4K Computer Monitors Are Coming (But Still Pricey)

First time accepted submitter jay age writes "When TV makers started pushing 4K screens on unsuspecting public, that just recently upgraded to 1080p, many had doubted what value will they bring consumers. Fair thought — 1080p is, at screen sizes and viewing distances commonly found in homes, good enough. However, PC users such as me have looked at this development with great hope. TV screens must have something to do with market being littered with monitors having puny 1080p resolution. What if 4K TVs will push PC makers to offer 4K screens too, wouldn't that be great? Well, they are coming. ASUS has just announced one!" You could hook a computer up to one of the available 4K displays, but will generally be paying a lot more for the privilege; this one is "only" about $5,000, according to ExtremeTech.

Comments

But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this? Most consumable content is at 1080p and I've yet to see a game which can run at these resolutions yet alone the newest Cryengine.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[eddy]

I would assume many games would play well in 4k (at least this fake-4k we're unfortunately talking about here). I think "Metro: Last Light" supports it officially.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting that 1080p ought to be enough for anybody?

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this?.

Video? Content? None will take advantage of it. Text. Text is the #1 driver of high density displays. Smooth text is pleasing to the eye. Developers will buy this and photo-editors.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Nyder]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this? Most consumable content is at 1080p and I've yet to see a game which can run at these resolutions yet alone the newest Cryengine.

Well, as currently (granted the Next Gen of consoles is around the corner) all the games on the market are made for the Xbox 360 & PS3, and then ported to the PC, and those games are barely 720p on the consoles, I wouldn't want to see any of those games on a 4k monitor.

Maybe if the next gen games are made at a resolution of 1080p, then yes, they probably be nice on the new 4k monitors. Of course, we don't have any of those next gen games out, so we really do NOT know if the new consoles can even push out 1080p resolution games.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

No but current graphical hardware struggles with antialiasing at 1080p and it's still a requirement to smooth pixels even at high res if you want 'great' visuals.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[walkerreuben]

I got that reference.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[JDG1980]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this?

Anyone who edits (or views) photos should appreciate the higher resolution. Even a cheap modern digital camera can usually take a picture with a resolution about as high as this monitor.

But the biggest advantage is in smooth text (and vector UI elements where available). You aren't supposed to run this at standard DPI and squint at tiny boxes; you're supposed to run it at 200% scaling and get far smoother text than usual, since it gets 4x the number of pixels at the same point size.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

By "support", what are the texture sizes like?

If I play a DVD on 4k it's going to look terrible because the source data is awful. I'm guessing that if my source textures are small then I'm going to experience the same sort of issues?

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Sir_Sri]

Um...

You realize there are lots of multi monitor setups that support 3, 4, or 6 or even more 1080p displays right?

If you are trying to power 6 displays in the new Tomb Raider or Crysis 3 with a single GTX 680 you're going to have a rough time no doubt. But you can certainly build a Titan SLI configuration or AMD 7990's in crossfire setups. It is not cheap by any means. But it's certainly possible.

I would expect to see the PC space start to adopt 'retina' displays or 4K or something else as we go forward. 4k in TV's is only for really big displays or ones viewed up close, and they're astronomically expensive. If you're spending 5k on a monitor and then complaining that your 500 dollar GPU isn't fast enough you should probably have thought of that expense first, or you shouldn't care about the money.

I saw a (1080p) 120Hz 60 inch TV for 800 bucks this week. New. I'm sure there are better deals in the US. We're not too many years away from an 80 inch or bigger TV being in the 1000 dollar range, and for that 4k is worth it.

Now yes, the PS4 and XB3 trying to do 4K might be... troublesome. We'll have to see exactly the specs on the GPU and then there's a tradeoff between lower quality at higher resolution or higher resolution and lower quality.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

People routinely play on 3-4 monitor setups and I've never heard anyone complain about texture quality on a proper PC game. A shitty console port? Those doesn't even look good at 1080p. Besides, there are too many variables to even answer you question. If you want to know about M:LL specifically I guess you have to buy the game and look at the resource files if you really want to know, or maybe you could just settle to look at one of the many many 4K screenshots that is out there.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about having a higher resolution, is that with a good renderer, anti-aliasing isn't needed. It is useful for lower resolution to emulating having a smoother image. 4k I'd image (even 2k) wouldn't need AA aside from maybe some nut jobs.

Now, I don't think my vision is poor in any regard sitting maybe at most 2 feet from a 1920x1080 monitor, but I'm not sure if I could even tell a difference without leaning in closely and trying to find the pixels if I went to a higher resolution. Ghosting, response times, contrast, and durability (back lights fading) are more important to me. A 4k projector would be nice though. Spread those pixels out.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get this idea? AA isn't that expensive, unless you're doing super-sampling. Besides, the need for AA goes down as resolution goes up. I know there are some 'visuaphiles' out there who spend more time looking for and complaining about jaggies than playing the game, but I think we can ignore the nut-case market with pretty good concience.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[atriusofbricia]

Well, as currently (granted the Next Gen of consoles is around the corner) all the games on the market are made for the Xbox 360 & PS3, and then ported to the PC...

This right here is one of the saddest things of the last 15 years or so. How much has gaming been held back and stunted by this one fact. :(

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that 'glitz' doesn't quite pan on a high res screen. Take the Unreal engine for example - you can play Unreal Tournament 3 today and the lighting effects and such aren't too departed from 2013 games but the textures look like cack and it's very noticeable. Another example is Skyrim - with the 2-4k resolution enhancements the game looks fantastic on 1080p monitors but I cannot imagine how awful the stock game would look on a 4k screen.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pop LOTRO on a 1080p screen and tell me you can't see the jaggies.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Following that line of thinking, we'd never get electricity. Who has the appliances to take advantage of electricity? My water well works just fine.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Dr Max]

Most games support higher resolutions (especially crysis) so that people can run multiple monitors side by side (of course you need very decent graphics to keep up with that many pixels). The problem for this monitor wont be resolution it'll be refresh rate; 8ms is more than enough for watching video but it doesn't feel quite natural when you have control of the camera.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

True, but it's not that bad with AA - it's only noticeable with static images like with the logon screen.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

your hardware sucks really badly. I've got hardware that's now 3 generations old, wasn't top of the line when I bought it (GTX 470), and it still plays most things I throw at it in 1920x1200 with 4x antialiasing, 16 ansiotropic filtering, and high settings, at playable frame rates.

if you're buying a titan or a gtx 690, you're buying them to game on 3 monitors.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

Have you seen the GPU load playing badly optimised games like Planetside 2 on single monitor? You might be able to find games that a 7970 etc will be fine with multi-screen but the majority of developers are still in 2007 in terms of multi-screen.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[gman003]

Yes, but with difficulty. Rendering generally scales linearly with the number of pixels, so rendering at 3840x2160 takes four times as much processing power as rendering at 1920x1080.

Games rarely have to specifically support a resolution. Most will query the system to see what resolutions are possible - they may have to upscale UI elements that are normally 1:1 or downscaled, and they may only support certain aspect ratios, but they rarely "break". Even games that use hardcoded resolution lists tend to work if you edit a config file - I did so to get UT2004 rendering at 2560x1440.

The problem, of course, is getting that power. Top-tier video cards tend to be tested at 5760x1080 (triple 1080p) or at 2560x1440, and they rarely break 60fps at high settings. My comparatively-puny Radeon 6870 struggles at 1440p, requiring me to drop Crysis down to medium settings. I can still max out undemanding games (UT3, BF2) but recent titles (or Crysis games), no.

PS: What the hell are you talking about, games not running at 1080p? In the time since I got a 1080p monitor, I have found only one game that cannot play at that resolution (Star Wars: Republic Commando), and that's because it only runs in 4:3. Everything else runs fine. Are you perhaps saying that you cannot find *console* games that can run at 1080p?

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Metro: last light sucks...

It's a fucking movie... Call it a movie.. lump it into that catagory. it's not a game.

Straight up on rails (sometimes literally) movie.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

I think this was the OP point - we don't have the graphical hardware to display the content. I'm sure conventional means have the bandwidth - HDMI 2.0 has 14.4 Gbit throughput for the video but the authors of the content don't provide the content in the right format. So the next best thing is that which is extensible i.e. Games and such. At the moment, you may be able to provide the resolution but the actual content is not scaled to be so. We're talking about Duke Nukem 32 on 1080p monitors - it seriously does not look good without the crazy modpack the community has provided. A fine example of bad resolution textures is Deus Ex 3 - a very decent linear game but terrible textures when upscaled to 1080p. I can't imagine what this would look like on 4K

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

Blimey... Duke Nukem 32! I meant 3D! I can't imagine a time in which we can quantify between Duke Nukem 3D, Forever and version 32!

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

We've all seen Star Wars in ASCII. It was devoid of Jar Jar. I'm inclined to agree with your statement.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[gman003]

I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've been gaming recently on a 1440p monitor, which isn't exactly something people design for. And yet I haven't really noticed major issues with texture resolution - unless I'm rubbing my face in 512x512 textures, they're usually still over one texel per pixel, meaning they're being downscaled. Yes, certain console ports have problems (Call of Duty being the most prominent), but even many console games look fine at quadruple the resolution they were designed for. A bigger problem is simply UI scaling - it looks fine, but it's less than optimal for gameplay.

I'll also add that you're wrong about the bandwidth. HDMI 2.0 is still in drafts, and even 1.4 (which barely supports 2160p, at only 24FPS) is not very widespread (my brand-new monitor *and* my year-old video card only support 1.3, as far as I can tell). For 2160p content, the only real option is DisplayPort - even dual-link DVI falters in framerate at that resolution. And DisplayPort is unfortunately not too common, particularly outside the PC world.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[petermgreen]

Games rarely have to specifically support a resolution. Most will query the system to see what resolutions are possible - they may have to upscale UI elements that are normally 1:1 or downscaled

Theres also some games that don't scale the UI elements at all.

I remember experiencing this years back with the original quake (dos version), It was designed for something like 320x200 and if you cranked it up to 800x600 or worse 1024x760 the UI became unusablly small (I presume this has been fixed by now either by ID or by third parties).

A lot of "builder" and "rts" type games have also had UIs and sometimes content too (though that is rarer now that contents is 3D rendered) in fixed pixel sizes. In recent years it hasn't been so much of a problem because monitors (when running at their native resoloution) have all been roughly the same pixel density but with these new high DPI screens UIs designed for a set number of pixels may become a problem again (it's a problem on the desktop too and MS and apple have both had to implement workarounds there which I can see may or may not play nice with games).

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

Ok, so 4K is marketable as a PPI gambit. This makes a lot more sense with your application. The problem is that 4K has to be mass market to drive down the price of such a thing and as we saw with 90s Apple hardware, the application won't drive it. Style won't drive a 4k screen either so there will have to be a mass market attitude change and media that moves with it. DVD is the only thing I can think of which bucked the trend - years of lacklustre DVD sales before the format took off. Are we seeing a pre-emptive product that is aimed at break even before media can support? Essentially we'd need non-niche 4K media to make the average consumer buy it.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[pantherace]

AA is a hack because of insufficient resolution.

Tell me, which is better: playing on an old SVGA 800x600 with 4x AA, or playing on 1600x1200 with no AA?

Or higher AA, but I'm willing to bet, with a quarter the AA setting, that 1600x1200, will look better than that 800x600. I'd bet 3200x2400 would look even better.

More resolution is better than more AA. More AA is better than nothing, but it's still a hack.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[elashish14]

As far as content goes, couldn't give a damn. But more resolution means more viewing area for multiple windows. I have 1080p on a 15.5 inch screen, and the text isn't too small. Not sure what ppi that comes to, but it's probably about the same as these screens.

What to do with all that real estate? Firefox takes up ~1/3 of the screen while IRC is open in the background. If I'm writing LaTeX documents (not sure why I chose to capitalize that properly), you keep your editor open in one corner, keep the pdf/dvi in another corner, and all other windows are documentation, reference, tutorials, other things to read on the side, etc. Same workflow in Libreoffice... or when coding and you need to see multiple windows at once (or just one vi instance with several splits, heh).

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[JDG1980]

Ok, so 4K is marketable as a PPI gambit. This makes a lot more sense with your application. The problem is that 4K has to be mass market to drive down the price of such a thing and as we saw with 90s Apple hardware, the application won't drive it.

