A monitor for a Mac

[cos]

I'm looking for a new 27" (or maybe a bit bigger?) standard "4K" monitor (or maybe 5K if not too expensive?) and it's hard to figure out which ones I'd like from online reviews. So looking for comments from people who have monitors!

I want:

• Good color and brightness, but doesn't have to be amazing. Just, white should look white, colors should look reasonably accurate, and nicely bright.
• Solid stable stand that doesn't take up too much desk surface area, but stands on the desk - doesn't require attaching or clamping, and doesn't require any fiddly or tricky assembly.
• Built in speakers that sound decent.
• Easy controls for volume, brightness, and input source select, using buttons/knobs. Nothing requiring multilevel on-screen menus where I have to navigate up/down or left/right to select options, yuck! Volume, brightness, and input select should be EASY to do frequently. This is the hardest point to find information on when reading reviews.

Do you know a monitor to recommend, or can tell me how it does on those criteria?

Comments

[cos]

My impression is that TVs have much lower resolution, are fuzzy at the pixel level, and are souped up with all sorts of TV-specific features like streaming services, and would not make a good monitor at all. Am I mistaken?

"4K" level resolution, with very crisp text, is a minimum requirement.

[macthud]

I think you're mistaken.

The guts of these screens are the same whether they're "monitor" or "TV". The main difference is that "TVs" have some built-in hardware — tuners, special purpose CPUs for their apps, etc. — which "monitors" don't include because they expect you to provide them with the video signal, from your computer, DVD player, descrambling cable tuner, etc.

There definitely exist 4K TVs (3840 x 2160 pixels) and even 5K TVs (5120 × 2880 pixels). These are driven by sportscasters, which are today's main source of crazy-hi-def video.

Of course, you need to remember that those resolution specs say nothing about the size of the pixels, which are influenced by the size of the screen. Text crispness depends a lot on your pixels-per-inch. There are OS settings that can make text more and less crisp on the same screen.

I think you'll need to visit at least one brick-and-mortar store that can at least show you the basics, and maybe let you connect (or already have connected) a computer like what you want to be working with at home, so you can judge the text crispness.