4k laptop screen experiences?

[wonkey_monkey]

Hi all,

My laptop is currently in a coma and may never recover, and some of my options for replacement offer a 4k screen option.

I've never seen one up close, and we don't have a lot of high-end stuff on the shelves on my island, so can anyone offer up any of their own experiences with 4k screens on Windows laptops?

I assume, firstly, that Windows will be clever enough to scale most things up at least double the "usual" (HD) size to give me a reasonable chance of actually seeing anything. Does this tend to happen automatically for everything? If, for example, I was to open a 1920x1080 AVS script in VirtualDub, would it fill the screen, or just one quarter (1:1 pixels)? What about other media players, like VLC? How does a browser like Firefox react, particularly with images but also with text?

Is scaling, in general, noticeable on such screens, or are the pixels so flippin' small you really can't tell?

All advice gratefully accepted!

[StainlessS]

David, dont know much/anything about Windows 7/8/10, but in XP, right click Desktop, Properties, Appearance,
click Font Size EXTRA LARGE, and play around in ADVANCED.
There is bound to be additional stuff in post XP versions OS.

[huhn]

Hi all,

My laptop is currently in a coma and may never recover, and some of my options for replacement offer a 4k screen option.

I've never seen one up close, and we don't have a lot of high-end stuff on the shelves on my island, so can anyone offer up any of their own experiences with 4k screens on Windows laptops?

I assume, firstly, that Windows will be clever enough to scale most things up at least double the "usual" (HD) size to give me a reasonable chance of actually seeing anything. Does this tend to happen automatically for everything? If, for example, I was to open a 1920x1080 AVS script in VirtualDub, would it fill the screen, or just one quarter (1:1 pixels)? What about other media players, like VLC? How does a browser like Firefox react, particularly with images but also with text?

windows 10 scales automatic to 300% using a UHD resolution so everything has the size of a 720p screen. of cause you can change this.

a program must be created with scaling in mind or it doesn't really work or things are at the native resolution.

for example MPC-HC can't really handle high DPI settings yet. only the fonts are scaled. so it depends on the software.


Is scaling, in general, noticeable on such screens, or are the pixels so flippin' small you really can't tell?
the scaling is so bad native 1080p looks better for picture.
the smiles on this forum look bilinear scaled.
fonts look totally fine.

I assume, firstly, that Windows will be clever enough to scale most things up at least double the "usual" (HD) size to give me a reasonable chance of actually seeing anything.
why do you even bother about UHD on a laptop?

[nevcairiel]

windows 10 scales automatic to 300% using a UHD resolution so everything has the size of a 720p screen. of cause you can change this.

Actually that depends on the physical screen size (if the screen reports it in the EDID). My 27" 4K screen only uses 150% scaling by default (so down to 2560x1440 effective)

Windows 8 and newer should generally deal properly with UHD screens, but generally you also need your applications to scale as well. Anything before 8 doesn't really have proper High-DPI support, unfortunately.
In my experience the situation is pretty good right now (at least in the apps I use) if you have one screen (or all screens using the same scaling), it only gets annoying if you have multiple screens with different DPI, many apps don't handle per-monitor scaling properly yet.