4K Monitors Are Great, But The Smart Money Buys A Cheaper Panel

If you're looking to upgrade your office or gaming setup, you might rejoice at the fact that 4K monitors are getting cheaper and cheaper. An ultra-high-resolution display allows for jaw-dropping visuals, excellent screen clarity, and abundant digital workspace real estate. It's not just for power gamers; more and more professionals are even using 4K monitors for work. However, snagging a budget-friendly 4K monitor is not necessarily the smart money move, depending on what you're using the monitor for.

Pixels aren't everything. That affordable 4K monitor might have the resolution necessary for displaying a super-detailed image, but it's likely compromising on other key specs. Buying a 1440p panel for a similar price is a prudent compromise that can actually deliver a superior experience over the budget 4K monitor, despite its lower pixel count. For the price of a budget 4K monitor, there are many mid-tier 1440p panels that are more than good enough.

Refresh rate is one of the frequently unsung heroes of monitor specifications, and also one of the first things that manufacturers will sacrifice when developing budget 4K displays. Refresh rate refers to the number of times a monitor's image refreshes per second, which affects the image's smoothness and visual quality during motion. There is a direct relationship between refresh rate and frames per second. If you're trying to run a video game at 120 frames per second, for example, you won't actually observe that result if your monitor has a refresh rate below 120 Hz.

It's also worth noting that many of the cheap 4K monitors on the market are vertical alignment panels. VA technology can allow for fast response times, beautiful contrast, and striking color accuracy, but these panels are not universally desirable. If you buy a budget 4K vertical alignment monitor, you may experience noticeable ghosting, restricted viewing angles, and ugly image smearing.

The biggest sacrifice in the decision between 4K and 1440p is pixel count, but you may even find this to be a negligible loss if you consider screen size. 4K screens shine the most in the context of large TVs, where it is important for the viewer to identify small details from across the room. Pixels are packed more densely on a desktop monitor of 27 inches or smaller, making the gap between 1440p and 4K much less noticeable.

There's also the matter of upscaling: 4K monitors are everywhere now, but not every media device can support 4K output. You might even want to use your monitor to watch older media or play retro video games. In these cases, it may be necessary to upscale the image from its lower resolution to match the screen's native resolution. The size of the resolution gap matters greatly when upscaling. Converting a 1080p image to 1440p is a small difference, but converting 1080p to 4K will likely result in a distorted and unappealing visual.

In a world where smart TVs are cheaper than PC monitors, it's important to consider the reason behind all this disparity. It often comes down to particular factors beyond the obvious pixel resolution. Smart money says that the cheaper panel has more going on under the hood than the flashy 4K monitor, and that's what can make all the difference for you.