I have a 16" MacBook Pro (2018) which runs Catalina for my work - I'm on this every weekday from 8 am to 5 pm after which I fully switch to my MacBook Air (2020) running Big Sur for personal projects, etc. I'm looking for a display that would run smooth with both of my MacBooks. My budget is $350-ish but I can go higher if the monitor is a great promise for ~5 years. Most of my use is browsing, coding, reading and a little bit of watching videos. Sharp and crisp visual quality is important, especially coming from a long time of viewing only retina screens. I would prefer 27 inch but I might consider 24 inch options too! Please let me know your suggestions and what worked for you.
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I started off with trying HP M27ha FHD monitor and quickly realized that FHD on a 27 inch screen is just not for me. I then got a 24 inch FHD by Sceptre and its display quality was worse than the FHD 27 inch I had before it. Are Sceptre monitors really good? - after using the monitor for just a couple hours, I could not believe how it got the reviews it did.
Anyhow, I next got another 24 inch FHD, this time by HP but it had similarly bad quality of display as the Sceptre - at this point I realized I really prefer the real estate of a 27 inch and my choice of quality has to be better than FHD.
Next, I got a Dell 27 inch QHD - it did not deliver the promised 2560x1440 resolution with the HDMI cable that came in the box. So I got a DisplayPort to USB-c cable and it does give QHD resolution now but at the full resolution, the font is too tiny and it is straining on the eyes to read. MacBooks unfortunately do not have an option to scale the view or change font size while keeping the resolution - I tried a few softwares and the apple-suggested way to make this work but nothing was even remotely perfect. This Dell QHD monitor btw works perfectly on a windows computer giving the best resolution and desired viewing scale. I'm now worried that this might be a pain point with any QHD or UHD monitor I get. Do you all live with tiny fonts or bad resolution? Is there no way out of this problem? I'm feeling pretty lost at this point and I'm desperate for help and suggestions on what would be a good monitor compatible with my MacBooks.
Extra info, please feel free to skip this before replying:
I started off with trying HP M27ha FHD monitor and quickly realized that FHD on a 27 inch screen is just not for me. I then got a 24 inch FHD by Sceptre and its display quality was worse than the FHD 27 inch I had before it. Are Sceptre monitors really good? - after using the monitor for just a couple hours, I could not believe how it got the reviews it did.
Anyhow, I next got another 24 inch FHD, this time by HP but it had similarly bad quality of display as the Sceptre - at this point I realized I really prefer the real estate of a 27 inch and my choice of quality has to be better than FHD.
Next, I got a Dell 27 inch QHD - it did not deliver the promised 2560x1440 resolution with the HDMI cable that came in the box. So I got a DisplayPort to USB-c cable and it does give QHD resolution now but at the full resolution, the font is too tiny and it is straining on the eyes to read. MacBooks unfortunately do not have an option to scale the view or change font size while keeping the resolution - I tried a few softwares and the apple-suggested way to make this work but nothing was even remotely perfect. This Dell QHD monitor btw works perfectly on a windows computer giving the best resolution and desired viewing scale. I'm now worried that this might be a pain point with any QHD or UHD monitor I get. Do you all live with tiny fonts or bad resolution? Is there no way out of this problem? I'm feeling pretty lost at this point and I'm desperate for help and suggestions on what would be a good monitor compatible with my MacBooks.
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