My partner and I have a few new monitors, and some older ones. The new ones all seem to have the problem that the buttons are not responsive.
Often, if the monitor doesn’t detect a signal, you just can’t enter the menu and the monitor turns off. Which becomes annoying when you are trying to change the inout to something that is putting out signal.
On the older monitors, the menus and buttons seem wholly divorced from the monitors state beyond being on or off. You change inputs and the little blue menu doesn’t even blink.
So what changed technically speaking? I would imagine the newer monitors have faster micro controllers. Is there some standard everyone uses now that sucks? Or have I just gotten unlucky and many modern monitors have more responsive buttons?
Good question. My best guess is that the buttons have become less important, because:
- they try to auto-detect where a signal comes,
- they have better defaults, so you don’t really need to change settings, and
- even monitor brightness can partially be controlled by the OS.
But yeah, I got a new monitor at work, and instead of buttons, it has a joystick on the backside. Now the monitor’s menu pops up every so often, I’m guessing because something shook the joystick just enough to trigger it.
When I saw that joystick for the first time, I wondered how long it’ll take before it breaks, but it’s broken on day 1, so that’s great. 🫠Oof yeah I guess that makes sense; but I hate the monolithic way modern software is made: “it does everything automatically, It will work always” Not the unix way.
Same thing with the joystick on my monitors at work too.
Most likely explanation… Modern monitors effectively have their own little PCs inside… that go to sleep when the monitor does to save power. Older monitors didn’t give a crap about power usage at all.
Mind you, changing the sleep logic to “if there is no signal and the menu isn’t open” shouldn’t be all that difficult. Neither should be waking up when a button is pressed.
That would require thought being put into it. That’s a lot to ask for, clearly.
I really hate their power saving features. When combined with other shitty power saving features from the computer I encountered a case where the monitor turns itself off because it’s not receiving a signal and the PC is not sending any signal because it is not detecting anything connected anymore.
Also, because they take a few seconds to turn on and show a splash screen I have to guess by noise of the fans when I can press the key to enter the bios or select the boot drive.
I miss physical wheels on the side. Bring those back
The lack of tactility is a huge problem for me. At first they made the buttons touch sensitive but kept raised features to help find them non-visually. Now they only have printed labels.
Somewhat related, the award for terrible user interface has to go to the water/ice dispenser on my fridge. It used to be that there were separate dispensers for water and ice, with buttons to select between crushed and cubed ice. Then they started making one dispenser with buttons to select water, cubed, and crushed. Now they’ve made a singular non tactile button with the only indication of the dispenser’s state being a light over an icon. But it gets worse, the water/cubed/crushed icons are positioned in such a way that you THINK they’re separate touch-sensitive surfaces, and you set the desired state by pressing the icon, or in my case, the tactilely undifferentiated area where the icon is located. But no, the icons are just there to show you the state of the dispenser and there’s just one button that cycles through the states.
So my average experience of filling a cup with water goes like this:
- press the cup against the lever to receive water.
- hear the ice grinder and pull the cup away because I just want water.
- grope around for the area on the fridge where the smooth, non tactile control surface is located until I hear a beep indicating I’ve successfully pressed it.
- push the cup against the lever again and hear the ice dispenser.
- repeat step 3.
- push the cup against the lever for a third time to finally receive water.
IT guy here, what monitors have you used?
I don’t think I have ever found a monitor where you can’t change the input when the screen is off, usually when you press the input button the monitor will turn on to show the input menu.
This works with monitors from Dell, AOC, Philips, Lenovo and others.
You need to press the input button, not the generic menu button, but it has always worked for me.
Ok good to know— the monitors are the MSI 321URX and Samsung G9 Odyssey circa 2019. Most of the older ones are Dell. Any recommendations? Thanks!
As a general rule, I will try to standardize on Dell Ultrasharp monitors, now that they support 120hz, there is little reason for me to pick something else.
I am currently running a U2724D at home and it is brilliant!
U3219Q reporting in. The new U4025QW is looking pretty tasty though, 5120x2160, 120Hz, Thunderbolt hub, more ports than you can shake a stick at.
All of the U and S series Dells I’ve used have been great, and they’re by and large remarkably reasonably priced too.
