Mac Mini and Dell Monitors

meribelman wrote:

Thanks Servant of Cats - much appreciated. Really useful insights! Reply to everything here. I wish I had known about the different resolutions - I assume you can get 24 and 27" monitors with the same higher resolution that my 27" operates at?

With any monitor, you can calculate the PPI – pixels per inch – resolution – as follows.

PPI = (Square_Root (Horizontal_Pixels^2 + Vertical_Pixels^2)) / Diagonal_in_Inches

Apple's Retina Displays and monitor have high PPIs. A 27" Apple 5K Apple Studio Display has about 218 PPI. It's hard to find third-party displays with similar PPIs. I know of only a few currently on the market:

• Two 27" 5K displays from LG and Samsung, which also list for well over $1000, but seem to have street prices that go from around $800 to $950.
• A 24" 4K display from LG that only costs $300 but that probably has terrible color accuracy. This is the LG 24UD58-B. LG pitches it as a "gaming" monitor and there is no specification of sRGB coverage – which for non-Apple monitors, is almost always a bad sign. LG once had a more expensive 24" 4K monitor that offered 98% coverage of DCI-P3 (the LG 24MD4KLB-B), but it's discontinued.

If you're looking for monitors with PPIs similar to your main one, it's easy to find 27" UHD 4K (3840x2160 pixel) monitors. Many manufacturers make these, and they are available with various levels of features and prices. As for 24" monitors, you'd need one with a native resolution of about 3424x1926 pixels to get a similar PPI – and I'd be extremely surprised if any of those exist.

meribelman wrote:

2x Dell P2425 one via Thunderbolt / display adaptor cable and one with HDMI

The 24" monitors are running at 1200 x 1020 rotated through 90° so they are in "portrait" mode. They look grainy and everything "looks big".

The Dell P2425 is a 24" monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. I assume that you meant to say that you were running your portrait-mode monitors at a resolution of 1200x1920. (1200x1020 would look really terrible.)

When running at full native resolution, these monitors have a pixel density of about 94.3 PPI.

Your 27" UHD 4K Dell monitor has a pixel density of about 163.2 PPI. This is why it looks sharper. It has roughly three times as many pixels per square inch as they do. So if you are running your monitors in modes which make text and objects have similar physical sizes, the text and objects on the 27" UHD 4K monitor will be drawn in finer detail.

4. What advice would you offer when dragging a window between the two because the resolution jumps all over the place - 27" to 24"

Given how different the pixel densities of those monitors are, I believe there's only going to be one crossing point where things line up. Everywhere else, there's going to be a discontinuity. The further away from the good place that you are when you cross, the more the pointer is going to jump.

I would suggest keeping all of your windows entirely on one monitor or on another. If you planned to work in a way where you were going to stretch one window across multiple monitors, it would be best to get monitors which had the same pixel density (such as multiple instances of the same model of monitor).

meribelman wrote:

I've bought a Mac mini M4 24Gb and connected to it the following

1x Dell S2722QC via Thunderbolt

…

The 27" monitor is great running at 3008x1692. A higher resolution would be even better but I cant see to get one

The Dell S2722QC is a 27" monitor with 3840x2160 pixel resolution, a 60 Hz refresh rate, a USB-C (DisplayPort) input, and two HDMI inputs.

I have a different 27" Dell 4K monitor attached to a M1 Max Mac Studio. In icon view, Displays Settings offers me five options:

• Retina "like 1920x1080" (Larger Text)
• Retina "like 2560x1440
• Retina "like 3008x1692"
• Retina "like 3360x1890"
• Native 3840x2160 (More Space)

The last two make things small enough to create eye strain.

I'm guessing that your M4 Mac mini is offering you all of these except Retina "like 3360x1890" mode. The Retina "like 3008x1692" mode implies a drawing canvas with a resolution of 6016x3384 pixels. That is the same as the native resolution of a 32" Apple 6K Pro Display XDR.

In Retina "like 3360x1890" mode, a Mac would be dealing with a drawing canvas with greater than 6K resolution. Both of our Macs have a resolution limit of 6K, but for whatever reason, my Mac is willing to go a bit over that and yours isn't.

What happens if you go into Displays Settings and tell it to show all resolutions, as a list? Do you see any Retina modes above "like 3008x1692" then?