Deals: Samsung Kicks Off Father's Day Sale With $250 Off iMac-Like Smart Monitor M8

Would be really good if Apple websites stopped referring to this as "iMac-like".
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It's not like iMac in any of the ways that count.

I know a lot of people still awaiting the ViewFinity S9 27" 5K ('https://www.samsung.com/au/business/monitors/high-resolution/viewfinity-s9-27-inch-5k-resolution-ls27c900paexxy/').

Please stop calling low pixel density monitors "iMac-like".

They say that because of its design

Well, they should be smarter than this.

I'm not an expert on pixel density, but isn't 27" kind of small for a 5K monitor? Wouldn't 32" be better so you don't need to scale everything to make the text readable for us folks over 25?

People on this forum obsess over perfectly even integer scaling to achieve retina PPI even though a regular 4K display at 27" will be indistinguishable from a 5K display at that size when viewed from a normal viewing desk distance for most people (the people who dispute this are the ones who most likely lean in closely to their displays to admire the pixel density).

That being said there is some logic to this. Before high-DPI displays like 4k and 5k became common QHD was the standard resolution for a 27" display (2560x1440). 5K is exactly 2x the vertical and horizontal resolutions of QHD (4x the pixels total). This means that a 5K monitor running in QHD scaled mode will scale the display output exactly 2x the original output. On a Mac this results in optimal sharpness of text and UI elements because of the bizarre way macOS handles UI scaling.

The Mac's internal display engine will render the display in two modes - native and retina. If you set your Mac to any display scaling that's not the optimal 2x scaling of the display's native resolution then the graphics subsystem will still render the display output at 2x and then scale it down to fit the display. For example if you plug a 4K display into a Mac and choose the display setting that looks like QHD then macOS will still render the display at 5K resolution and then scale it down to fit the 4K display resolution. This can lead to a slight loss of sharpness that some users find unacceptable. (I personally barely notice it). Users would have to run a 4K display at the display scaling equivalent of FHD/1080p to get that perfect 2x scaling on a 4K display, which results in an overly large UI.

So that's why Mac users obsess over 5K for 27" displays and routinely trash 4K panels for being inferior and low resolution. It also means that a 32" display has to be 6K to achieve the same 2x scaling equilibrium.

It's not like iMac in any of the ways that count.

Yeah, you need to price things like an idiot if you wanna be like Apple.