Why are you citing incidents from the 1990s? Look at the last couple of years. Apple already has driven high-DPI "Retina" displays into the mainstream. Yes, they are currently a premium product on laptops, but on tablets and smartphones, DPI far higher than the desktop norm is now standard across the industry. And Samsung is preparing a 3200x1800 laptop display – clearly they think there is some demand here.

I think portable devices really have changed the game. Once you've used a iPad 4 for a while, the low DPI on a PC monitor really looks blurry and crappy in comparison. I don't think it's a stretch that desktop and laptop users going forward will want the same high display quality that they have gotten used to on their smartphones and tablets.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[nobodyman]

8ms is more than enough for watching video but it doesn't feel quite natural when you have control of the camera

Really? Isn't that over 120hz? That's a genuine question -- i'm pretty ignorant of display tech.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this? Most consumable content is at 1080p and I've yet to see a game which can run at these resolutions yet alone the newest Cryengine.

If you can't hear your card screaming for air right now, you probably don't own a video card that can handle it; but most reasonably modern engines are flexible on resolution. The drop-down menu may not present the option, if it's something odd; but some bodging around with .ini files or command line options can usually be made to happen.

I'm sure some games just don't ship with the texture assets to fully do justice; but unless the textures the engine uses even for right-in-your-face distances are truly dreadful, it should be possible to get noticable improvement over 1080p.

Photos/editing are one obvious area that would benefit: even the '4k' screen is only 8.2 megapixels. Even cheap happy-snap cameras dump pictures that large(some of them may have lower effective resolutions because their optics suck; but somebody buying a several-thousand-dollar screen is probably also in the market for a real camera, if that's their thing).

While mundane, text should also look pretty nice: 30 inches is a lot of real space, to have multiple documents tiled, and 140ppi is on the high side for desktop panels, so fonts should look really good.

If anything, team video and their 'consumable content' are probably last in terms of readiness.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[harrkev]

You DO realize that there are uses for monitors besides games. This is a monitor for professionals, not gamers.

At work, I have a 2560x1600 surrounded by a pair of 1200x1600 (portrait mode). No games at work. Terminal windows, emacs windows, simulation waveforms, and schematic windows. For this, the more pixels the better. I loved my 30" monitor so much, I purchased one for home use on those days when I telecommute.

Now, it was painful to throw down $1200 for 30" of glass for home use, and I cannot see spending four or five thousand for a mere 1MP increase. Not to mention that I use a DVI KVM to switch between work and home machines. My home machine is a laptop that cannot drive anything past 1080 over HDMI.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Stormwatch]

Look at the bright side: even a modest PC could run the newest games well, because those games were designed for the modest hardware of consoles.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

Definitely but when we are adjusting the horizontal and the vertical, the outer limits comes and bashes us in the head. The bigger screen and neck movement results in the new need for AA.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

But that's by necessity in having a compact device and competing in a saturated market. Let's consider Iiyama in the 90s - they had clearly a lead in the PC screen market until roughly 2001. Sure we can argue that the format change to TFT made a difference but the simple fact is that when you came down to high end anti-ghosting screens for soviet Russian to product anti-Google maps sites; it was king. Iiyama has been squashed as a market leader from this period - not down to providing inferior products but by not adapting to demand. However, we're seeing in sales for tablets that consumers simply don't care about PPI and the ipad/or competitors don't look at PPI. I own a Nexus 10 and I realise that I'm a very small minority that do. It's a great device but PPI means crap against an Apple brand or even an ASUS brand.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[KingMotley]

Most can.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would expect to see the PC space start to adopt 'retina' displays or 4K or something else as we go forward.

Exactly! The focus should be on the DPI, not the pixel count.

Right now, in consumer space, only the Macbook gives you retina display (>300dpi). I am longing for monitors that give me retina display resolution, but as the usual PC monitors are still stuck at catering at 1080p display (which is just about 100dpi for a ~10" height screen for a ~22" diagonal), there is little hope. But if 4K display became prevalent, eventually PC monitors will get high enough dpi.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[beelsebob]

Depends how far away you sit.

At 10 feet from a 36" screen, you can't tell the difference between DVD (576p) and 720p.
At 10 feet from a 55" screen, you can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.
At 10 feet from a 110" screen, you can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4k.

So, given that this monitor is less than 36", if you sit at TV viewing distances from it, no, a DVD won't look awful on it.

* all measurements assume normal, good eye sight.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[beelsebob]

The point is that having a display with 4 times as many pixels on it requires exactly as much power as 4x SSAA. So yes, it really is "that expensive".

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

5ms or 6ms is much better. If were talking LCD flat panel tech.

60hz was tolerable on crts, but doubling that or doing 110 or 120 hz was a big step up.

I think thats fantastic you can get a hi rez display, but that just puts a larger field of view in a smaller box.

Having two monitors so the FoV is higher but the res does not get really small is were it is at right now. Driving resolution up we could wait a decade still I think and just sell more monitors for better viewing area/field of view again.

80 or 90 FoV on a 17' sucks whether its 4k or not resolution.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

I didn't. I was sure it was "Can it play Crysis?" Perhaps this is why Google didn't bring all the boys in the yard (in daylight, their 3gb Titans are better than yours).

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[TheGavster]

The rate described in ms for a display isn't the frequency with which new data can be presented, but how long it takes a set of data to be presented. In this case, it takes the pixels 8ms (on average) to get from where they were to a new state. At a 60Hz refresh rate, that leaves you 10-11ms to perceive the image before it starts changing again. As the portion of each frame that is spent getting the pixels into position increases, fast-changing scenes will begin to look muddy (because the pixels that have to change the most won't even be at their new state before they start changing again). Think of it like a movie projector, where the shutter must be closed while the next frame is moved into position. If the shutter spends too much of its time closed, the illusion of motion is lost.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[pla]

At 10 feet from a 36" screen, you can't tell the difference between DVD (576p) and 720p [...]So, given that this monitor is less than 36", if you sit at TV viewing distances from it, no, a DVD won't look awful on it.

I don't know about you, but I don't sit 10ft from my monitor. More like 3ft max, and sometimes as close as 18in.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Solapse]

Perhaps in 2003 when the original came out. Screens are meant to show what they can show. However, we're getting so far in comparing old engined that: my eye also can watch an apple degrade into a maggot ridden husk. Without being too flippant, Crysis was used as it's a bit of a joke that the CryEngine in which the game Crysis 1, 2, 3 etc. is based was initially a joke as a massive hog on system resources and also a new graphical standard. It may not be so any longer but it's a bit of a catchphrase "can it run crysis"? Many Raspberry PIs and Beagle Boards have tried and died.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

2k isn't that much bigger than 1080p, in fact, it's only 128px wider...

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[AJH16]

I'm not completely convinced of this. I can reliably distinguish the difference in detail on my 55 inch screen from more than 10 feet. I may not be able to make full use of that detail as I can't resolve it perfectly, but that doesn't mean I can't tell the detail is there. Granted that may be partly due to other artifacts produced from the lower data rate in the 720 feed rather than raw resolution too. (I also have better than average vision, so I guess that could be part of it.)

Not saying your point is necessarily wrong in most people's cases, but it doesn't seem to gel with my personal experience (which includes blind tests.) Just saying that for some (such as an experienced A/V tech with excellent vision), this might not hold true.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[jones_supa]

And the Nintendo 64 port is called Duke Nukem 64...

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

ET QUAKE WARS can run at 64x FSAA
16xFSAA on my machine smoothly.
So i expect my rig to be able to run it at 4xFSAA on a 4k monitor, as that is the same number of samples.
Howevere, some shader operations might not be run at the antialiased level, and will therefore be running at 4k res rather than 1080p res.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[atriusofbricia]

Look at the bright side: even a modest PC could run the newest games well, because those games were designed for the modest hardware of consoles.

I suppose there is that. Of course, what bothers me more is the retardation of game design. Since everything is developed for consoles and console players we end up with basically the same games over and over again just with slightly different characters and tweaked story lines.

In the end, it is QTEs and chest high walls as far as the eye can see with only a rare exception.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[happymellon]

then there's a tradeoff between lower quality at higher resolution or higher resolution and lower quality.

There is probably less difference than you think.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wish what you say were true. I have a 1080p monitor, and I see the pixels. I work a lot on open source graphics "stuff" and I guarantee you that I see the pixels. I need a better monitor, but I can't afford what they sell. I don't make money doing it so it makes a difference. If the price point comes down below $1000 US I'll buy. And yes I have a mullti monitor setup. I just need the one screen for graphics.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Krneki]

In Soviet Russia the government tells you how good you see!

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Krneki]

LOL consoles on 4k, they have a freaking APU, an 5 years old high end GPU laughs at this.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a rat's ass if you can play games on it? Some of us actually use computers to get something useful done, which frequently involves editing text or arrays of numbers, in which case the more the merrier.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[tibit]

Chip layout could use such monitors, as long as you have good vision; good vision with corrective lenses is of course fine, too. Perhaps GIS applications, and maybe some kinds of CAD as well. Just off the top of my head.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[tibit]

Bullshit. At 10 feet from a 32" screen I can not only tell the difference between a DVD and a 720p, I can also tell the difference between high and low bitrate SD on cable channels. Different channels have different bitrates, my provider for example likes absolutely killing content for children of all ages. Sometimes it looks as bad as Indeo-encoded samples that came with Windows 95, if people still remember that :)

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[tibit]

If the shutter spends too much of its time closed, the illusion of motion is lost.

Nope, the image simply gets progressively darker. This analogy doesn't apply to monitors that usually don't blank the LED backlight while the pixels change state. Now they obviously could blank the backlight since LEDs are more than fast enough. You'd trade off reduced perceived image intensity for crisper, less "muddy" image as you wouldn't be seeing the desired pixel values averaged with values from the transition.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[pthisis]

Forget games, let's talk about work. I was running at 1600x1200 on my 15" CRT in 1997, and it wasn't state of the art. I could very comfortably have multiple 80 column editors or terminals beside each other with nice resolution fonts. LCDs/LEDs are great in a lot of ways, but they were a step backward in resolution (the same terminals or editors leave a bit of overlap on sub-1400 pixel widescreen LCD screens, unless I dial down the fonts to crappier quality).

It'd be awesome to finally get back to 15+ year old technology again on that front.

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[shitzu]

There are lots of 27" 2560x1440 displays. Most of them are way under $1K

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xterm. 30 of them, tiled.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[AmiMoJo]

CAD users too. When you have lots of overlapping layers and fine detail the extra resolution really helps separate them.

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[Malc]

1080p _is_ 2k, or at least the most common 2k resolution for TVs. Likewise, the most common 4k resolution will probably be 1080p doubled (3840x2160). There are a range of common resolutions of course that fall under the 4k umbrella.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Maxo-Texas]

And I knew a guy who could see the difference between 57fps and >60fps reliably (below 60fps looked "choppy" to him but glass smooth to the rest of us.

And I know one person who can truly tell the difference between a 60 dollar bottle of wine and a 30 dollar bottle of wine. The rest of us topped out at about 25 dollars a bottle and in one case preferred a 12 dollar bottle over the 30 and the 60 dollar bottles.

And I know a guy who has 20/15 natural vision.

Grants on your great eyesight. Most of the rest of us can't tell the difference.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Maxo-Texas]

Short of a retina display, the screen will always look jaggier without AA than with AA.
Once you hit resolution finer than your retina can discern, then AA makes no sense.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[pinkeen]

Most importantly the 8ms figure that most manufacturers state is the G2G time, meaning the time it takes for a pixel to change colour from grey to another shade of grey. It's doesn't directly translate to response time. I don't know about others but I see a lot of blur on my 8ms monitor when playing games at 60fps (when a large area of the screen refreshes). It was a lot less noticeable when I had a GPU which was mostly capable of ~30fps.

BTW The constant V-Sync problems that are plaguing today's games are ludicrous. You thought that they would've fixed this by now. But instead the whole pipeline gets more parallel, everything's being deferred and it's harder to maintain smooth motion.

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty would take advantage of it: imagine doing architecture, design, photography, engineering, air traffic control, etc on a large hi-dpi display?

Switching from current (smaller) hi-dpi displays, like the MacBook Pro Retina to a large display makes standard displays look like dot matrix printer.

Even allowing for larger typical viewing distance of desktop displays, the (spatial) resolution of common displays is far too low to resolve fine detail and get anywhere near human visual acuity.

Who cares about computer games for kids? I don't.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Sir_Sri]

Considering I develop games for a living, do a lot of graphics programming and work with this problem on a regular basis.. no not likely.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Sir_Sri]

What did I say that you think *isn't* true?

