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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.
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.
$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.
Thirty four characters live here.
The monitor for my 4k computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer) was just an ordinary television.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On my computer monitor I need more height!! Please bring back 16:10 for computer monitors! 16:9 is for tv's only.
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.
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.
Rocket Surgeon.
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.
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..
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.