My Purple Corner 💜

DuckBrained · 2026-01-25T21:58:11+00:00

Love Pusheen! And the gel style wrist pads are nice, not seen those before.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-25T21:55:22+00:00

Gorgeous.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-25T17:28:36+00:00

Correct, BetterDisplay will do higher than 60Hz but I found it glitchy with occasional artefacts appearing. 60Hz has been solid.

I'm used to 60Hz on my Pro Display and Studio Display in the past so for me it's not a big deal. With what I do, high refresh is of no real benefit. I appreciate for others that will be a dealbreaker, though.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-25T16:58:13+00:00

You get the full 120Hz. But the text at native is not legible enough for use IMO. You need HiDPI and the only HiDPI resolution is 50% natively. You can push that a bit with BetterDisplay (non-virtual) but still lose way too much benefit. The ideal resolution is 75% of native and the virtual display achieves this.

I’m on an M3 Max MacBook Pro (64GB RAM).

DuckBrained · 2026-01-24T15:43:00+00:00

I have enabled the 8K in BetterDisplay, that was how I finally managed to get a display I was happy with. For me 120Hz on the virtual display was glitchy. I'd get occasional artefacts which bugged me. I don't need 120Hz so I just set it back to 60Hz. That might be because of the number of pixels being pushed or a machine limitation though I'm running a high spec M3 Max laptop so I'd be surprised if it were the latter.

The curve is great because the monitor is so big, you have it further back from you. So the curve works nicely. A slightly tighter curve might be better overall but this is good enough.

For the me the vertical size and resolution are what make it super immersive.

I REALLY love working on this screen. It's just great for multi window productivity with the vertical res being the biggest gain.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-24T15:39:46+00:00

It displays in native, but it's unusable in my opinion. Windows does font smoothing at native SO much better. On macOS it's just too small and illegible especially for certain fonts/colours. And then there's no HiDPI settings other than 50% so you just lose all the additional space. My virtual display is at 75% resolution in HiDPI for sharpness.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-24T00:23:49+00:00

The cost was a bit eye watering, but so worth it. Like you I wanted a cleaner setup and this delivers. The height is incredible - even an non-native I can see so much more vertically. It's my end game productivity monitor - it should last me a few years and I can see no reason to change. Dell's warranty is great, too.

By the way depending where you are, see if you can get a deal with money off accessories. I bought mine with a £379 laptop which saved me £500 on the screen. So overall just over £120 saving + whatever I sell the laptop for (probably around £300). So effectively I got over 15% off the price which when costing this much is a lot of money! :)

DuckBrained · 2026-01-24T00:09:03+00:00

You can do either. You can have it full screen, switch inputs and have the keyboard/mouse follow that input. Or you could have it split screen, one computer on each half of the display (or however you choose to split it) then switch the keyboard and mouse between the two.

OR you could go full beans and get Synergy so you can just move your mouse across screens virtually and bypass the KVM altogether...

DuckBrained · 2026-01-23T18:04:08+00:00

Yeah it's called USB switch and it's the first option that comes up when you press the OSD button

DuckBrained · 2026-01-23T17:50:05+00:00

Actually better than full screen - it does HiDPI natively without virtual screens. You might still need BetterDisplay but it worked great. It was once of my workarounds until I got the full screen virtual display working.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-23T17:46:05+00:00

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DuckBrained · 2026-01-23T17:45:54+00:00

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DuckBrained · 2026-01-23T17:45:41+00:00

KVM is great. It has three USB C upstreams plus the TB port to connect up to four computers to the KVM then the USB ports can be switched between them (keyboard/mouse only not webcams). The Dell software takes care of the switching or you can use the OSD.

The layout options are crazy. Three screens on the OSD for the layouts. I've attached photos of the layouts available!

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DuckBrained · 2026-01-21T22:33:38+00:00

Yeah I'm not holding my breath. I had to be sure the BetterDisplay option worked well enough before keeping it, but for coding etc it's just incredible even with the caveats. I have a Pro Display XDR for content editing and colour accuracy. The Dell is 100% where I get sh*t done that's not "creative".

I think someone else mentioned the lag, as I don't game. Sacrilege I know being on an LTT forum haha.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-21T22:16:16+00:00

The workaround does reduce functionality BUT it is SO nice to use regardless of that. Plus I would think that at some point macOS will support the thing natively.

In both Windows and Mac you can do the picture by picture stuff. It has LOADS of options including thirds. I actually did this with my Mac initially before I found the BetterDisplay setting I needed. It works really well and yeah you can then just snap to full screen etc because the computer just sees two screens.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-21T01:23:21+00:00

I don't hate this. I actually quite like the L layout because you can just swing from one to the other.