I have a 1080p monitor, and I see the pixels

I never said you (or anyone else) can't. The Pixel density in a 24 inch 1080p display is usually 'good enough', but it is by no means perfect. That's why I expect we'll eventually see higher density displays. The tradeoff between density and hardware performance requirements means we're a ways out from that being mainstream.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ignorance is staggering.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Sir_Sri]

Have you actually benchmarked AMD's top end integrated APU? The current one (and the PS4 and XB3 use some semi custom next gen version) are definitely kinda wacky, but they're about on par with a GTX 580 or a AMD 7870 (not counting clock for clock changes, the Jaguar APU seems to sit somewhere between a 7850 and a 7870 in performance but it's a newer part so I'm not sure clock for clock differences).

And yes, they can certainly power a 4 monitor 1080p display setup, but you'd be really struggling to have high settings when doing so natively.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the games are never ported properly. They are instead stuffed into buggy emulators that ultimately hamper performance and leave much to be desired in the way of control customization.

PC "ports" today are an abomination. They're sold with little or no support, and often reek of having had the most trivial of bug testing.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering I develop games for a living, do a lot of graphics programming and work with this problem on a regular basis.. no not likely.

I doubt that.
In a 3-D environment the user only sees a 1-to-1 scale on textures and vertices for a relatively short distance away from their character. At which point, a single pixel on screen begins to hold two or more pixels from a texture map, or two or more vertices from a 3D lattice. Simply by increasing the pixel count on the display, you are now able to see further in any 3-D space before you hit this boundary. This has the result of making objects sharper and more detailed, especially at long distances, without increasing the vertex density of the 3D models or the pixel count in textures.

The tradeoff is not quality vs. resolution. It's resolution vs. performance. Quality is primarily reliant on the skills of the people developing the art.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

By "support", what are the texture sizes like?

If I play a DVD on 4k it's going to look terrible because the source data is awful. I'm guessing that if my source textures are small then I'm going to experience the same sort of issues?

1. It won't look any worse than it does now.
2. You'll be able to see full texture detail from farther away.
3. You'll be able to see individual textures/objects at distances where they would blend into a single pixel on a lower resolution display.
4. If someone chooses to take full advantage of the display, then yes the texture sizes will probably get a lot larger.

Your dvd is not going to look terrible. DVD is only 720, and it looks fine on a 1080 display, it'll look just as good as it does now. It'll only look bad if you compare it to something which was sourced at a higher resolution.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[hairyfeet]

That is one game out of HOW many that have been released just this year? Not to mention all the games of years past, if you thought you had problems getting them to run on a widescreen monitor imagine what "fun" you'll have when its picture is the size of a postage stamp compared to your new 4K screen.

I'm sure what I am about to say will depress the shit out of the resolution nuts but truth is truth and the simple truth is you are gonna have to have a SHITLOAD of content to get people to let go of those 1080P sets and considering how much it costs to make a triple A game these days? They'll probably be one of the last things to switch. Unless you use some cheap fakery 4K art assets are gonna suck up some serious space which is gonna mean more space and/or more bandwidth...speaking of bandwidth how big of a pipe are we gonna need to have MP with 4K? Considering the ISPs are all going to caps I bet the answer is "too damned much".

Then finally there is the big fat rotting elephant lying on top of the Blu Ray which is thus, most people? They don't see any problem with what they have and they sure as fuck ain't gonna spend thousands on a set that has content measured in double digits. I mean has anybody looked at the sales of DVD versus the sales of Blu Ray lately? People seem quite content with their upscaling DVD players even though those won't even do 1080p, so good damned luck selling them on yet another format...oh and has anybody thought about the DRM? If you think Blu Ray sucks balls for DRM imagine how fucking apeshit the MPAA is gonna be when it comes to a format that gives a better picture than many theaters.

All in all I'm gonna say this will end up yet another niche videophile market, not even getting the limited adoption that Blu Ray has. The content isn't there, you'll have to have bandwidth that frankly damned few in the USA even has access to to do any streaming, its expensive as hell, and the majority see nothing wrong with what they have. I mean for crap's sake guys the majority of notebooks sold are running 1366x768, you honestly think people are gonna care about a 4K set? At the end of the day it'll be just like 3D-TV, something the TV manufacturers pushed trying to get the prices back up only to end up with a pile of unsold sets. Hell you still see something like 4 720P sets sold for each 1080P, its obvious people care about price more than resolution and "good enough" is the rule of the day.

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[tysonedwards]

DVD is 720x480 vs Bluray which is 1920x1080. The sizes are wildly different.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[hairyfeet]

Ahhh Indeo, I remember that. The name is I believe ancient Sanskrit for "Blocks made of fecal matter". I hear the MPAA mourned when that format died because it was so good at keeping people from watching copyrighted content...or pretty much anything except colored squares. And how could we forget one of its most popular uses, it was in part thanks to Indeo we had the FMV "game" ;-)

As for being able to tell the difference? I'm sure you can, but you are in the minority friend. Hell the majority of notebooks today are sold with 1366x768 screens and most TV manufacturers sell a good 4 to 6 720P TV sets for each 1080P set they sell so its pretty damned obvious that most folks either can't tell or just don't care.

In the interest of full disclosure I'm typing this at home on my 1600x900 22 inch and while i wouldn't mind picking up a 32 inch 1080P TV set to use as a monitor down the line I have to say picture wise I'm quite happy with what I have. But then again I'm also quite happy with my 12 inch netbook which is 1366x768 which I'm sure makes videophiles cry.

Re: But can you play Crysis on it?

[QQBoss]

I paid 2100 RMB (about 330 USD) for my HKC 2560x1440 27" monitor. Supports HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA (to get those, means they splurged on a video scaler), has audio input, and was pixel perfect. Color rendition is surprisingly good, far better than I anticipated, but that is only eyeballing it and not using a colorimeter. Oh, and has wonderfully crappy 2W speakers if you are into torturing your ears more than your eyes.

There was a brand called Sekei available with a 50" 4K TV on NewEgg not that long ago for... about $900, I think it was? I forgot to save a link to it, unfortunately, and I can't locate them now. Pity. I did find a link to info about the panel, though. Would be fun if it could actually do 120 Hz at 4K res, that is only for 1080P or lower.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[rachit]

And I knew a guy who could see the difference between 57fps and >60fps reliably (below 60fps looked "choppy" to him but glass smooth to the rest of us.

Well, most LCD refresh rates are 60fps (or a multiple thereof), so 57fps as an "average" means that you get 60 FPS, but 2% of the time skip a frame (or more). You don't need to have the best eyesight in the world to notice dropped frames..

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Maxo-Texas]

Analog monitors back about 2002. Playing "Shogo" and "Team Fortress" and "Doom".
Good times.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.people who have an iPad would like to have a "Retina Display" in their laptop, but some, I'd bet most of them are not willing to shell out over $2k for a laptop, that was the equipment that I used to use (I have a 17" MBP now), but I'm no longer going with that because the only thing you can do with Apple laptops nowadays is browse the web, editing your photos maybe, but that is not MBP anymore. I'm not willing to spend some extra that I've used to spend on a bigger screen just for higher resolution, which makes no sense to me at all. I have an external display with the same res, but it's like 27" which makes sense if it's 1 meter from me, 15" just doesn't cut it.
People who used do buy high-end MBPs just won't buy Retina MBPs while people who used to like MBAs will, but that is going to fail in the long run. iPad/iPhone Retina is not that big deal, while the laptop is, is it not?

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[tibit]

I'm not in the minority due to my vision, but due to knowledge of what's there and how artifacts look. People who know a bit about video encoding make extremely poor test subjects - their results are always worse than general public's. People just don't care and don't know, that's all.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...I transcode too and I notice artifacts...for about 10 seconds and then i'm too busy watching the actual content to care. Unless you get Indeo levels of shitty most folks just won't care, they really won't, or how else do you explain how 1366x768 notebooks and 720p TVs are the biggest sellers?

I can tell you why, its the same reason why my dad watches a 50 inch 1080P set yet the majority of the content he watches on it isn't even DVD quality, its because as long as its not blocky as hell he cares more about the content than what resolution its at and I have a feeling the majority feels the same.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[happymellon]

Woosh.

Re:But can you play Crysis on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

gamers will want this. gamers already do.

downsampling is where you make a monitor (say, 1080p) run at a higher resolution (say, 4k) for IQ purposes. even my gtx 470 can hit 4k (albeit at only 45hz). i can play games like xcom at 1800p no problem.

bring on native 4k! would love to downsample a 4k monitor at an 8k resolution.

ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS, why do I need to enable ajax.googleapis.com in NoScript just to view Asus's website?

I'm sick of creepy Google gathering info on me.
Then, when I later email someone with a Gmail mailbox, Google will link my IP address (contained in the email's header) with my unique email address and add that intel to their already overflowing collection of 'big data'.

You know what? Stuff it, I won't enable it. Asus just lost me as a website visitor.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Google operates a javascript CDN that many sites use. It doesn't use cookies, and means you don't have to load common libraries like jquery from every website individually.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[cheater512]

ajax.googleapis.com isn't a tracking domain and your IP shouldn't be in any emails you send unless you run your own mail server.

Next?

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the irony. I just scrolled down and saw this.
Here's a perfect example of why I'm conscious of my digital footprint: Judge Orders Google To Comply With FBI's Warrantless NSL Requests

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[forkazoo]

ajax.googleapis.com isn't a tracking domain and your IP shouldn't be in any emails you send unless you run your own mail server.

Erm, that seems like a bit of a failure of imagination. Why wouldn't that be a "tracking domain?" Do you have some specific proof that it's somehow impossible for Google to use normal logging functionality on the web server for that domain? And that this will be true forever? Obviously, the idea that any particular domain can't be used for tracking is just silly. So, if google knows you visited the manufacturer's website, why couldn't they use that for ad tailoring when you log into gmail to send an email? Or anywhere else that you get a Google served ad, for that matter...

I'm not amazingly paranoid about this stuff, but to seriously dismiss the possibility of doing these things is just silly.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus speaks a man who's only ever used webmail...

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[hotrodent]

I had ajax.googleapis.com still blocked and the site loaded fine. Just had to allow asus.com. Seems AC didn't check properly.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[cheater512]

The googleapis.com domain exists purely to be a cookie free domain. Helps with caching.
Its a pretty common technique for static content.

Without cookies, they have a IP and the website that loaded the script. Hardly useful for advertising and it cannot be tied to your personalised advertising profile.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[cheater512]

Nope. I've used webmail, commercial email solutions and ISP email.

The latter two *should* always say the username you authenticated with the SMTP server with, not your IP.
I just did a test to demonstrate this. If your email provider doesn't do this then it might be an idea to use one who knows what they are doing.

Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
        by smtp29.relay.dfw1a.emailsrvr.com (SMTP Server) with ESMTP id 02066398EA5
        for ; Fri, 31 May 2013 19:49:02 -0400 (EDT)
X-Virus-Scanned: OK
Received: by smtp29.relay.dfw1a.emailsrvr.com (Authenticated sender: sending-AT-email.address) with ESMTPSA id F384B398E99
        for ; Fri, 31 May 2013 19:49:00 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID:

As you can see, Rackspace's email server is the first received header and it only says 'Authenticated sender: sending-AT-email.address' which is my email address. My IP isn't there at all.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

IP address + user agent string is often sufficient to uniquely-enough track people.

Of course Google the advertising company offers all these free services out of the the good of their hearts and not because they're tracking your internet browsing behavior.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Without cookies, they have a IP and the website that loaded the script. Hardly useful for advertising and it cannot be tied to your personalised advertising profile.

With js enabled? they have IP, user agent, screen resolution, system fonts, plugins ... see here to check how unique you are without cookies active. Compare that to your personalized profile data (which has the same info, plus cookies, if you happen to be logged into a service that requires them like webmail) and you'll have remarkably few matches. Heck, IP match would narrow it down pretty quickly. The fun begins when behind the same (corporate) IP there are multiple computers with the same configuration - you'll start to get funny targeted ads triggered by someone of the opposite sex endlessly browsing clothing stores.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I block *.googleapis.com everywhere. It is disturbing how many sites don't work without it. I would gladly "load common libraries like jquery from every website individually" to avoid Google tracking my way through the entire web, but apparently web authors can't even be arsed to add a fallback in case vital script files can't be retrieved from an external server. If I were in charge of company as big as ASUS, I wouldn't serve my web stats to a competitor like Google on a silver platter.

