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4K Displays Ready For Prime Time
An anonymous reader writes "After the HD revolution, display manufacturers rolled out gimmick after gimmick to try to recapture that burst of purchasing (3-D, curved displays, 'Smart' features, form factor tweaks, etc). Now, we're finally seeing an improvement that might actually be useful: 4K displays are starting to drop into a reasonable price range. Tech Report reviews a 28" model from Asus that runs $650. They say, 'Unlike almost every other 4K display on the market, the PB287Q is capable of treating that grid as a single, coherent surface. ... Running games at 4K requires tons of GPU horsepower, yet dual-tile displays don't support simple scaling. As a result, you can't drop back to obvious subset resolutions like 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 in order to keep frame rendering times low. ... And single-tile 4K at 30Hz stinks worse, especially for gaming. The PB287Q solves almost all of those problems.' They add that the monitor's firmware is not great, and while most options you want are available, they often require digging through menus to set up. The review ends up recommending the monitor, but notes that, more importantly, its capabilities signify 'the promise of better things coming soon.'"
I got it recently, and it's got 4k at 60FPS, in a 28" size - great for programming.
Review link
Just to try it, I was able to get all the single-player PC Ultima games running in about half the screen real estate:
ALL THE ULTIMAS
It's around $600 when its on sale, so I think it just about matches the model slashvertised here.
Ryan Fenton
I did the calculations and don't care to repeat them again, but depending on your use case, it might help... or it might be totally imperceptible. A medium-large on the other side of a good-sized living room, your eyes shouldn't be able to see the difference. On the other hand, a large computer monitor right in front of you, in many situations you will be able to see the difference. Note that human eyesight isn't a simple matter of resolution comparisons, it gets kind of complicated... there's basic measures of how far apart you can see two black dots or lines separated by white before they merge into one, but the less the contrast, the greater the distance they have to be separated (absolute brightness matters too, as does distance from the center of your field of vision and all sorts of other stuff), and of course your ability to perceive fine detail drops tremendously when viewing moving objects. But in relatively static, high contrast images, on a large screen near the viewer (say, a nice computer monitor), most people shouldn't have trouble seeing the difference in a side-by-side comparison.
The only problem with this gimmick is that we're basically running into a resolution dead-end here, there's only so far you can go before the improved detail becomes meaningless. I hope for their sake that they come up with true (non-stereoscopic) 3d or something of that nature, or they're going to be running out of TV-sales gimmicks.
Hmm, I just thought of something that I heard about a good while back but haven't seen any movement on - "peripheral vision" TVs. I seem to recall reading years ago about a type of TV that used lights around the edges to dimly shine the peripheral colors on the TV image around the room parallel to the TV, giving the illusion to your peripheral vision of an expansive screen. I could envision improving that with a video format that includes a lower-resolution peripheral video stream and side projectors instead of simple side lights. Maybe that could be the next gimmick. ;)
The Spanish-English dictionary is out of ink.
I thought that 10.9.3 addressed this (Not quite two weeks old). Might be time for you to try again.
The only problem with this gimmick is that we're basically running into a resolution dead-end here, there's only so far you can go before the improved detail becomes meaningless.
Why would you even discuss this now. We are NOWHERE near the types of resolutions that my eyes are happy with. Yes, I am an elitist snob who couldn't tell a pixel from a hole in the ground. I do not care. Stop whining about how none of us can tell the difference. I can tell the difference and even if I can not, I believe I can tell the difference.
I do NOT want to see even a hint of blockiness or fuzziness at the edge of a font. I want curves that appear to be perfect curves. As it stands now, I can clearly see blockiness in all fonts. With hinting turned on, some aspects of the blockiness goes away but it is still there... and now the fonts are fuzzy too. Will 4K solve that? Not even close. Will it be much much better than what we have now? Yes!
Stop blocking progress with your negative whining about arcs and distinguishability. I may not be able to argue against your science and maths, but science always loses out to reality. Look at the blocks and fuzziness in this message and dare to tell me that I am wrong.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Inch. Away. From. The. Screen.
Slowly.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Football is shot at close angles specifically to tell a narrative; they will not and are required not to show the full field during a play. This is the view that coaches get on a closed loop. It is available to the public, but only 4 hours after the game ends and you have to pay a special subscription to get it.
moox. for a new generation.
Nah. I am not trying to be a douche but I am undoubtedly succeeding. *sigh* Such is life. Here is where I am coming from:
While the Commodore Amiga 500 was not my first computer, it was the one that brought me very deeply into computing. I first hooked it up to an NTSC television set. The fonts were extremely jagged and the images were extremely blurry. I should probably add that the color was absolutely terrible too. But it worked. I fell deeply in love with my Amiga 500. It was the most awesome computer on the planet. It had a flat 32 bit memory space and preemptive multitasking. It was god compared to the standard IBM PC and Microsoft DOS.
I eventually was able to afford to buy a used "real" monitor for it. Essentially the same resolution but much higher quality. The fonts were still jagged though.
Through the years, I have upgraded my monitors continuously, with one of the best monitors being the Apple 30 inch Cinema Display running at something like 3560x1600 or somesuch. A _very_ nice monitor. Currently, I am using a Samsung 48 inch 1920x1080 screen as a display.
One thing that was common across ALL of the displays is that curves never looked like continuous curves and fonts always looked blocky. It is possible that problem may not be resolution, but I doubt it. I look at photographs of handwriting, images that should show continuous curves, and it still does not look "right". Either it is fuzzy or the pixels intrude.
Maybe I put my face too close to the monitor. Maybe I just expect too much. Maybe I notice things that other people do not notice. Regardless, No matter how much anti-aliasing I use in Grand Theft Auto IV, lines that are not perfectly vertical or horizontal have a staircase effect. No matter what type of font hinting I use, fonts seem blocky and or fuzzy. Perhaps 1920x1080 is enough and I just want too much.
4K screens look gorgeous. I look at them at the Sony store in the mall. My eyes are still drawn to the imperfections in the red headed girl's hair (in the demo) despite the fact that it is mathematically and scientifically impossible to see them. *shrug*
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen