I'm looking for a Retina quality monitor for PC

[Mainer82]

I'm a photographer and edit photos a lot. I don't really play games on my PC.

I'd like a 24" - 27" IPS screen for editing photos that are sharp as a Retina screen. I don't want to move to Apple, I'm happy with the Microsoft Ecosystem.

I've found this, but is it Retina quality? http://www.benq.us/product/monitor/sw2700pt

 

[turkey3_scratch]

"Retina" is just an Apple-made term. I'm assuming you are looking for high resolution? Get a nice 4K monitor. You could even get an extra wide one. How much are you looking to spend?

 

[ikaz]

You may also want to look for review on Dell UltraSharp models they are used by professional for photo editing as well.

 

[Solandri]

"Retina" is just an Apple-made term. I'm assuming you are looking for high resolution? Get a nice 4K monitor. You could even get an extra wide one. How much are you looking to spend?

It's not high resolution per se that you want, but high PPI. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute of separation. Phil Plait covers the math pretty thoroughly here (though he's wrong about a 4th yellow pixel being silly - it actually does make a small difference):
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/

So using the 3438 number (1 / tangent of 1/60 degree), you get:

PPI >= 3438 / (viewing distance in inches)
or
(viewing distance in inches) >= 3438 / PPI

So if you prefer to sit with your eyes 18 inches from the monitor (laptop), you get 191 PPI as the minimum to fool the (average) eye into not seeing the pixels. This corresponds very closely to the Macbook Pro retina displays (220-226 PPI).

Since display sizes are given diagonally, you need to do a bit of math to calculate its PPI. Or you can just use a PPI calculator:
https://www.sven.de/dpi/

e.g. If you plan to buy a 27" 4k (3840x2160) monitor, that will give you 163 PPI. And the pixels will effectively be invisible as long as you keep your eyes at least 21 inches from the screen.

There are a few flies in the ointment. The obvious one is that you can briefly move your head closer to the screen to "zoom in" on some details. The pixels can then become visible then. This standard was developed for black/white, so doesn't really apply as well to color. You can in fact reduce the amount of blue resolution by a huge amount and red by a moderate amount, and the pixels will still be indistinguishable. This is the premise behind most lossy compressive encoders like JPEG, MPEG, NTSC, and why Pentile displays aren't as bad as reviewers who take zoomed-in photos of their subpixels claim they are.
http://nfggames.com/games/ntsc/visual.shtm

Another is that you view with both eyes at once, and your brain uses the info from both to create an aggregate image which has slightly higher resolution. There are some other small factors as well. But the bottom line is that for most viewing purposes, there is little point to getting a display which exceeds these PPIs.

(As for yellow, the RGB triad carves out a perfect triangle in color space with straight edges. Your eyes cones respond slightly differently to different frequencies of light, and your red cones are actually most sensitive to yellow-green, not red (to your brain, red = yellow-green and the absence of blue). So the "triangle" of visible colors actually does bulge out slightly in yellow - it's not a straight line between green and red. And a monitor with RGBY pixels could in fact display colors you can't get with RGB pixels. But the difference is very slight and not worth buying a new TV over. )

tl;dr - If you sit with your eyes 24" from the monitor while working, you want something with 143 PPI or higher. A 4k 24" monitor is 184 PPI. A 4k 27" monitor is 163 PPI. So either would work for your purposes.