think this is a really hard question. I have gone from a 5K iMac Pro to an LG 4K 27" monitor on my new M1 Mini. You can see a difference in image quality, although it’s not enough to make me trade up to the LG Ultrafine 5K 27" (I would if the Ultrafine were perhaps $400, but not at over $1000).
I have been considering a widescreen monitor just as you are, because I would like to be able to have either multiple windows side by side on a single monitor (although I do use a two monitor setup on the desktop, the second monitor is my old 24" Dell 4K and sits off to the side with OmniFocus and Calendar on it; it don’t like the two monitor bezel in the middle of my field of view approach) or at times a huge window like for a very large Numbers spreadsheet.
There are two big stumbling blocks to my doing the upgrade (outside of cost, of course). Firstly I am concerned about the downgrade in pixel pitch / density degrading the image I am used to seeing, and secondly the ultrawidescreens are mostly curved, and I am concerned about the impact of a curved screen on image editing for my photography work.
Remember that while the “effective” resolution of your retina scale Ultrafine is 2560 x 1440, which is lower than the pixel count of the larger monitor you are looking at, the Retina display is allocating 4 screen pixels to every one pixel in the image, and using “sub pixel rendering” (eg controlling the 4 pixels on the screen for every one in the image individually to enhance sharpness) to make the image far sharper and more detailed than would be the case for a 2560x1440 display that actually had that lower number of physical pixels.
The result is that the Retina display just appears sharper. And of course as already noted you can change the scaling to put more on the screen, but that makes everything smaller and I suspect few people do that because once things become too small they become much harder to read and work with.
I’d be interesting if you do make the change to hear your thoughts. I wish that more of these higher end ultrawides were on display in local stores where I could see them in operation to make the decision.
