Why are monitors lagging behind in tech?

Question

Now that MacBook Pro comes with a really gorgeous 120hz 4K-ish display and the fact that mobile phones have had one of the best displays, it makes me wonder why do we not have such good displays in the consumer monitor segment? The only consumer retina display monitor is the Lg ultra fine 5k and that doesn&rsquo;t have high refresh rate.

dyingkneepad · Accepted Answer

And what exactly are you going to use your 4k 120hz screen for? It's not like there's a great need for it, when most people use their computers to stream 720p@30hz videos or worse, or don't have graphics devices capable of rendering games or even a desktop at 4k@120hz.
The industry has been pushing HDR and support for variable refresh rate, and that seems way more useful than 4k@120hz, but it's another thing consumers won't be able to notice unless they try really really hard.
Edit: also, does either DP or HDMI support 4k@120hz? I'm still running my 4k monitor at 30hz because my employer doesn't want to buy me a freaking HDMI 2.0 cable!

theandrewbailey · Answer

They exist, but they're expensive and have limited options. Haven't 4K 120Hz monitors and GPUs only been out for a year or two?Of course, 4K 60Hz monitors have been out for years, but are still rather expensive.

vletal · Answer

Smartphones started from scratch supporting displaying the same content on displays with various sizes and DPIs. Computer apps and window managers were long stuck with bitmap / pixel perfect UI frameworks.There was little to no demand for displays above HD before Apple gave devs the incentives to make their apps support HiDPI by introducing retina displays. Windows took really long time to offer similar support. Linux was (is?) waiting for Wayland to solve this issue.

PaulHoule · Answer

That's been a long time situation.Look at how much more you can buy in a TV set at a given price than you can buy in something called a "computer monitor"

Why are monitors lagging behind in tech?

They exist, but they're expensive and have limited options. Haven't 4K 120Hz monitors and GPUs only been out for a year or two?
Of course, 4K 60Hz monitors have been out for years, but are still rather expensive.

That's been a long time situation.
Look at how much more you can buy in a TV set at a given price than you can buy in something called a "computer monitor"