Your 1440p Monitor Could Be Using a 4K Panel

The antics of the computer monitor industry continues with a new report claiming that certain panel manufacturers are using 4K panels for QHD displays because they are cheaper to produce. The native resolution is limited via firmware, and image quality is reduced due to scaling. In order to scale a 2560x1440 image to 3840x2160, the scaling factor is x1.5. This means that a single pixel in the lower-resolution original image gets mapped onto one and a half pixels, which increases blurriness. This is vastly different to a 4K display running with 1920x1080 input, where each pixel simply gets doubled in width and height, so a 1:1 mapping exists and everything stays sharp.