Re:ajax.googleapis.com

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. Yeah, your IP is not identifying you at all, and the website you visit does not tell them anything about your interest. Sure. And it's a well known fact that all targeted marketing relies only on cookies. Riiight. Just for your information, you are naive, and potentially dumb. You should keep that in mind next time you make a big decision.

Weak!

[tysonedwards]

$5000 for a 31.5" monitor with a 3840x2160 resolution?
$800 gets a 30" monitor with a 2560x1600 resolution.
$1400 gets a 50" TV with a 3840x2160 resolution.
$2200 gets a 15" laptop with a 2880x1800 resolution.

Sure, none of these are directly comparable, but at the same time it's disappointing to see Asus at such an extreme price point.

Re:Weak!

[Gr8Apes]

No kidding - I love my 2560X1600 monitor. 1080? seriously?

Re:Weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is it a 16:10 display?"
"It's a beautiful HD display! Look at how HD it is! It's so HD, it's MORE HD than what we call HD today!!!"
"But is it 16:10?
"Friend, this is the H-est of Ds ever known to home entertainment science! So much H! So much D! It's HD to the MORE!"
"Is. It. A. 16:10. Display. Answer that. Now."
"...No."
"Then it's CRAAAAAAAAAAP!"

Re:Weak!

[sd4f]

Yep, although my monitor is 1920x1200, it's going to take a while for me to move along from that, unless there is a 3840x2400.

Re:Weak!

[Tagged_84]

It's Extreme Tech and they admit to making up the price in the article. That site is extremely opinionated and I wouldn't trust it with my bookmarks!

Re:Weak!

[rthille]

Two monitors, one 16x9 and one 9x16 is what most people at my work use. I'm pretty happy with the 1920x1080 laptop next to the 2560x1440, but yeah another 160 pixels vertically would be nicer.

Re:Weak!

[macemoneta]

> $1400 gets a 50" TV with a 3840x2160 resolution.

That was my thought as well. Rather than getting a 2x2 1920x1080 monitor array, using the $1400 50" Seiki 4K TV as a monitor will give you the same real estate, seamlessly. You only need one Radeon 7970 (or better) to drive it, simplifying the configuration. $1800 for that configuration is not bad at all.

Re:Weak!

[Shadow of Eternity]

I'm still using my 2048x1536@100hz screen from *ten years ago*. Flatpanels are the worst thing to ever happen to display technology.

Re:Weak!

[elashish14]

In all honesty, what's the real difference between a TV and a monitor? I wanted a monitor as well as something I use for my Wii (composite output). Ended up buying a TV and use DP -> HDMI when I want to use it as an external (which I never do because that thing is a piece of crap, but that's an aside).

Is it just a matter of ports or something? Is it the fact that a TV also comes with a tuner? My conclusion is that TVs are a superset of monitors in the functionality that they provide, and often come with a better resolution/price. Someone please enlighten me if I've missed something....

Re:Weak!

[harrkev]

$800 gets a 30" monitor with a 2560x1600 resolution.

Really? Where? I have seen budget Korean 2560x1200 monitors for around $400 or so, and name-brand at the same resolution for around $700 or so. I have yet to see a budget 2560x1600. That extra 400 pixels of vertical resolution really raises the price.

Re:Weak!

[bill_mcgonigle]

you better hope that thing lasts until the 4k's are mass-market!

Re:Weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this one for under $700, full 2560x1600, 30".

Also you can often find deals or promo codes for Dell 30" 2560x1600 under $999 new.

Re:Weak!

[jones_supa]

I'm still using my 2048x1536@100hz screen from *ten years ago*. Flatpanels are the worst thing to ever happen to display technology.

Is the image still sharp?

Re:Weak!

[jones_supa]

A TV has also the disadvantage that its stand can usually not tilt, which would often be useful in PC use.

Re:Weak!

[Visserau]

The same question has been bugging me.

I think that it's mostly the DPI. The TV has huge pixels (since you sit so far away from it) so you can never use it as a monitor. Obviously this varies greatly between units, but in general a e.g. 1080 TV will be physically much larger than the equivilent 1080 monitor. That means the manufacturing process is cheap and easy.

Re:Weak!

[AmiMoJo]

But what size? A 31.5" CRT isn't exactly easy to place on an average size desk, and can't compete on power consumption.

For 99% of people flat panels are a huge improvement over their old 17" CRTs that were set to 60Hz by the IT department.

Re:Weak!

[adolf]

It's analog; it can be adjusted. Over the past twenty years, I've adjusted a number of monitors. A properly-working but well-used CRT display usually cheers right up with just a bit of knob-diddling, especially in terms of focus, without any tools but a screwdriver, a non-conductive diddle-stick, and a calibrated eyeball....if the monitor was worth anything to begin with.

(No, not OP, but I do miss tweaking the hell out of CRTs. My 24" 16x9 1920x1080 and 20" 1600x1200 LCD displays are nice on my desk, but absolute resolution is less on either of them than the 19" CRT I used to have....and the colors still aren't as pretty, and the viewing angle limitation still sucks, and the 60Hz maximum refresh rate over DVI is totally fucking meh. I can drive the 1600x1200 display at up to 75Hz if I want to, but only over VGA which is the worst of all worlds.)

Re:Weak!

[foma84]

I remember we had an article about them a year ago.
It was $400, 2560x1400 pixels, and people that bought them had good things to say about them.
I was actually going to buy one, but I'm forced to a laptop because of the nature of my work.

Hi-res laptops are so difficult and expensive to have these days... sigh.

Re:Weak!

[jones_supa]

Pony up for one of those 120Hz gaming LCDs and have fun. I've been considering getting one myself...

Re:Weak!

[spongman]

You only need a fast refresh rate if you're

1) playing twitch games
2) illuminating one pixel at a time

Re:Weak!

[otuz]

I've had a 22" 3840x2400 IPS monitor for years in daily use. Still waiting for "modern technology" to catch up.

Re:Weak!

[sd4f]

I have a 21" CRT at that res tucked away, so not using it. The increase in area of the 24" LCD monitor is much nicer in my opinion. I do agree though, moving from CRT monitors was hard, there were so many advantages from CRT's that it was really tough, stuff like no native resolution (optimal yes, but not native), no input lag, you may also view a softer image as a plus if you prefer them. What I liked about 1920x1200 was that I could still run 1600x1200 stuff in its native resolution as well as 1920x1080 with black bars.

Re:Weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

So can someone who has a 4k monitor say "1600? Seriously?"

Pompous ass.

Re:Weak!

[adolf]

Because you know everything about what I need, don't you?

What if I'm watching 25 FPS TV shows from the BBC? Hint: 60 is not evenly divisible by 25, but 75 sure is. Displaying 25 FPS material on a 60Hz display is always either messy or broken, or both.

What about editing film-sourced material? I'll take 72Hz over 3:2 pulldown any fucking day.

Re:Weak!

[Shadow of Eternity]

Sadly GP is right, they're starting to get so old that it's becoming a balancing act to keep them at a good sharpness and convergence.

Re:Weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I'm watching 25 FPS TV shows from the BBC? Hint: 60 is not evenly divisible by 25, but 75 sure is.

Well, what if I'M watching 29.97 FPS TV shows from the US? Hint: 75 is not evenly divisible by 29.97, but 60 is close enough.

Obviously, the correct answer is that all TVs should run at precisely 749.25 FPS, which is the only possible way to keep everyone happy. Including the marketing droids who want your money.

Re:Weak!

[adolf]

Television in the US is not 29.97 FPS, but 29.97002617 FPS.

Analog is fun: It doesn't care about decimal places.

Re: Weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's 29.97002997002997...Hz

(30000/1001) Hz, to be precise.

almost 4K

[Anonymous Coward]

"almost 4K" is pretty bad marketing fail. it's starting out with an obvious inaccurate oversell of an otherwise interesting product, which would have been compelling without the MiB vs. MB vs 10^x type lie.

Re:almost 4K

[fustakrakich]

It would be 2K if we kept using the vertical resolution that we have used since the beginning of TV. This move to horizontal resolution is pure marketing hype, and it sucks

Re:almost 4K

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually 2K and 4K are terms that came from the film industry and is used with professional digital film camera (which record RAW frames) and with digital projectors which also use XYZ colour coding.

For most widescreen 1.90:1 theatre content these are the resolutions:
2K means 2048 x1080
4K means 4096 × 2160

However film has variable hight so they also have
4K at academy 1.32:1 ratio 4096 x 2664
4K at cinemascope 2.39:1 ratio 4096 x 1714

So for film 2K and 4K as resolution make sense.
sadly the computer and tv screen manufactures have claimed the names and use it for horizontal resolution of 3800 pixels.

4k Computer

[John Marter]

The monitor for my 4k computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer) was just an ordinary television.

Re:4k Computer

[MrBandersnatch]

The monitor for my 4GB media PC is just an ordinary (plasma) television but if VDUs had kept pace with computing power advancements we would be looking at 655360000p screens....

Re:4k Computer

[sconeu]

You fell into the sar-chasm.

Of course it'll be tainted...

[Anonymous Coward]

with an anti-glare coating.

50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[MSRedfox]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7674736 (groupon and a few other places have had it down to around $1,100 over the past few months) I know, some people probably find the 50" way too big. But it seems a bit silly that 32" is so more expensive.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[DragonWriter]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500.

Well, presumably, because your use case isn't appropriate for a 50" display.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad review by Consumer Report
http://consumerist.com/2013/05/29/consumer-reports-1500-ultra-hd-tv-is-just-a-mediocre-lcd-tv/

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[MSRedfox]

For some people it isn't. For me, I'd have no issue replacing my triple monitor eyefinity setup with a single 4k 50". It'd be about the same real estate side to side. And for photo editing and video work, it'd would be quite nice. But I'm probably just in a small niche of people that would find it useful.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500.

Well, presumably, because your use case isn't appropriate for a 50" display.

Just sit further back then. If you're constrained by space, then it's probably because you're in an office environment, meaning they're targeting the enterprise with this size and price-point.

For home users, the 50" screen at a lower price-point makes way more sense.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[FrankSchwab]

Bad review because of a lack of "wifi, Internet connectivity, and 3D", and poor quality upconversion from 1080 content.

None of which applies to one used as a computer monitor. They did mention motion blur, so it might not be appropriate for the latest FPS games.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[DragonWriter]

If you're constrained by space, then it's probably because you're in an office environment, meaning they're targeting the enterprise with this size and price-point.

I don't see this, except taking "office" in the broadest possible sense; I mean I could just see moving from a 24" to a 32" monitor for the desktop in the extra bedroom that serves as my home office/library/miscellaneous storage room, but a 50" display would be enormous.

For home users, the 50" screen at a lower price-point makes way more sense.

For living room- (equivalently, conference room-) style use, I'd say 50" is better. For desktop-style use, 32" is better. Both styles are found both in "office" settings and "home" settings.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor color accuracy and narrow viewing angle is a problem. Just like cameras, more pixels doesn't necessarily translate to better quality.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500.

Well, presumably, because your use case isn't appropriate for a 50" display.

People said the same about 24" screens, and then again at 30".

A productive user such as someone working with photos, video and programming, can use as many pixels as a screen can cope with. Cunts like you that do nothing more than FB, twitter and reddit shite, obviously don't need more than a phone.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Nemyst]

That TV has only HDMI, which limits full resolution to 30Hz. Sorry, that's an instant pass for me.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[jtownatpunk.net]

Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992? That's the last time I saw an interlaced display on a computer. That's the best you'll be able to do at 3840x2160 on the HDMI connection on that 50" Seiki. There's currently no way to run them at 60Hz using the available connections on the computer and display. At best, they'll get Nvidia and AMD to support using dual connections to treat the single monitor as dual monitors with no bezel correction.

Check the bandwidth of various video connections and you'll find that this is a hurdle that will need to be overcome before these monitors make significant inroads onto desktops. We need HDMI 2.0 and/or DisplayPort 2.0 to drive these things properly.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Z34107]

With computer monitors, you're generally paying a premium for better input latencies, refresh rates, color reproduction, and ghosting. $5,000 is still on the high side, but I'd be extremely wary about replacing my monitor with a television, sight unseen.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992? That's the last time I saw an interlaced display on a computer.

