Suppose your desk is 36" deep. A 48" wide screen at the back of it occupies 41 degrees of your world. The THX recommendation for cinema is 40 degrees. This is as immersive as you're going to get without strapping a screen to your head.
20/20 vision is about 60 pixels per degree, depending on which study you want to believe. 41x60 is 2460 pixels across -- you've already reached the max required pixels with a 3840x2160 display.
I run a 40" Philips 4k monitor as my primary desktop which sits 3 feet away from me, and I can guarantee you that I can see every single pixel still. It's nothing like a 5k iMac, for example, which at 40 inches, would basically be 8k. 4k is nowhere near the end of the game yet. Even for a TV 6 feet away. Until I can't distinguish my TV from my window, there is room for improvement.
I'm in a similar boat, although my sizes and distances are a little different from yours.
I couldn't wait for the 40" Phillips to arrive in Canada, so I ended up getting a Dell 27" 4K monitor (that turned into two once I got addicted to all the real estate).
I have my monitors side by side on a standing desk where the range of closest and furthest distance of the screen to my eyes is between 21 and 27 inches. I have the monitors running at native text scaling in Windows (my wife and friends look at my screens and think I'm nuts), so I am pretty close to the threshold of seeing every pixel. Granted, I have single vision glasses that I wear for computer use (combination of distance + presbyopia correction), and those glasses coincidentally magnify what I see by a hair.
I'd love to get a 55" 8K curved display as a monitor. Oh, the added real estate...
How is web browsing at that density? I'm nervous to pick up a 4K display even at 30-32 inches, as I don't think scaling is solved in Windows or on the web (though that's just speculation).
It's fine for me, but I'm used to high density screens. For the longest time, I was using 1680x1050 15" laptop screens at 1:1 (before 1080p became common).
Looking at the HN site, which has pretty small text to start with, I'm perfectly fine reading the text on the screen. If the text is too small, zooming once or twice usually fixes it.
I originally thought 40 or 32 would be the ideal size, but got tired of waiting for the models to come out.
I went into a store and checked out the 28" 4K monitors (which were pretty common), but I wanted IPS, so I ended up with the 27" Dell IPS, which got good reviews and not that much denser than the 28s (for me).
I actually am glad that I did not go 32 or larger because I got acclimated to the added real estate very quickly and wanted more. My desk handles two side by side 27s in landscape. I guess I could have went with two portrait 32s but I definitely could not fit in dual 40s.
I don't know if I can handle four monitors (more head turning than I have now), but I've got some mini monitors in addition to my two main ones, and I still feel at times that I don't have enough screen real estate when I'm multitasking.
You're not facing a resolution problem so much as a brightness and contrast problem.
Bright sunlight is about 120000 lux. That's about 38000 nits -- and the brightest specialty monitors I know of go up to about 10000 nits. A typical "wow, look at that" display is 2-3000 nits.
I do not want to downplay that we have a lot of improvement to do on contrast and brightness before we can match an actual window to the outdoors, but vegabook specifically called out his ability to resolve pixels on his 40-inch 4K. Resolution is still a problem. In fact, I feel we have a lot of improvement still to do in desktop displays and that resolution and size remain the most significant hurdles.
I run two of the Philips 40-inch 4Ks on my desk and although these are fantastic displays for the price, there are many areas for improvement.
Most importantly, and easiest to fix: they should be fully matte rather than semi-gloss. My contention is any display used for work should be matte unless you work in an environment with absolutely no lighting. Lighting glare is the most frustrating issue with computing, in large part because it's so easy to fix. In the early 2000s and before, monitors, including the highest-resolution monitors of the time, were almost exclusively matte. During the malignant era when living room displays converged into desktop workspaces and "HD" reigned terror on computing, we also accepted glossy/mirror displays. Although we have recovered from that period of resolution regression, matte remains marginalized.
40-inch at 4K is too small to use singularly and too low-resolution. I feel ideal is ~55 inches, concave, 10 to 15K horizontal resolution.
I think what's keeping us back as much as anything are video cards that can handle those displays. I have a 40" 4K as my primary desktop display, and run at native 1:1, it's still a little small for me. I often zoom websites to 125%. On that, I bought a GTX 1080, and it runs it well enough... native gaming really only works on older games and doesn't hit even 40fps consistently.
I have an i3-5010u as a backup, which has a 28" 4K attached... it feels sluggish just on desktop use (150% zoom) in windows.
I you want to push much more than that, you're going to need some really beefy video cards in tandum.
I'm a bit of a monitor nut myself and I too am running 2xBDM4065UC. Actually I run the second one above the first one, mounted at an angle towards me, and with a lean-back, headrested, programmers chair. It's awesome. If you can get used to the i3 tiling window manager, it's even better IMO, but that's a taste that not everybody acquires.
Maybe the new 43 inch version is more matte but I have not seen it yet. Could not agree more that a 55 inch'er 10k resolution, would be my absolutely perfect display. With a low radius curve, and possibly curved vertically too (i.e. a rectangular sector of a sphere) though I am not holding my breath for that.
>> I feel ideal is ~55 inches, concave, 10 to 15K horizontal resolution.
I'm with you on that. I run a pair of 27" 4Ks at native scaling, and I feel like I'm looking at a 10 year old monitor.
27" was about the smallest screen my eyes could tolerate at 1:1 scaling - I was driven by real estate more than sharpness. All other things being equal, I'd prefer a pair of 27" 8K monitors so that I can get my 4K equivalent real estate with crisper text.
I was all in on matte. Glossy screens were absolutely terrible in any kind of lighting... until the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro. Whatever reduced layer-gluing-this-to-that magic they did there reduced glare to the point where I just don't notice it anymore.
Meanwhile matte displays actually get more affected by light falling on them, just that it's spread out a bit.
That is if I stay fixed in my position. If I lean forward to see some detail, I again profit from better resolution. And screens bigger than my viewing field (disregarding peripheral vision) may be unnecessary for entertainment but are certainly useful for work. Head movements are fast and precise and much better than software solutions for switching between windows.
When I was at the security office for the medical division of an at-the-time-German-company-owned software company I noticed a security officer comparing digital scans of fingerprints on an LCD monitor using a magnifying glass.
20/20 vision is about 60 pixels per degree, depending on which study you want to believe. 41x60 is 2460 pixels across -- you've already reached the max required pixels with a 3840x2160 display.