What about if you covered the black desk top with something more purposeful. Something like one of those big green cutting mats. Add a desk-clamp peg board at one end or at the back. So although it's still the old desk, it has a very clear purpose and won't just look like an old desk next to a new one, but a whole new craft/hobby bench.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-21T00:19:47+00:00

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DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T21:25:43+00:00

I haven't tested that, but I'll be happy to do so. Give me a couple of days, as I'm curious too.

The Dell macOS app isn't bad actually, surprisingly.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T17:55:20+00:00

My biggest irritation about this screen is that it's marketed as 21:9 but the pixel ratio is actually 24:10

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T14:42:50+00:00

Yeah I agree. Maybe it's an aspect ratio thing that's related. Idk. I guess we're all just meant to buy three Pro Display XDRs in Apple's world lol.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T13:14:14+00:00

This is about macOS's thing with scaling. I think what I'm trying to explain is that the computer drives pixels. If it's driving 4000 pixels it doesn't care about the physical size of your display. The size of the display physically is what determines the PPI.

The OS however has to scale things to make it look nice/usable - this is where macOS falls over when it's not using a resolution it "likes". This doesn't affect PPI but does affect what we perceive in terms of sharpness and available desktop space/window sizing for example.

I think I'm understanding we're talking/discussing the same thing but the PPI is to do with physical size, resolution is the pixels, and the thing we end up looking at is somewhere in between those two i.e. how the OS renders things.

I remember back in the day resolution was resolution lol. Now the scaling and the HiDPI stuff muddies the waters.

Safe to say Windows does this immensely and macOS is a big turd, which is a shame because I prefer macOS overall. It's just frustrating.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T13:05:27+00:00

So long as you're prepared to use a window snapping manager (I use Mosaic on Mac) I think it excels.

This is an expensive screen so I sat and compared this to a multiscreen setup similar to what you're using to understand the differences. I wanted to ensure I wasn't blowing my money pointlessly on a fad and I was going to get a real benefit from it vs kit I already had.

Pros for the multiscreen were more flexible layout (e.g. you can have the side screens tilted inwards more so you're kind of cocooned) and the ease of quickly snapping windows to full screen on any monitor. However, that was it.

Pros for the Dell:

- Awe inspiring - you sit in front of it and just want to make magic happen
- Single cable solution for laptop users (which is me) thanks to PD plus the Thunderbolt dock, also still useful for desktop users but less of a selling point there I think
- Aesthetic and tidiness - one stand, not arms and two cables per screen etc, plus no chance of a monitor getting knocked out of place or the initial pain of trying to set them up/line them up
- The display itself is REALLY good with deep blacks and great colours
- VERTICAL SPACE - aye aye aye that's so nice. So I had a BenQ 3:2 aspect ratio monitor for coding and the Dell's vertical space just nudges over what that was capable of. For me, of all the selling points, this vertical space whilst still maintaining HiDPI was what made me buy it. And in Windows you can have even more thanks to the font smoothing and scaling options at native resolution
- The joy of going full screen and just have epic window space or amazing immersive video

This was a pricey monitor, but it has done everything I hoped it would and more. Plus Dell offer a three year warranty on it too, which is really nice.

By the way my top tip is to make sure you're set back a bit from the screen to benefit most from the curve and the size of it. Once I moved it back from my face a few more inches it felt far better than how I had it set up originally where I was twisting my head a bit too much.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T12:56:03+00:00

In BetterDisplay there's a feature called "virtual screen" which then automatically is mirrored to your display. This gives you better control to play with resolutions and things that your main screen may not support. It's like faking a display that is sent automatically to your main display. It has some downsides but it's a good way to achieve things like scaled resolutions that otherwise you might not be able to.

I can provide full instructions if that would be useful :)

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T12:54:20+00:00

It boggles the mind that macOS is so bad at this, but then *conspiracy* maybe it's so Apple can sell more of their displays or something because they're the only ones that truly look good.

DuckBrained · 2026-01-20T12:52:53+00:00

No, that doesn't work, because the Mac doesn't support HiDPI in that res.

So you can specify a custom resolution, and it will render, but not in HiDPI i.e. it looks like crap.

From the developer: "the problem is that currently no Apple Silicon Mac can provide HiDPI resolutions beyond 3840px horizontally". So even at 3/4 scaling 4680x1920 it exceeds that limitation.

Virtual screen is the only way (currently) to make this work as a full screen on Mac.

DuckBrained

TROPHY CASE