30Hz is perfectly acceptable on a computer display - especially if you are staring at it all day. If you want to play video games, that is another issue, but for work like photo editing or software development or spread-sheets, word proceessing, email, or even just web browsing, 30hz is plenty. You won't even notice the difference.

I speak from experience, I used to have one of those Viewsonic 3840x2400 22" monitors. The model I had could do about 32Hz at most and as long as I wasn't playing a video game, you'd never know the refresh rate was so low.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Blaskowicz]

DisplayPort 1.2 is what's actually needed, it's found on the geforce Titan, GTX 780 and for others such as GTX 680, GTX 660 I plain don't know. Radeons, same deal you'd have to check it.

DP 1.2 is said to be available on Haswell motherboards. Should do 3840x2160 and 3840x2400 at 60Hz and 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 at 120Hz (of course good luck finding a 120Hz monitor - real one, not fake as on TVs. They only do them as crappy 1080p TN)

So the connection problem is not that bad except for HDMI 2.0 not being there.. Anyway yes a 30Hz monitor is completely unacceptable, you wouldn't even want to scroll text on that. That magical "$1400 only" TV is something to avoid at all costs unless for a specific purpose.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[petermgreen]

With computer monitors, you're generally paying a premium for better input latencies, refresh rates, color reproduction, and ghosting.

And not fucking with the input signal.

I've learnt the hard way that some TVs are incapable of taking an input signal in their advertised native resolution and displaying it without fucking it up though application of inappropriate processing that smears single pixel lines making the desktop a blurry mess.

I've also learnt the hard way that some TVs have terrible VGA inputs that take ages to lock, can't lock properly to the low resoloutions seen during bootup/bios, sometimes mis-lock even at their native resooution (though to be fair i've seen monitors mis-lock from time to time too) and degrade the signal even more than the aforementioned inappropriate processing does.

I would NOT buy a TV for use as a monitor without confirming it doesn't suffer from these problems.

* And before anyone gives me any BS VGA being unsuitable for "full HD" resoloutions i've been running plenty of monitors at 1920x1080x60 and 1920x1200x60 over VGA without any noticeable issues.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

TVs are also... renowned... for the quality and accuracy of the EDID data they provide the hapless device attempting to drive them.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[pla]

Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992?

No, not 1992 anymore - Which means 30Hz doesn't imply a display with a seizure-inducing flicker. The pixels of an LCD come on and stay on, they don't depend on an electron beam to blast them 60 times a second to keep glowing long enough to create the illusion of continuity.

LCDs more accurately have an update speed, not a "refresh" rate. If you really really need full-motion high-contrast video, and have pretty good eyes[*], the difference may matter to you. If you mostly work on code or spreadsheets or the like, you won't even notice the difference.

* FWIW, I actually can see the difference, and yes, DLP projectors drive me completely ape-shit. But I stare at code all day long, and on an LCD, it makes absolutely no difference if I use a USB-connected display at a whopping 10-15hz vs a top-of-the-line 240hz monster.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Cito]

30hz should be enough for anybody...

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[RubberChainsaw]

I'm using one of the 50" seikis right now. 30Hz is a little annoying (there is a slight flicker at the edge of my vision), but it is perfectly acceptable compromise in exchange for the sheer amount of desktop space I'm granted. The vertical resolution is key. 2100 pixels down without the annoyance of bezels? Yes, please.

This panel is capable of 120hz. There is a good business opportunity for anyone skilled in FPGA programming. Make a board capable of accepting multiple hdmi or displayport inputs to combine for 4k @ 60hz. Since the only competition to this set is currently 4x's the price, there is a lot of room for extra costs. Even adding several hundred dollars to the set will make it cost-competitive. Its times like this that I wish I had studied more electrical engineering rather than pure math..

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[drkim]

30hz should be enough for anybody...

People can discern up to 60 FPS (Hz) which is why Trumbull chose 60 FPS for Showscan.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[AmiMoJo]

You certainly do notice the difference even for desktop work. The mouse cursor lags noticeably behind your movements. Scrolling judders and makes it hard to follow moving text. Not everyone will be bothered by it, but a lot of people are.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Jherek Carnelian]

Sounds like you are mixing up panel update speed with refresh rate. If the panel updates at 60Hz or 120Hz it really minimizes the impact of a low frame rate / refresh.

I'm typing this on a 48Hz DLP projector - DLP is super fast with the redraw times, like 400Hz but I am driving it at 48Hz (because I use my pc to watch a lot of 24fps movies). This 48Hz 120" display is at least as snappy as my 60Hz LCD monitors - and you would expect a larger display to have more motion judder because the amount of linear movement that can happen during 1 refresh is larger the larger the display. What would be fractions of an inch on a 22" monitor is multiple inches on a 120" screen.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[chrismcb]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500.

Because they aren't the same. Right now my 30 inch monitor sits an arms length from me. If I got a 32 inch, it could sit comfortably at the same spot. If I get a 50" what do I need to do, move my desk back 6 feet?
It isn't about getting a 4K monitor. As it is getting a high resolution monitor with a very small dot pitch.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[otuz]

I actually run mine at 34Hz :P It's more of a function of how much over the specs your display adapter can supply bandwidth.
It's also awesome for civilization-like strategy games, where you want to see as much of the map at once as possible. If I wanted bigger refreshes out of it, I could perform the almost-60Hz (56Hz-ish seems to be stable for most) mod on it by overclocking its fpga's. That'd mean driving it with four single-link dvi heads, each at 1920x1200.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[otuz]

30Hz is fine for a monitor, when you do productivity. It's even fine for most video. The most common issue I have with it is losing the mouse cursor sometimes, because motion tracking of such fast-moving items is where a faster frame rate would be useful.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why spend $5,000 for a 32" when you can get a 50" 4k for under $1,500.

A 50" panel is flat from edge to edge, horizontally and vertically. Multiple smaller panels allow you to orient them slightly in on the sides and down on the top for better viewing. Further, multiple smaller panels allow you to spread your devices over several different systems while one large panel is stuck to being used by a single system only. I have six panels on my desk - 3 on one system, 2 on another and a third on a KVM to several other systems. This simply can't be done with one panel.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

But it seems a bit silly that 32" is so more expensive.

Manufacturing defects.

Bigger panels have lower pixel density so are more resilient to faults in the manufacturing process. Small high density displays have very small gaps between each pixel so manufacturing faults are more likely to result in dead pixels creating a useless display that needs to be junked. The more failed displays there are, the more expensive the successfully produced ones will cost.

Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32"

[Anonymous Coward]

You go and "produce" your facebook cat photos, your youtube fraternity vomit videos, and your android pong games, and leave the real work to the big people who can get things done without blaming their tools, mmmkay?

wow!

[houbou]

Would love to have a 4K monitor.. Cheez.. the PhotoShop experience alone..

Why?

[Sable Drakon]

What's the point of this? We won't have an effective way to properly drive these displays at a meaningful refresh rate. Yes, the graphics cards can support both levels of 4K. But HDMI has an upper limit of 44FPS and a realistic framerate of 30. Shouldn't we wait until we've got an interconnect that'll support 4K's bandwidth requirements at 60FPS at the very least?

Re:Why?

[JDG1980]

DisplayPort 1.2 can already do 4K @ 60 Hz. What's so special about HDMI?

Re:Why?

[DragonWriter]

What's the point of this? We won't have an effective way to properly drive these displays at a meaningful refresh rate.

Not every use case is gaming. There are plenty of uses where more resolution would be worth trading off refresh rate. Obviously, if you can have both together, that's better, but refresh rate isn't always the key feature.

Re:Why?

[scarboni888]

1. So far it's been marketed more successfully and therefore exists on most HD devices

That'd be about it.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thunderbolt?

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

The fact that nowhere near enough devices or displays even support DisplayPort. Increase DP's adoption rate and the problem goes away, until then, it's a pretty big stumbling block against 4K for both PC users and home theater.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

Why assume the use case is gaming? This is just as applicable for home theater as well as gaming.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

HDMI is obsolete. Has been obsolete for some time already.

Re: Why?

[Sable Drakon]

I don't often respond to ACs, but this deserves an response. Thunderbolt suffers from the same problem as DisplayPort, only moreso. TB is a new standard, really really really new. Like DisplayPort, there aren't anywhere near enough devices that support it or offer it outside of the turtleneck kool-aid club (Apple). So again, once it has halfway decent adoption, we can consider it a solution since it carries DisplayPort as part of it's spec.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

A 4k monitor will have a display port, as will any graphics card capable or driving it. So this is a non issue.

Re:Why?

[wiredlogic]

There is nothing wrong with plain old VGA. It could easily handle these resolutions on CRTs. It can do the same on today's flat panels.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

Obsolete, yes. But try telling that to the millions of people with HDMI capable hardware that'd have to upgrade to DisplayPort. Increase DisplayPort adoption before marking something to the masses as obsolete and give them a reason to upgrade their hardware.

Re:Why?

[AHuxley]

Try a newegg search for 'DisplayPort' under the gpu and lcd sections. You will find many 10's++ of options, brands over many prices.
A ~100 seems a good count over 2013 stock.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

Actually, it is an issue. I don't see DisplayPort on a GTX560 or HD6770 nor a lot of other recent graphics cards that can drive such resolution. So yeah, it's still an issue.

Re:Why?

[blackraven14250]

Yes, there is something wrong with plain old VGA. It looks terrible on LCDs compared to any of the digital connections - the quality degradation is unbearable to anyone who can see it, and it's really easy to see.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

No it can't. Not with the same clarity, color depth, and sound along for the ride. VGA being used on displays higher than a 1280*720 flat panel start looking muddier and muddier, lose color definition, and VGA doesn't carry audio.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

But this is more than just a PC problem. It's also a hurdle in the home theater space as well.

Re:Why?

[ceoyoyo]

If you're buying a $5000 4k monitor, upgrading your video card to something that has a decent interconnect isn't going to bother you too much. Your point seems to be along the lines of "4k monitors are impractical because my POS video with HDMI out can't drive one!" So what? 4k monitors are obviously in early adopter territory currently, but display port and thunderbolt are already widely deployed, just on a platform you have some kind of emotional dislike of. You can buy Wintels with display port as well, of course. And if 4k catches on even your econobox will have one.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

No, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt aren't widely deployed. That's the problem. Sure, they're on most if not all Apple hardware. But DisplayPort and Thunderbolt aren't in common deployment on PCs or even in home theater setups. So great job for your assumptions.

Re:Why?

[ceoyoyo]

Displayport or thundebolt is on every Mac and is available from every major manufacturer. If you want one, you can get one. They're a lot more widely deployed than 4k monitors.

Re:Why?

[JDG1980]

But this is more than just a PC problem. It's also a hurdle in the home theater space as well.

Not really. Virtually all 4K video content will be sourced from film. This is true of 1080p content on current Blu-Rays; even most TV shows in the HD era are shot on film, not video. This means the frame rate will be 23.976 frames per second, which the current version of HDMI can handle at that resolution just fine. It's only PCs that really need 4K @ 60 Hz.

Re:Why?

[JDG1980]

Actually, it is an issue. I don't see DisplayPort on a GTX560 or HD6770 nor a lot of other recent graphics cards that can drive such resolution. So yeah, it's still an issue.

At this point, the technology is still cutting-edge. Even if Asus manages to pull a rabbit out of their hat and releases this monitor at a $999 price point, that's still a premium product, and if the buyer doesn't already have a current-generation video card, he/she probably won't balk too much at spending an extra $100-$200 for one with DP 1.2 support.

By the time 4K becomes mainstream, the cards you mention will be completely outdated and integrated GPUs will routinely support 4K @ 60 Hz through DisplayPorts on the motherboard. Intel already has the silicon ready as of Ivy Bridge, though I don't think the firmware is fully implemented yet due to lack of demand.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

And what's going to happen to everyone attempting 3D (which is possible now) or 48FPS content (available once people listen to Peter Jackson)? There isn't enough bandwidth to handle 3D 4K on HDMI and 48FPS falls outside HDMI's capabilities.

Re:Why?

[AHuxley]

Lots of Hollywood movies where cleaned up to 4k and some 8k too.
New movies will be 4/8k ready. Film is 4k/8k scannable given Hollywood budgets and quality original stock.
4K will become the plaything of many low budget productions - with well under $50-100k production costs.
People spent $10K on early projectors, plasma, media collections "back in the day"
So have the back catalogue content, the gpu's, the computer connections, the display, the codecs, the cpus, the computer games and OS.
Price gouging DRM media or bandwidth for regional distribution might be missing but the enduser hardware/software side seems ok :)

Re:Why?

