About MonitorGeek

Pixels per inch cannot be compared; pixels per degree can

A 27-inch 4K panel and a 32-inch 1440p panel get argued about endlessly because the only density figure anyone quotes is pixels per inch, and that figure is meaningless across screens you sit different distances from. What lands on the retina is pixels per degree of vision, and it is arithmetic: density multiplied by viewing distance. Every monitor here carries that figure at a 24-inch reference distance, and the catalog sorts by it. Of the 84, 23 land past the roughly one-arcminute resolving limit of 20/20 vision where the pixel grid disappears, 56 sit between clean text and a visible grid, and 5 show their pixels at a desk.

Two other figures get computed the same way rather than copied: whether each physical input can carry the panel it is attached to at the resolution and refresh the box advertises, and whether an HDR badge describes hardware that can produce an image or only accept a signal. 11 monitors here cannot drive their own panel at full rate over any port they have. The arithmetic behind all three is written out in full, including the constants.

A blank cell is an answer

Every printed figure in this catalog has been re-checked against the sources its own entry cites — 266 links across 84 monitors, listed on each monitor’s page. Where a figure turned out to rest on nothing a cited source states, it was deleted rather than rounded to something plausible. That is why 65 cells in this catalog are empty today: a response time nobody publishes, a launch year no specification table gives, a compression row a maker leaves off the sheet. The blank is the finding.

The audit’s sharpest case was the local-dimming zone count, where two opposite facts had been stored as the same integer. A backlight with no dimming zones at all is an edge-lit panel whose HDR mode changes the tone curve and nothing else — 27 monitors here are that. A maker who simply does not print a zone row is telling you nothing, and on a panel carrying a certificate that cannot be awarded without local dimming, the dimming demonstrably exists — 17 monitors here are that. Stored as a zero, the second was slandered as the first, and the HDR verdict on its page was wrong. The two are separate states now, and they read differently on every page, filter and shortlist that touches them.

Who is behind it, and who is not

Two people build and maintain this, in their own time. There is no office, no editorial staff and no measurement lab — no colorimeter, no photodiode rig, no darkened room — so nothing on this site is a brightness or a colour figure that came from us. Specifications come from each manufacturer’s own published product page, and the 12 peak-brightness figures that a named third party actually metered print in their own colour, beside the maker’s claim rather than in place of it, so a measurement and a marketing number are never mistaken for each other.

No manufacturer pays for a place in this catalog, for its position in a list, or for a word of what its page says; no money changes hands with any maker in either direction. There are no retailer links of any kind — no buy buttons, no affiliate tags, no price-check calls to action — so there is no model here that earns more by being recommended. What the site collects is one analytics tag and one browser key holding your filters.

Owner experience, kept separate

Some things about a monitor only show up after a year of owning it: coating grain under a window, a fan nobody mentions in the specifications, a firmware update that fixed the flicker. Where public owner discussion was read for a model, it sits in its own section under its own heading, labelled as owner reports and never blended into the specification copy. Coverage is 65 of 84 monitors; the remaining 19 pages say plainly that they were written from specification sheets and published measurements, because an empty block would read as “owners had nothing to complain about”, which is a different claim and a false one.

What the site will not do

No star ratings appear anywhere, because none of these 84 monitors has a rating from a citable source that is not a shop — so the review markup is absent from the code rather than switched off, and there is no rating sort to mislead you with. No list is ordered by a judgement: every shortlist prints the rule it was sorted by at the top, and a list must qualify at least three monitors to exist at all. Prices are approximate snapshots from the last refresh, marked as such, and 4 models carry no price here because no source states one.

How often this changes

The catalog was last refreshed on 2026-09-25, and that date drives the sitemap rather than today’s. A refresh is not only a price sweep: monitor lineups turn over within months, so each pass re-checks whether the model is still sold in the United States and whether the maker’s own page still says what the entry claims it says. Where a monitor has been recalled, its notice stays on its page and its structured data stops declaring it available, rather than the entry quietly disappearing — the people who already own one are the readers most likely to look it up.

Corrections are the fastest way to improve this

A wrong link rate, a zone count a maker does publish somewhere this site did not find, a monitor missing from the catalog entirely — all of it is welcome and all of it gets acted on. Send a correction, or write to chelsea@hagadornwebdev.com.

Where to start