Good monitor for a MacBook Pro

I spend most of my time working on a code editor or a browser on my old MacBook Pro (15", 2017 model). Essentially all I consume at work on a computer screen is just characters mostly.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I never felt a need for a dedicated work setup at home, but this one didn’t seem like it was here to go anytime soon from our lives. So, I started looking for a good companion monitor at home. To me, the definition of the word good here was apparent — it should be able to render/display text very well, like really well, everything else was really a bonus.

I did take a look at the Apple approved 4K/5K Ultrafine family of monitors made by LG but the price alone made it a difficult buy here in the UK. So, my search for this good monitor continued and felt like a never ending task. After weeks of reading, asking around and watching tons of monitor reviews, I was finally convinced that my good monitor didn’t exist.

I then came across 31.5'' UltraFine™ UHD 4K Ergo IPS Monitor with USB Type-C™ - 32UN880-B monitor. Although LG markets this particular monitor in the same family as the rest of the Ultrafine family of monitors, the pixel density on this one is ~140ppi which falls short of Apple’s Retina display standards on a computer screen (i.e. >200ppi) and even by LG’s own standards for an Ultrafine monitor this doesn’t make the cut.

A monitor specification that’s often neglected and lost in the more protruding specs, such as refresh rate and panel type, is the pixel density. I'm inclined to believe that I might be in the minority here, but if your work on computer requires you to spend most of your time looking at (or writing) a piece of text you should rather have a monitor excel at rendering text very well.

Evidently, this is LG’s ‘Ergo’ monitor, so that’s going to be the selling point for many customers out there who perhaps care less about the little details around the display panel like me. To be honest, the build quality, USB-C Power Delivery, HDR10, 32" IPS 4K, ergonomic features, colour profiles (all of which was just a bonus to me, remember?) and trustful tech reviews of this this monitor made it a bit more appealing to buy than the others in my humble research especially at the price point of ~400£. Obviously, I was still worried about the very thing I was looking for — the pixel density of the panel.

I finally stopped being a Vulcan and decided to buy this one.

Once setup & connected to MacBook, at first, I thought this was a mistake and wanted to return it before I got too comfortable with it — the text didn’t look crisp the way I wanted it. But, truth be told, everything else about this monitor was excellent and delivered on the promise.

As you might already know, macOS uses fractional scaling, which means your text is going to look a little less crisp in most of the default resolutions available for the external display and to compensate for this Font Smoothing exists. Using 1x scaling on a 32-inch 4K monitor was not an option for me for the applications I use anyway and 2x scaling is too big. Let’s not even talk about Windows here, thankfully MacType exists!

So, I started playing with different display resolutions on this external display to try and see what mimics a good setting for this monitor given the distance from the eye & the viewing angle in my setup. After much trial & error, I felt2304x1296 resolution worked very well for my setup (i.e., at 1.666 scaling factor) which isn’t perfect but definitely worked just fine for my setup despite having a small real estate to work with

By the way, I used QuickRes to try unlisted resolutions quite easily, but you can even change it directly via System Preferences if you can’t be bothered to install an app.

Also, I did try the different brightness/contrast/sharpness levels in my honest effort to further refine this setup but the default values always did the trick for me in most cases. I think the “Mode 4” gamma mode worked best to compensate for the overly bright whites.

Finally, I also explored various levels of Font Smoothing using a simple app called Font Smoothing Adjuster, and to me default ‘medium’ setting looked the best.

To summarize it all (perhaps to those 0.00000001% out there who’re as pedantic on this topic as me), this is my current configuration:

That’s it, I have been on this config for a while now and aside from the occasional rants on the pixel density, I’ve been happy with it.