[petermgreen]

The thing with "VGA" is there really isn't too much to it, three analog video signals and two sync signals with some loose agreements on timings.

That means that there is very little theoretical limit on resolution* but it also means that.

1: All components in the chain have to actually have sufficient analog bandwidth. Lack of strong standards and gradual failure (rather than the brick wall failure you get with digital systems) if the analog circuitry is skimped on encourages skimping on the analog components. This is particually bad with TVs (monitors seem to make an effort to give acceptable performance on VGA at their native resoloution).
2: When driving a screen with discrete pixels the receiver has to guess where each line starts and ends. They are generally pretty good at it but again poor implementations, unhelpful content (completely black screen, screen with black bars from the source) or just plain bad luck can cause mis-locks which are annoying.
3: The individual pixels will inevitably not be completely isolated from each other.

* The connector probably imposes some limit but using the rule of thumb that structures less than a tenth of a wavelength can be regarded as of negligable size it should be usable up to a few gigahertz with careful termination..

Re:Why?

[harrkev]

Try to find a DisplayPort KVM switch. I got a 30" 2560x1600 at home for those days when I telecommute. I don't have the real estate for a 2nd whole computer setup, so I use a KVM switch. To use 2560X1600, you need a digital connection -- analog won't cut it. KVMs with digital inputs are invariably DVI.

Fortunately, my home laptop had HDMI, which connects to DVI with a simple cable. Unfortunately, HDMI won't go past 1080.

Re:Why?

[iggymanz]

so we're going to have 30 to 50 Mbps internet connection to drive this beast? something tells me most in the USA will be screwed.

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

1. So far it's been marketed more successfully and therefore exists on most HD devices

That'd be about it.

On the plus side, the devices that are HDMI only are also unlikely to be sufficiently new and powerful to provide 4k output, and the scaling from the 1080 they do provide is a trivial 1->4, so there should be no unpleasant artifacts.

The only real losers are the (relatively thin) slice of HDMI 1.4 capable PC video cards, which are capable of pushing 4k pixels; but only at low refresh rates. Anything earlier than 1.4 won't handle that resolution at all, and anything that isn't a PC(home theatre type devices) isn't going to be providing more than 1080p anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Radeon7850 has two displayport connectors, an HDMI and DVI also.

Re:Why?

[Dahan]

No, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt aren't widely deployed.

I don't know when you last looked at video cards, but pretty much all of them have had DisplayPort for the last 2 or 3 years. NewEgg currently lists almost 300 video cards that have at least one DP or mini-DP connector: here are the 195 that have exactly one DP connector.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

I'm counting all devices here, not just PCs. In home theater, DP/TB are almost non-existant. Which is going to become a problem in 4K adoption. Moreso since both new upcoming game consoles support 4K output, yet seemingly lack DisplayPort.

Re:Why?

[Dahan]

My Gigabyte Z77 chipset motherboard has a DisplayPort connector for onboard video. Many other motherboards also include a DisplayPort. They're rather common.

Re:Why?

[Sable Drakon]

Again, I'm not just counting strictly PCs here.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're citing older low to mid-end cards, some of which from a simple google are in fact available with DisplayPort, if only one port.

(For reference, on the nvidia side the 7xx series is rolling out now, 5xx is two product generations old.)

If you can afford a 4K display today, you can afford the graphics card to drive it. Tomorrow, it won't matter because nothing about this will be a problem.

Re:Why?

[otuz]

Actually you could push 4k resolutions out of really old video cards, including something like HDMI 1.0 and single-link DVI. You'd just have to scale down the refresh rate. The video card limits are mostly a function of bandwidth and they don't really care about the display geometry, all they do is send a stream of bytes from their frame buffer along with some sync bits to tell the monitor where the line or frame ends.

Re:Why?

[garyebickford]

This raises the question - does Linux have DisplayPort support for any good display cards? (going to search ... apparently even today DP is often problematical. More research needed, but I'm not buying anything this week, so this is a future research problem.)

Re:Why?

[garyebickford]

I haven't kept up with the research in the last few years, but I am of the opinion/expectation that the higher the resolution, the more effective the compression for almost all video signals. So doubling the resolution (quadrupling the number of pixels) might only increase the compressed signal by, I'm guessing, 1.4, maybe less.

Since I'm no longer in that business, I resist the temptation to blather on about how modern compression works, and defer to those who are actually up-to-date with compression methodologies.

Re:Why?

[Dahan]

I'm counting all devices here, not just PCs.

I was replying to Sable Drakon, who said, "But DisplayPort and Thunderbolt aren't in common deployment on PCs ..." in response to someone who said that "display port and thunderbolt are already widely deployed." DisplayPort is widely deployed on PCs, and anyone who doesn't have DP but wants this computer monitor (see headline, "4K Computer Monitors Are Coming (But Still Pricey)") can easily get DP. If someone wants 4K for their home theater, they'll have to deal with the HDMI limitations for now, but that's not what we're talking about here--we're talking about computers.

Re:Why?

[DragonWriter]

Why assume the use case is gaming? This is just as applicable for home theater as well as gaming.

Yes, GP is just as relevant with "home theater" included in the one place gaming is mentioned; the basic point is there are plenty of use cases that aren't like the ones, including gaming, as -- as you note -- home theater, where refresh rate is key.

About damn time!

[anthony_greer]

It is sickening that an ipad can have a better resolution than a 27 inch display that costs about the same price - that is all.

Article is misleading and incomplete

[JDG1980]

First of all, the alleged price of $5000 is pure speculation. None of the other sources reporting on the Asus 4K monitor have mentioned it, and the Extreme Tech article describes the price as "our guess".

Secondly, the article is flat-out wrong when it says that Sharp's 4K monitor "doesnâ(TM)t seem to have been released" so far. In fact, the PN-K321 has been released and you can buy one on Amazon for $4900. A few other online retailers have it, too, for slightly lower prices. There is one weird caveat; you currently need an AMD card for it to work properly, because it uses DisplayPort 1.2 with MST and basically shows up to the OS as two 1920x2160 monitors. You have to use Eyefinity to get the OS to treat it as one large screen. This Youtube video (not mine - I only wish I could afford this thing!) shows how it's done.

The Sharp monitor isn't even the cheapest 4K device currently on the market. That distinction belongs to a 50 inch Seiki Digital TV which costs $1,399.99 on Amazon. But this device can only take a 30 Hz input, due to the limitations of the HDMI protocol. I've also heard some criticisms of the panel quality.

What I and many others are hoping is that the Asus 4K monitor can lower the price point on this technology. If it sells for the same $5000 as the Sharp monitor, it's a non-event since it does nothing to advance the state of the art. But if they can get it down to $2500 or lower, then we'll start to see it show up in "extreme" gaming rigs and some professional workspaces, and maybe in a year or two they will be affordable for mainstream power users.

1080?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many computer monitors on the market have a 1080p resolution? Mine has a lot more and it's no $5000.

Re:1080?

[AAWood]

Are you kidding me? The market's flooded with 1080p monitors, and the price almost doubles the moment you go over 1920 x 1200. So come on, details; what monitor have you got, and how much did it cost you?

Re:1080?

[Blaskowicz]

1920x1200 displays are back, though. More expensive than 1080p, but then again in the times of CRT monitors a display that could do 1280x960 at 85Hz or 1152x864 at 100Hz was quite more expensive that one that topped at 1024x768 85Hz (unless you wanted to burn your eyes)

Re:1080?

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be able to tolerate that, but it would take some work. I've been using 1600x1200's for years, so going widescreen on it is not a negative in my book, but my central screen became a 2084x1152 (if only that had been x1200). I absolutely love this thing far above any of the 1080 monitors I've had to use.

Dear Samsung.. please put the 2343s back on the market...

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want a pc monitor that big...

27-29 inch is perfect for all the desks i've worked at.

I'd rather have 2x or 3x of those instead of a '4k' one.

Not to mention the price for now.

Aspect Ratio

[scarboni888]

On my computer monitor I need more height!! Please bring back 16:10 for computer monitors! 16:9 is for tv's only.

Re:Aspect Ratio

[wiredlogic]

Just treat it as two 8:9 screens. With a larger display, the usability of each half increases tremendously.

Re:Aspect Ratio

[Rich0]

The problem is that you're generally constrained to placing those two screens directly side-by-side horizontally.

If I switched from my current 4:3 monitor to a 16:9 one I'd end up getting a smaller screen, because I couldn't expand the width of the monitor until it had an equal area. Above my monitor there is nothing until you reach the ceiling, but next to it I have other stuff on my desk.

Sure, you can place stuff side-by-side with a widescreen, but that doesn't change the fact that you have far less vertical space available on either window, and usually vertical space is the kind most in demand.

About the only thing that widescreen monitors make sense for are watching movies. If I want to watch a movie I'll go watch it on my TV - I don't live in a dorm or something.

Re:Aspect Ratio

[AmiMoJo]

I don't know why people keep complaining about this and asking for 16:10 to be "brought back" - it never went away. You can buy 16:10 monitors easily. I have a 16:10 1920x1200 display in front of me and am looking at buying a Korean 30" 2560x1600 display too.

Re:Aspect Ratio

[pne]

On my computer monitor I need more height!! Please bring back 16:10 for computer monitors! 16:9 is for tv's only.

I still have my 16:12 (aka 4:3) for pretty much this reason.

Re:Aspect Ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, and when 16:9 is appropriate, I'll deal with the black bars, but I want that extra vertical space.

2160

[dlowder]

I use 1900x1200 because it lets me see a few more lines of code over 1900x1080. So, going to 2160 sounds great. Most of my coworkers have dual screens. The question is, how long will it take for the price to be competitive with two 1900x1080 screens?

Re:2160

[Mekabyte]

Do you mean four 1900x1080 screens?

Re:2160

[Skapare]

I hate coders like you: I have to jump all over the place to see what's happening in some function you call that isn't located right where the call is located. So now I end having to use 3 monitors and a couple dozen windows just to see all the logic of what is happening.

I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[Gordo_1]

And my eyes can barely make out the width of a pixel as it is. What is it going to do for me if you increase pixel density such that pixel are now a quarter the size they are now? Give us 40" or more, and it might start to get interesting, but then you're constantly bending your neck to read what's on different parts of the screen.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[the eric conspiracy]

I recently purchased a Dell 30" screen with 2560x1600 resolution. It's really nice with IPS and the ability to display 12 bit color with the right software and graphics card.

I think the pixel density for text is about as high as I would want on a screen. For a 4K screen I'd want at least 40".

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[caseih]

I should think it is obvious. You're getting more dpi so that letters and graphics will be crisp and clear. The difference is clear if you place an el cheapo android phone next to a nice high res amoled phone.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the math on this a couple of months ago. The cheap 50" TV is about the right size, maybe a little smaller would be better. A 48" 3840 x 2160 would be about 95 PPI, which is close to the 94 PPI of the 24" 1920 x 1200 that I'm using now. The mainstream operating systems don't have ubiquitous vector scaled graphics yet, so those ultra-high PPI monitors are of little interest to me. I have trouble reading stuff on those kinds of screens, even if I squint real hard.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[fafalone]

Good for you. Not everyone would want it. My use case is different.

I sit 2-3ft away from a 27" screen, and would absolutely love to have a 4K screen in a 27-32" form factor in front of me. I have a second monitor and a laptop to form a 3 screen setup, but the single large screen in the center is my preference for primary tasks. Even though there's limited video content for 4k right now, being able to display more information on the screen would be awesome. And I'm sure 4K content will become more prevalent in the coming years.

Not everyone likes sitting 2ft away from a 27" 1080p screen either, but I do. Use cases vary. Bring on the 4K.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you tell the difference between looking at your monitor and looking out the window? Then we're not done yet.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[Gordo_1]

The reason you can tell the difference between looking outside and your monitor has more to do with your monitor's limited color gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio than pixel density. Beyond a certain density, you need a much bigger screen to appreciate the extra pixels.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[phantomfive]

And my eyes can barely make out the width of a pixel as it is.

I think that's the point. Things will look better when you can't make out the width of a pixel at all.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Give us 40" or more, and it might start to get interesting, but then you're constantly bending your neck to read what's on different parts of the screen.

Yeah, I actually prefer the size of my 22" display over that of my 24" display for this reason - the 22" fits perfectly into my field of view. But my 24" is 1920x1200 IPS and the 22" is an abysmal 1080 panel, so I do a bit of neck turning.

