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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.