I don’t mean to be a snob (to the other commentors), but as someone who actually knows a thing or two about monitors,
YES PICKING THE RIGHT MONITOR DOES MATTER!!!!!!
So there are three things to think about when picking a monitor.
Resolution, Size, and color reproduction ability.
It seems the others are only thinking about the resolution (granted captainJugs did point out a hint about color reproduction for printing). Everyone is correct, the resolution is not that important for rendering, just because when rendering, the program (any) will render to a buffer, which can be save or displayed as an image. The buffer size can be set to any resolution independant of the screen’s resolution. So you could render at 4k and share 4k images, but when you look at the image on your monitor assuming something like you have a 1080p monitor, you will be looking at the downsampled variation, so you won’t be able to see it the 4k, but the image will be cleaner and smoother because of the downsampling, tho a $1700 computer rendering 4k daz images i am estimating takes about 30 minute a frame last I check the settings and my guess about components, idk. meanwhile 1080p should take a quarter of the time since it is quarter of the data to be calculated.
Resolution: I would recommend two:
1920x1080p (the p is actually not correct since that is for describing video formats) is a great option since it will let you know what most people will see on their screen, letting you know how detailed you can and can’t be.
2560x1440 also known as 2K (be careful lots of screen advertise 2k but do not have this resolution or do not have the proper 16 by 9 ration of modern day monitor standards.) if 4k is 4x 1080p, then 2k is 4x 720p. this screen is slightly bigger by 70% more pixels. The main bennifit with this is you get more “real-estate” to work with on your screen. Mainly I find my favorite thing about 1440p is that you can render or display a 1080p image on the screen, at full size, and still have room for the user interface of Daz or Blender without the interface covering up part of the images so you can both see all you need and still work without any compromise. Also, it is just nicer to have a bigger screen. 2k is a type of sweet spot, since as Rich pointed out, 4k does have the issue of making text too small to read and window does scall the best to 4k.
Size: You don’t want to go too small as then the screen would strain your eyes, but if you go too big you will be able to see the pixels and that may distract you or make it hard to truly read the image on your screen. Here are the sweet spots, as per my research of what the PC MasterRace community thought was best.
if you have a 1080p monitor, go for 24” (diagonal) monitor, this is a good size, a common size, and not too stressfull or to large.
if you have a 1440p monitor, go for 27” (diagonal) monitor. Not only is this bigger (and you can sit it the same distance away comfortable on a desk) but even though it is bigger the quality is still better, if you compair a 1440p monitor at 27” next to a 24” 1080p monitor, you will be able to see that the pixels of the 1440p monitor are still smaller than the 1080p monitor, meaning even though the screen is bigger it is still generating a higher quality, shaper image.
NOW TO THE IMPORTANT PART EVERYONE ELSE MISSED
COLOR REPRODUCTION.
different monitors have different color proproduction capabilites. What it means to produce color is, how accurate is the monitor to produce the color you want it to. if you tell it to turn white, will it be white, will it be slightly blue, yellow, green red? How well does it handle the low shadows? does it start to bleach out if the colors start to to get too brights. Issues like this can mean many things. if your monitor has bad color reproduction, bad things can happen. having a good monitor means you know what your image is suppose to look like, and you can assume most people will not have a good monitor, but that the average monitor will average around to what yours look like. Maybe you want to make a scene with a bit of a cold mood, so you make the light in the scene a bit pure or bluer. On some monitors it will look even more bluer, on some monitors it may not be blue enough. if you happen to have a monitor that has a hard time with blue, and you try to do this, you may try to make the scene look good, but without realizing it your scene may have too much blue and other people may notice it and it may even look goofy. Thats an easy example, a hard example, one you will for sure have, is issues with darks and brights. most monitors do not smoothly transition from dark to bright. if you bring up a gradient image you can see banding of shades on a bad monitor rather than a smooth transition. Because of this if you try to make scenes with more or less light for dramatic effect, the image may either be a bit washed out, the details may be lost and if you are using a bad monitor you will have to compensate for this, by either brightning up the image or dimming it, which means the final product will not be as good as possible when users/players view your content.
So you need to get a monitor with a decient color reproduction ability. I am not saying, go to best by, look for the monitor with the colors that most pop out, and buy it. most of the time in stores the idiots selling tv set the saturation way up to make crap tv and monitors look better than they are, but it is just ruining the true image quality.
Most monitors starting cheap are TN type pannels, TN is the cheapest, the fastest switching (important for twitch based gaming such as CS:GO), but the worst color reproduction (tend to be a bit yellow, have a hard time with dark colors, and the brighter the image the harder the colors standout.) also with many, in moving images there is a bit of a red forward ghost and blue after ghost because each color turns on and off at different speed depnding on the monitor.
What you want and why I went to the effort of making this longwinded comment is
MONITORS WITH TYPE IPS SCREENs
While there are many different panel types out there, tn and ips are the two most popular. tn being cheap, ips used for making good quality screens. side note there are many ips sub types, such as IPS-AV or AH-IPS which are common. also good brightness is recommended since it expands the range of your screen so you can see your work with the right setup.
if your budget is $150, you can get a 24” 1080p ips monitor from newegg, any thing LG brand will be good, if not go for ASUS or DELL but avoid the rest, but i would recommend stepping up to $220 to get the LG 24MP88HV-S since I can at least confirm that it is callibrate out of box so the color reproduction is confirmed (else with the other monitors you would have to calibrate it yourself and you do not have the equipment for that)
But if it interest you and you want to step it up to a 27” 1440p monitor with ips is about $330 to $650 and just about any model at this point is good in terms of quality, Dell, BenQ, BUT especially ASUS and Acer .
If you are wondering, I have the latter, an Acer Preditor XB270HU (OLD now replaced by the XB271HU becasue it has a more gamery look i guess), for $1400, which is expensive because i wanted high refreshrate, g sync, and it has a game mode feature that is not related to gaming, but lets you switch between three different presets, I have one seting for calibrating for color prints (and easy to look at when it is night time and dark in my room, good for reading since it is dimmer), one where it is the same calibration but at full brightness so I can properly appreciate the different levels of brightness in my renders (really bright, like seeing a glint of of a jewel or car bumber actual hurts my eyes with this monitor) and my special setting for more bloom to make images and video games more exotic when I enjoy content. This is parred with 2 crappy cheap 1080p monitors because I needed more screens to work with and their quality doesn’t matter.
(thing to point out, when having both a good and bad monitor, you can actually move images to each monitor and see how much a bad monitor will alter the image even if it has been calibrated to its best performance still it is amazing to see the change, so much so I am a firm believer you should go to ips if you spent $1700 on a computer.)
also, what are the specks of your computer, just curious.
Hope this information was helpful to someone, or at least interesting and I’m not just talking to myself :3
But this is a common complaint among the "4K folks."