I'd love to have a 4K 22" display. The pixels would be small enough that I'd rarely notice them and everything would be smooth and beautiful. Tablets have higher resolutions already, so it's just a matter of the manufacturers wanting to do it. I'd easily pay a thousand bucks for it, assuming it was fairly great. Heck, I paid $730 for a 17" CRT in the early 90's and that's when money was worth twice as much.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[trout007]

I work on CAD systems and when you are creating the drawings it would be nice to have a display as big as a D size print. That is 22" x 34" or 40" diagonal with a high resolution. 4k will get you to over 100 dpi which is pretty good.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[the eric conspiracy]

Depth of field plays big a role in this too. That may be the most difficult issue of all to fix.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[tlhIngan]

The mainstream operating systems don't have ubiquitous vector scaled graphics yet, so those ultra-high PPI monitors are of little interest to me

They make text very nice - if you're using one of the high-PPI displays. Of course, only OS X seems to have the best most universal support for it - even the MBPr's 2880x1800 seems to scale nicely from 2 (virtual 1440x900) to 1.5 (virtual 1900x1200). Every other OS seems to do terrible things if you try running high PPI, but even at 1.5x scaling, the MBPr looks very "native".

Of course, the fact that it's actually downscaling the image helps - most OSes simply scale up - while OS X uses the 2x resources on a 3840x2400 framebuffer that's scaled down to 2880x1800.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[AmiMoJo]

Higher pixel density helps with readability of small text. These days the difference is subtle on systems that have good text anti-aliasing like Windows, Android and Linux, but more noticeable on Mac OS/iOS.

Higher DPI means you can have two complete documents side by side on a 24" display and they are still readable. CAD packages are easier to use because you can see detail even when zoomed out. It's subtle but valuable to a lot of people. Not worth $5000, but still desirable.

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[spongman]

Can you make out a laser printer dot?

Re:I'm sitting 24" away from my 24" monitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you need anti-aliasing still? One of the benefits of not being able to see pixels anymore is that aliasing starts to disappear naturally.

Contrast

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough pixels, just give me more contrast.

the article is drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the article obviously didn't even give a cursory glance at what is actually available in the marketplace.

27" 1920x1080 are cheap and commonplace around GBP220
2560x1080 or 2560x1440 are becoming commonplace at around GBP400-550

And at top consumer level 2560x1600 there is the Dell U3013 30" at GBP1000 and the OcUK. The Dell unit has been around for perhaps 5 years and is excellent but it makes my 2nd screen of 1920x1080 look teensy. Most people who see this monitor are awed by its resolution but horrified by its size. You need a decent gfx card to put 3D games up with medium to high settings.
I think what makes me laugh the most is that some people still want to fullscreen webpages on it. How wide do monitors have to get before people stop fullscreening text?

a buck a pixel

[Mister Liberty]

and Asus is a shakedown operation.
Go Samsung!

Re:a buck a pixel

[Virtucon]

What?

I've owned a lot of ASUS products, this is probably the first item I've seen that I'd consider overpriced.

Pixels and the real world

[BenJeremy]

Well, these make great monitors.. somebody has already mentioned the 50" sub-$1500 TV.

I would rather make the case that 4k, while great for PC monitors, are not compelling as consumer TVs. I realize there are charts that demonstrate, scientifically, that 4K is visibly better in a living room, with a large screen, over 1080p, but I don't buy it, at least not for motion video (games and shows). We are reaching the pivot point towards vastly diminishing returns.

I do that by dropping these pictures fro reference:

Pixel Fallacy example 1

Pixel Fallacy 2

The pictures explain as well as anything. I'd love the real estate for computer work, but games and video, not so much (at least, not to replace my 58" 1080p plasma)

Re:Pixels and the real world

[Anonymous Coward]

Using JPEG for pixel comparisons kinda makes your position invalid.

    I can see banding on the first image and the second one has the second line all blurry. Even if you were to use a loss-less image format for your examples, you will still notice that the anti-aliased line is not as sharp as what a high resolution line would be.

In other words, the higher the resolution, the less need there is for crap like anti-aliasing and other such pre-/post-rendering shortcuts. I for one would rather 4k screens and source material then lower resolution crap that has been processed in the attempt to make it look better....

Re:Pixels and the real world

[BenJeremy]

First off, the jpeg was encoded without anti-aliasing and at high quality.

Second, the intention was to demonstrate the relative difficulty the human eye has at discerning pixel differentiation at higher resolutions. You'd never see that sort of aliased, high-contrast diagonal line in a motion video or game. You would see it in a fixed image as part of a PC display (part of the UI or displayed by an app). Almost all video you see is going to have a lot of natural anti-aliasing, either due to what is being filmed or the means to record it (I'm ignoring altogether compression artifacts, but they only would make my argument stronger).

For games and movies, the differences between 4K and 1080p are minimal, at best, even when you have an 80" screen viewed from 6 feet away, by a human eye.

720p to 1080p is noticeable on such a set up, but only side-by-side. If I had you walk into the room while a 720p or 1080p action movie was playing (note I'm excluding a film like Samsara, where visual quality is optimal and there is little motion), you'd have a hard time telling me which resolution it really was.

480p to 720p the difference is easily discernible, assuming the quality of interpolation is not great (there are some processors that do a great job, particularly with animation).

The chart that is usually presented claims you can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k 8ft away on a 20" display. This is laughable. You MIGHT be able to tell in the case of the aliased diagonal line I showed in my image, but not with anything else. At 8' you'd probably need a display bigger than 100" to tell the difference with the right still images.

It's about diminishing returns. The same rule applies to 3D models and tessellation. At a certain point, it simply doesn't matter. Our eyes are perceiving good enough quality, and we are more interested in everything else going on.

Color gamut!

[femtobyte]

I'm much more excited by the vastly expanded color gamut of Rec. 2020 UHDTV standard that (should) come along with 4k displays. The extra pixels are nice, but having the Rec. 2020 color primaries will be a huge step forward.

Retnia design

[EmperorOfCanada]

I would love one for doing retina destined design. Presently if I don't scale the iPad simulator on my screen it is 8 feet high. Doesn't quite give me the right sense of proportion. I suspect that more and more mobile devices are going to go with higher density displays and thus it would be nice to get into at least the same density ballpark on my desktop. The sad part is that most if not all of these monitors will be really BIG. Personally for development I don't like going much over 22" per monitor. I'd just like 4K crammed into that 22".

never heard of 4K

[Anonymous Coward]

i have never heard of before. i'll go read about it now. i know someone who still uses a 15 inch SVGA CRT monitor. lol

Just give me 1200P

[Virtucon]

Like I had a few years ago. I'm also wondering about how to drive a 4K monitor with graphics cards? I mean content and driving the thing will be problematic so if you buy one now you may be buying early first generation hardware when, by the time the second gen comes out, you'll have content and hardware that can take advantage of it.

Re:Just give me 1200P

[AmiMoJo]

Radeon 5000 series and beyond are all capable of driving a 4k display, and the mid range models can decode 4k video in hardware too. Intel 4000 series graphics can drive 4k but only the latest revisions can decode 4k video. Not sure about nVidia.

Unless you mean for games, in which case the best thing to do is run at 1920x1080 (HD) and have it scaled up to 4k with pixel doubling. Current high end cards can get reasonable frame rates out of 2560x1600 displays but the real issue is that the fallback position is 1280x800 when they aren't up to it. At least with 4k the quarter resolution fallback is still full HD.

Re:Just give me 1200P

[branchingfactor]

You can drive the Asus PQ321 / Sharp PN-K321 at 3840x2160 with two HDMI ports or one DisplayPort. If your graphics card supports DisplayPort 1.1, then it can only drive the monitors at 3840x2160 30Hz. If your graphics card supports the latest DisplayPort 1.2, then you can drive the monitors at 60Hz if you are willing to configure it as if it were two 1920x2160 60Hz monitors side-by-side.

Re:Just give me 1200P

[Virtucon]

Damn, so no Civilization V at super hi res then, got it.

4k? Okay, but...

[Moppusan]

High pixel density is one hurdle we're getting over but color gamut should be focused on too. Density beyond what the human eye could ever differentiate and the entire gamut of colors possible would be drool worthy. Hmm. While I'm at it, add an extra thin profile, IPS v2 (complete 180 degree viewing angle, though completely pointless. HEY, I can see the side of the TV AND the movie! THIS IS SOME TECHNOLOGY!) anti-glare, touch compatible, under 5 lbs., 100W max load, 0.001mW standby, built-in wireless petabit internet, built-in 500 exabyte Super-SSD (30x faster than current SSD technology!) and an 8 slice toaster.

4K's improvements are not JUST resolution

[mattack2]

BTW, the TV "4K" TVs have more than JUST the resolution as technical advances over existing HDTV.

Today's HD & Home Theater podcast episode covered it. The only one I can remember at the moment is expanded color space.

I'm not trying to completely promote it, heck, I record mostly SD (for disk space reasons) even though I have a HDTV. I am interested in the technology, however.

Work?

[mosb1000]

You know some people work on computers, right?

Make pixels invisible

[Sycraft-fu]

Ultimately, we shouldn't be able to see pixels. It would be ideal if they were so small they were below human perception. That's the idea. You don't then make everything microscopic, rather you increase the number of pixels used to render elements so they look smoother.

I'd settle for

[rossdee]

I'd settle for 2048x1536 on a 32 inch screen

I have a 4 -5 year old 28 inch 1920x1200 at the moment.

The biggest (affordable) monitors you can get these days are 27 inch with 1920x1080

you can get a HDTV thats bigger but still only 1920x1080 (Which is fair enough I suppose, since TV resolution is 1080p)

Sooner or later this old monitor will fail (probably the flourescent illiminating tube) and obviously I will need a replacement, and I will have to buy it before the Marketplace Fairness Act comes into force) (Internet sales tax)

Re:I'd settle for

[kimvette]

It's too early to know what reliability will be, as well as long-term availability, but Monoprice has introduced affordable high resolution IPS monitors:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=114&cp_id=11401&cs_id=1130704

Hopefully they will start taking sales away from Samsung, Viewsonic, Dell, et. al and cause them to take notice and dump the 1080p-panels-for-all-markets crap.

The main drawback: I have not found any 3D monitors in resolutions greater than 1080p. It would be nice to be able to get one of the monitors like above, only 3D capable for gaming and movies.

Why should we anti-alias though?

[Sycraft-fu]

It is, at the very best, nearly as good as having a higher resolution and usually not. Also to do it properly, as in real supersampling, you use the same amount of memory and pixel operations as you would to actually render at a higher resolution.

Hence, ultimately higher resolution displays are the right answer. I'm not saying you need to run out and buy one RIGHT NAO!!! but it is the direction we would like to see technology moving. We shouldn't have to fuck with tricks to mask pixels, they should be so small they are optically hidden.

Also go have a look at a high DPI display sometime, compare the fonts to a normal one. You'll see the difference, and modern fonts are anti-aliased to all get out (even going so far as to use subpixel antialiasing).

8K is the real ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

4K doesn't have the same resolution as a human eye. 8K does. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9774380.stm

Chroma Subsampling

[_133MHz]

There's a difference between LCD TVs and LCD monitors: chroma subsampling. If your LCD TV doesn't support 4:4:4 chroma subsampling using it as a PC monitor will yield mediocre results - text and other fine details won't look right even if you're using the panel's native resolution and disabling any "image enhancement" options the TV scaler may provide. This is why a 1080p LCD TV might look like absolute garbage next to a similar 1080p PC monitor when displaying computer graphics even though they take the same input signals, have the same resolution and probably the same type of LCD panel.

TB;DB

[Skapare]

Too Big; Don't Buy. Well, unless you want it that big.

I'd be quite happy with 2304x1296. It just need to be a little taller than 1200 (1080 would never work out). I have 1920x1200 now and it's just a wee bit too small. It seems my only option is 2560x1600.

I also need the right spectrum. The monitors we bought from Dell at work really sucked because of the wavelengths chosen for each of the primary colors. They split wide apart. Nobody specs that, so there is no way to tell when buying online. I'm currently using an NEC MultiSync EA241WM. I had that at work, so I bought one for home, too. It has the spectrum that works best for me (colors don't split apart in my glasses).

