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New Mac mini with Samsung UHD vs 4K

gorthmog

gorthmog

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 22, 2018
2
1
Hi all,
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac mini and pairing it via HDMI with a Samsung 43" UHD (2018) TV for our family room TV. I haven't bought anything yet. Because the Mac mini native resolution is 4096x2160 while the Samsung UHD is 3840x2160, I'm worried that the Mac will have to downscale and the picture quality will suffer.

Note that I'm primarily using this for watching movies, youtube, photos, etc. - not for gaming or video editing. But I'd still like the text to be crisp and to avoid tearing, skipped frames, etc.

Has anyone tried the new Mac mini with a UHD (3840x2160) TV, or does anyone know of any issues?
Thanks!
-Chris
 
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strawbale

macrumors 6502
Mar 25, 2011
395
189
French Pyrenees
gorthmog said:
Hi all,
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac mini and pairing it via HDMI with a Samsung 43" UHD (2018) TV for our family room TV. I haven't bought anything yet. Because the Mac mini native resolution is 4096x2160 while the Samsung UHD is 3840x2160, I'm worried that the Mac will have to downscale and the picture quality will suffer.

Note that I'm primarily using this for watching movies, youtube, photos, etc. - not for gaming or video editing. But I'd still like the text to be crisp and to avoid tearing, skipped frames, etc.

Has anyone tried the new Mac mini with a UHD (3840x2160) TV, or does anyone know of any issues?
Thanks!
-Chris
Click to expand...
The Mac Mini (or any other desktop) doesn't have a 'native resolution', only monitors have. It does have a max resolution that its iGPU supports: 5120x2880 (aka 5k). So you're fine with buying a UHD TV.
 
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rmdeluca

macrumors 6502
Oct 30, 2018
250
415
gorthmog said:
Hi all,
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac mini and pairing it via HDMI with a Samsung 43" UHD (2018) TV for our family room TV. I haven't bought anything yet. Because the Mac mini native resolution is 4096x2160 while the Samsung UHD is 3840x2160, I'm worried that the Mac will have to downscale and the picture quality will suffer.

Note that I'm primarily using this for watching movies, youtube, photos, etc. - not for gaming or video editing. But I'd still like the text to be crisp and to avoid tearing, skipped frames, etc.

Has anyone tried the new Mac mini with a UHD (3840x2160) TV, or does anyone know of any issues?
Thanks!
-Chris
Click to expand...

The Mini doesn't really have a "native" resolution because it's headless. I've plugged mine into my 65" OLED and it works fine.

The only time you get into scaling issues is when using smaller 4K monitors. Text is hard to read (too small) at their native resolution so people scale the UI up a certain non-integer percentage which *can* bog down the GPU a bit. Depending on how far you sit you may have the same issue. At typical family room distances 4K is a bit of a waste on 43" so you might just run it at 1920x1080. Even when I game on my 65" from 8' away I run it at 1920x1080 so that I can get 120Hz.
 
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