Retina hack for Mini and 4k TV?

[Treq]

I've been looking around and haven't found anything. I was thinking about buying a 4k tv and hooking it up to my mini. The question I have is; Can you hook it up and force it to handle the resolution like a retina MBP? I would like to have my screen at a high res, but at 8-10ft away anything more than 1080p is un-readable, and even at that res, I have to use the zoom feature. Does anyone know if this is possible, or is there another way to do it?

Thanks!

 

[jdryyz]

How large a TV are we talking about here? I have a 55" 1080p TV that I use with my Mac mini at a distance of over 11 feet and it looks very readable to me. My eyes are still young, I guess.

I'm not sure how the whole 4k HDTVs and their dimensions are going to work out. I suspect you will need to have a minimum size in order get the full benefit from them. I wouldn't expect to see any 37" or 40" 4k TVs being pushed early on.

As for the mini being capable of displaying Retina-ish pixel density, I do not think so....not yet.

I've been looking around and haven't found anything. I was thinking about buying a 4k tv and hooking it up to my mini. The question I have is; Can you hook it up and force it to handle the resolution like a retina MBP? I would like to have my screen at a high res, but at 8-10ft away anything more than 1080p is un-readable, and even at that res, I have to use the zoom feature. Does anyone know if this is possible, or is there another way to do it?

Thanks!

 

[Stetrain]

Assuming that you can get the Mini to correctly drive the TV at the full 3840x2160 resolution, then it should work. You just have to manually enable HiDPI modes:

http://cocoamanifest.net/articles/2013/01/turn-on-hidpi-retina-mode-on-an-ordinary-mac.html

 

[Treq]

How large a TV are we talking about here? I have a 55" 1080p TV that I use with my Mac mini at a distance of over 11 feet and it looks very readable to me. My eyes I still young, I guess.

I'm not sure how the whole 4k HDTVs and their dimensions are going to work out. I suspect you will need to have a minimum size in order get the full benefit from them. I wouldn't expect to see any 37" or 40" 4k TVs being pushed early on.

As for the mini being capable of displaying Retina-ish pixel density, I do not think so....not yet.

I'm looking at a 50" 4k tv. Right now I have a 40" Sony, but at a distance, some things are a little hard to read. If I were to drive the tv at its full res, text would be way too small to read. So, the way the retina MBP handles scaling, would be perfect. The working res would be 1080p, but native res would be 4x that. And would look awesome.

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Assuming that you can get the Mini to correctly drive the TV at the full 3840x2160 resolution, then it should work. You just have to manually enable HiDPI modes:

http://cocoamanifest.net/articles/2013/01/turn-on-hidpi-retina-mode-on-an-ordinary-mac.html

Thanks, I'm going to try that when I get home with my regular hd tv to see what it enables.

Edit: Turns out it worked on my 1080p tv. Sweet. Thanks Again!

 

[pacmania1982]

I'm going to ask the obvious question....but for the moment why? There isn't any 4K content out there. Unless you could the very very few clips that are on YouTube..

pac

 

[Treq]

I'm going to ask the obvious question....but for the moment why? There isn't any 4K content out there. Unless you could the very very few clips that are on YouTube..

pac

Well, I was thinking of buying a bigger tv, and saw a new 4k TV on sale for $1200. I was wondering if the I could get the higher res while still being able to read text and basically see what I was doing. I know there is very little content out there, but there is more coming. Also, I work in the film/TV business, so there are a few uses I could find for work. But really, I'm just a nerd who likes to see if it can be done.
As a side note, I did enable HiDPI on my existing 1080p tv and I kinda like it. I still get 1080p res while watching videos, but the menus are nice and big and readable (though in some cases they are too big).

 

[hleewell]

There is a Samsung or LG 4K monitors in 20" or 32" configuration. These will be perfect for desktop viewing. I am waiting for Apple to release their own Retina style monitors.The screen technology they use for iPhone and especially for MacBook Pros are impressive! Color saturation, contrast, the balance of temperatures are all just amazing. I don;t know how these folks walk around with their Galaxy Notes proudly flaunting the massive size of these phones without realizing how poor the screen quality is.