Re:TB;DB

[garyebickford]

I also need the right spectrum. The monitors we bought from Dell at work really sucked because of the wavelengths chosen for each of the primary colors. They split wide apart. Nobody specs that, so there is no way to tell when buying online. I'm currently using an NEC MultiSync EA241WM. I had that at work, so I bought one for home, too. It has the spectrum that works best for me (colors don't split apart in my glasses).

Interesting - back in 1980 I worked at Tektronix, where they were building some of the first full color graphic terminals (a whopping 640x480 or 800x600!). One of the early complaints from test/beta users was that the screens always seemed out of focus.

After some research, testing and consternation, it was determined that the problem came from using narrow-spectrum pure 'day-glo' colors for red, green and blue. It turns out that the focal length at typical viewing distances was about 1/4" (IIRC) different for red and blue, so it was impossible for the eye to focus on both colors at once. Tektronix switched to more 'earth-tone' phosphors and the problem went away. Somehow using spectral ranges that matched closer the broad spectral sensitivity of the human retina allowed the eye to put things together better. It's possible that the image processing done by the retina and the brain includes some way to clean up the focus issue - the retina and brain are known to do a lot of other very sophisticated processing.

For $5K, it better not have a single bad pixel

[Anonymous Coward]

And they better not charge a 15% restocking fee if I have to return it due to a bad pixel.

Fantastic!

[PPH]

This means the price on all those 'outdated' 1080p TV sets will drop through the floor. Now I can get rid of my old Sony Trinitron.

Re:Fantastic!

[LocalH]

I'll take that Trinitron off your hands for free, thanks.

Arbitrary Resolutions

[Cowclops]

Heres the real benefit I see to 3840x2160 (or 3840x2400). Whatever. I'll call it 4k like everybody else is.

The real benefit is that you can start treating your monitor like a CRT again, feeding it arbitrary resolutions. First off, 1080p would work fine on a 3840x2160, and with any luck the monitor would just display it pixel-doubled so it wouldn't be any more blurry than a native 1080p monitor. That would be awesome. You can also run 1280x720p natively, as 3840x2160 is triple that, just like its double 1080p. But heres the real kicker - say you have some old game that tops out at 1280x1024 or something. You'll have to accept the black bars on the sides for games that aren't widescreen, but given that, you can upscale 1280x1024 to 2700x2160 or whatever. It'll still look good because theres so many excess pixels - more than double. Back when we were switching from CRTs to 15 and 17" or maybe a 19 if you're lucky, we had the issue that 800x600 looked like junk on a 1024x768 monitor and 1024x768 looked like junk on 1280x1024. At 3840x2160, we can display 1080p and 720p with literally no artifacts, and anything in between with minimal artifacts. In fact, the dot pitch of a 3840x2160 24" monitor is smaller than that of a typical 21" fine dot pitch aperture grille CRT. 3840x2160 at that resolution is only .13mm dot pitch. Remember when we thought .25mm dot pitch was awesome? Obviously we've got that beat, and that's why 3840x2160 is worth it even when not displaying native 3840x2160 images.

Re:Arbitrary Resolutions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed the same thing when playing games on my retina display mac book pro. I can use any resolution and the pixelation is not an issue. In fact scaling acts like a poor man's anti-aliasing. So I actually play my games at a non-multiple of a native resolution, like 1280x720 to get an anti-aliasing effect.

Re:Arbitrary Resolutions

[spongman]

Huh? A CRT has quantized resolution just like an LCD. The only reason you didn't usually see the aliasing is CRTs are blurry as shit.

Re:Arbitrary Resolutions

[cavebison]

The real benefit is that you can start treating your monitor like a CRT again, feeding it arbitrary resolutions.

The screen on my HP 8510p laptop has a native resolution of 1680 x 1050. Yet, because it is a really good screen, made by LG I think, I run all the time in 1280 x 800 (my preferred resolution) and don't notice any blurred edges. Not when browsing, not when developing, not when using text editors or Photoshop, no matter the font.

It's simply a great screen. There were other screens that looked terrible when I changed the resolution. Somehow, this one is smooth as silk.

Give me quality over pixels any day.

Re:Arbitrary Resolutions

[toddestan]

It's possible that on your laptop, the GPU is doing the scaling (scales the 1280x800 to 1680x1050 then sends the higher resolution to the screen). GPUs are generally much better at it than the scalers built into the screens. This can also be done on desktops if you have the right graphics card.

Don't worry

[istartedi]

No matter how many pixels you have, trendy web guys and even OS UI designers will design as if they don't exist. You'll have to move your mouse pointer to the side to make a menu appear, or click "More" to access more than six options on a horizontal menu. You'll probably have to drop your morning Danish and smudge the monitor with your fingers too.

1080p seems fine to me

[Anonymous Coward]

1080p seems fine to me. I have two 22" monitors both set to run at 1920x1080. I can see very crisp sharp images on them. BluRay disks look good at 1920x1080 even though I don't have a lot of blu-ray disks. I mostly play dvd's and they are usually 720xsomething. I scale them and they are a bit grainy but very watchable. The content I get from the TV station is all broadcast at 1920x1080. I have all the resolution I need. Even when I am creating 3d graphics, I can create it at double the 1920x1080 resolution, and then when it plays back at 1920x1080, it all looks sharp. And its good enough. Sure I have software that can create 4k or 8k images, but I don't usually, because its all overkill. A '4k' resolution image is 4,096 × 2,304 pixels. On a 50 foot movie screen, one pixel is just larger than 1/8 inch wide and 1/8 high, slightly smaller than the diameter of a pencil. Human visual acuity for 20/20 vision is 1 arc minute or 1/16 of an inch at 20 feet. On a 50 foot screen, 4k *might* be noticible, 8k is imperceptable to human acuity. On an 80 inch screen, which is really 69.726 inches wide and 39.221 inches high, a pixel is 0.036 inches wide (1/32 of an inch) by 0.036 inches high (1/32 of an inch). If you are sitting closer than 3 feet from the screen, you might notice the pixels. I normally sit at least 4 feet from my computer monitors and they are side by side smaller than an 80 inch screen (actually 38.35 inches wide, exclusive of bezels). There isn't content at that resolution. There won't be content for a while. Buy if you want. Oh and go ahead and burn some money too.

4K is very nice...

[Yvanhoe]

But when will I be able to buy a laptop with more than 768 lines for under 1000â? When will I get a monitor with more than 1080 lines for under than 300â?

4 years ago, I bought a 1980x1200 for 150â. Prices have gone up since then. What is happening?

Re:4K is very nice...

[jeffb (2.718)]

But when will I be able to buy a laptop with more than 768 lines for under 1000â?

Five to ten years ago. Isn't "progress" great?

LCD's Muck with Melatonin

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now we will be a nation of insomnaics. The new electrowetting displays will be even brighter and worse. I'm beginning to wonder if it affects me and will be talking to my sleep doctor about it next visit.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2012/10/08/fighting-back-against-the-health-menace-of-lcd-screens/

Re:LCD's Muck with Melatonin

[Reliable Windmill]

Great, now we will be a nation of insomnaics. The new electrowetting displays will be even brighter and worse. I'm beginning to wonder if it affects me and will be talking to my sleep doctor about it next visit.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2012/10/08/fighting-back-against-the-health-menace-of-lcd-screens/

You need to lower the color temperature of the screen, and the lighting in your home as well, in the evenings to get rid of the sharp blue light, and your eyes will be less stressed out. Programs like F.Lux that do this automatically have worked great for me.

My TRS-80's monitor

[Bing Tsher E]

My TRS-80 had a monitor program that ran in considerably less than 4K. T-Bug loaded off cassette and you could type in assembly language code. Closest MS-DOS analogy would be the debug program.

4:3 beats 16:10 beats 16:9

[Z00L00K]

Those extra pixels in height makes a difference, especially if you do something else than watching movies and playing games.

Widescreen for computers isn't really that good since a lot of computer work is about reading and writing, not active content. A 4:3 monitor on a computer makes sense if you work with static content where you want a good overview without resorting to scrolling up and down.

A 1920x1440 monitor would be interesting if it was decently priced.

Sharp PN-K321 will disappoint

[branchingfactor]

The Asus PQ321 appears to be the same IGZO monitor as the Sharp PN-K321. I purchased the Sharp PN-K321 last week and found it had less dynamic range / contrast than the Dell 3011 it replaced, which meant that pictures and movies looked better on the Dell than on the Sharp despite the higher resolution of the Sharp. And it was very difficult to configure all my applications to display text at the desired size. Regardless of how I set it up, some fonts in some applications were either too small or too large. I returned it yesterday, and I wouldn't be surprised if many others meet the same disappointing fate. The only application I can think of is where you need resolution and are willing to give up contrast / dynamic range. Maybe it's good for displaying maps?

What a waste! Monitors should be *bigger*.

[Anonymous Coward]

No! What a waste! A 4K monitor should have the same hardware DPI but be *bigger*! Filling out more of your viewing area. Then you run it at standard DPI and have *vastly* more screen space.

Suddenly you don't need multiple monitors, just how you don't need multiple desks. One display and being able to move around non-full-screen windows finally makes sense. (On a sub-HD display, anything but full screen is just a huge and pointless pain in the ass.)

Re:What a waste! Monitors should be *bigger*.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

By this time I was certain we'd all have a white wall with a fairly cheap DLP projector. You don't need the freaking LCD any more than the old bulky tube. That tech scales readily to more pixels and higher density (it's all lensing or focus, the "projector" pixels don't need to get smaller -- you just need more rows of 'em.)

For computers, sure, you can use separate screens. Not for your big TV though. I blame Texas Instruments. Thanks for inventing it, now go give it to the Chinese.

No more antialiasing

[Reliable Windmill]

What I find interesting about these high resolutions, is that while they're unnecessary for many things, there are also many graphics techniques such as antialiasing, cleartype, perhaps noise filters etc. that will in many cases no longer be necessary. At these high resolutions, when viewed directly on a single screen, you can't make out individual pixels and jagged edges.

Indeed, you can.

[neoshroom]

The question is... what content will take advantage of this? Most consumable content is at 1080p and I've yet to see a game which can run at these resolutions yet alone the newest Cryengine.

Yes, you can play Crysis on it. May I point you here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXBu9nxLN78

For some reason one no-name panel wholesaler has released one of these 4k sets early and for only $1500 instead of the $5000 everyone else is offering (for things that won't even come for months or longer). There are limitations, of course, but they will play Crysis and most other games. The panel quality isn't anything to brag about (but isn't horrible either) and they only offer HDMI-out, which then I believe has some refresh issues with using as a monitor. That is, I think they claim a 60hz refresh rate or something on the box, but HDMI as the only output method can at present only support double that.

That said, it is still pretty nice. We've been stuck at a 30" maximum for computers for years now and I can't wait for these 4K TV's to really get going. I also wish those unboxers in the video tested the same panel for OS X and Linux.

An absolute necessity for...

[Alejux]

Virtual reality headsets. Devices like the Oculus Rift, with FOV 90+ degrees, will definitely require 4K and higher resolutions in order to appear closer to reality. Specially in the Rift, considering the display would be split in two.

I already have a 4K monitor on my computer

[nsxdavid]

I got the SEIKI 4K TV from TigerDirect not long ago. I hooked it up as a 4th (!) monitor. It dwarfs the 3 30" dells I have next to it since, well... it's frikin 50"!

Despite being a lot bigger the pixel density is roughly the same as the 30" Dells which are only 2560x1600. The SEIKI 4K is rocking, obviously the 4K resolution of 3840x2160.

So is it cool?

Kinda of.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that the refresh rate is only 30 hertz. This is driven by the fact that current 1.4 HDMI spec can't push faster than that. So the screen has a soft pulsing. It also tears badly on fast moving things, but this may be a separate issue not related to the TV, not sure. Been messing with my video card to try and solve that. VSync doesn't seem to help, so maybe it is the TV.

Color reproduction is just ... meh. You have to switch modes to get things to look right depending on what you are doing... say work vs. play. Games do look spectacular at the high resolution and the big size. I have the monitor at a normal seated distance, so it's ... immersive. Much like the Rift in that way, but without the nausea and fatbits.

The bottom line is, don't get this TV unless you are a crazy early adopter who just likes cool toys and throws money away to do it. Wait until next year when HDMI 2.0 comes out and more monitor-class 4K units come onto the market. Then, yes... if you are a resolution junkie like I am, get one! Because even in this early form, the promise is quite clear.

Oh, and it impresses friends. Very important point. :)