I’ve been using a 27” Dell 4k monitor for a number of years now. It’s been fine but as part of this project I wanted to upgrade it to something befitting an M4 Cube!

What were the requirements?

• 27” size - this works well for the space I have available at my desk. Anything bigger would take up too much room
• Colour accuracy - I do a lot of design work for print and fabric so I need the colours on the screen to be representative of what they’ll be in real life
• 5k - MacOS prefers 5k screens at 27” to keep the dpi in the sweet spot of a retina screen.

Where I live that just left two options, the Samsung Viewfinity S9 and the Apple Studio Display.

I considered the Samsung, as it was a lot cheaper than the Studio Display. But the major concerns I had with it was it was running a TV operating system, which meant changing basic things like brightness had to be done via a remote control and navigating a bunch of menu options.

So I chose the Studio Display. I got the nano texture model with VESA mount.

So far it’s been fine. The screen looks amazing and I’ve actually noticed a performance improvement with 5k (I was using display scaling with the 4k monitor) which was a nice bonus.

I was thinking I might be able to retire my Krix bookshelf speakers and just use the inbuilt speakers of the Studio Display, but unfortunately I can’t. The display’s speakers aren’t that good.

So will I be keeping the monitor? Apple has a 14 day return period and I’m about 4 days into it. So far I’m leaning towards keeping it. It’s definitely a high quality monitor but is it worth the purchase price? I guess when the only viable alternative is a Samsung, I’ll pick the Apple option 99% of the time!

And honestly, what better monitor is there for an M4 Cube?