Some Macs can only drive a 4K monitor at 24hz or 30hz. The last big technical distinction comes from refresh rates.

This is typically found in the monitor’s menu. We’ve been in a few offices that have 4K monitors connected, but they’re running at very low framerates because they haven’t had MST enabled. As you’ll see later in this article, some Macs only support the highest quality modes when running in MST mode, but many monitors don’t default to that mode. We’ll skip the low level technical specifics here, but there’s an important item to note here. There are two possible technologies that can be used over a thunderbolt cable – Single-Stream and Multi-Stream. 5K displays require two Thunderbolt connections, all the other displays use a single cable. There are also two ways to connect a high resolution display to your Mac – HDMI and Thunderbolt (or “display port”). So, an HD video being played at “actual size” on a 4K monitor will take up exactly 1/4 of the screen. However, when you’re viewing a video file on one of these displays, it will be played at a 1:1 ratio. This is what you find on all of the iPhones and most iPads, and it dramatically increases the clarity and crispness of the display. When you’re connecting one of these displays to a Mac, you’ll generally be running them in some sort of “Retina” mode – this means the monitor has (for example) 1920×1080 “points” of resolution, and each point is backed by 4 pixels.

We’ll also be talking about “5K” which is 5120×2880. In this post, we’ll refer to computers that can drive 3840×2160 displays as “UltraHD” and computers that can do 4096×216 as 4K. Unraveling the Terminologyįirst, we need to clear up a few bits of terminology. Take a look at the Wirecutter’s roundup for thoughts on that. In this post, we won’t be recommending specific displays. We’d like to help break down the options a bit.

Even worse, there are confusing compatibilty issues that mean a lot of folks either have problems, or end up running their displays with less-than-ideal settings. However, it’s still pretty uncommon to have a 4K display, especially connected to your Mac as an actual computer display. Heck, even the new iPhone 6s can shoot 4K video. It’s become fairly normal for video professionals to work with 4K sources.

5k monitor for mac pro 2013