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It looks great; at first having a 40inch display is crazy; but (again, for doing work.. programming, graphics, writing) i find the lower pixel density great. i am a bit further from the monitor with it being so large; so the bigger text is fine
First of all, a lot of them can only drive a 4K display at 30hz (for example, my late-2013 Retina MBP). The currently available HDMI only goes up to 30hz, and DisplayPort 1.2 only supports 60hz with MST enabled. It seems like high-end desktop graphics cards can do this.
Second, native 4K on a 28" screen is too small. I can't read it, and my eyes aren't all that bad. I'm guessing a 32" screen would be a bit better, but probably still too small. Any larger than 32" probably wouldn't be feasible as a computer monitor.
It seems like 4K would be perfect at HiDPI mode on a 24" screen. Unfortunately, my Macbook Pro can't do HiDPI on a 4K display. 1.5X HiDPI mode (effective 1440p) on a 28" would probably also look good, but my Macbook Pro can't do that either.
My guess is that the resolution we really want is 5K @ 27". I was playing around with the Retina iMac at the Apple store, and it was still completely readable at 3200x1800. Unfortunately, Apple apparently had to hack the Displayport spec to get this working, and Displayport 1.3 (which has enough bandwidth for 8K) won't be out for a while.
My guess is that we will have reasonable 4K/5K displays as well as computers that can support them in a year or two.
There were a few caveats that prevented The Wire Cutter from recommending any monitor, but some of those don't seem to apply as readily now as they did at the time of last edit.
I got the Dell UP2414Q - a 24" ~4k monitor, making it around 183 ppi. The primary issues The Wire Cutter brought up in their rundown (of this display and generally) seemed to be the following:
- price (in this case $1100)
- the resolution being too high for the screen space
- poor refresh rates (30Hz in this case)
On the first point, you can now get it for around $750, maybe less, in the US. The second point was somewhat platform-specific, but on OS X you can tell it to display in HiDPI mode and it'll deal with the resolution in pretty much the same way that it deals with a retina Macbook Pro's 2880x1800 display. Namely, it'll scale everything at 2x. This is idyllic. If you have an rMBP, imagine that kind of sharpness across a 24" display and you're in the right ballpark.
The last point, about refresh rates, is trickier. My understanding is that this display has no trouble displaying at 60Hz once you enable it, but I have this display hooked up to a hackintosh, so myriad driver quirks make it impossible for me to say definitively whether the video card, the monitor, or the whole universe is conspiring against my success in trying to get it to display at 4k@60Hz. I think it's the buggy nature of the solution I came upon, which I could only describe as "not working in varying degrees". I'm still looking around, but I'm not optimistic for a real fix to get 60Hz for another month or two, if I'm lucky.
If I had a 2013 or later rMBP, I understand I could test it since that supports the DisplayPort 1.2 standard, but mine is from 2012. So I'm stuck testing with a desktop that shouldn't really even exist, heh.
So bringing it full circle, I recommend that you give waiting a chance. The Dell monitor I have has been fantastic, but not without its frustrations. If you can wait 6 months (or better yet, a year) I emphatically believe that the long term solutions to these kinds of displays will have shaken out by then. DP 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 will almost certainly be ubiquitous in video cards and probably in most laptops. It'll just be a lot easier to get things up and running.
That being said, if you're willing to put in some work and get frustrated a couple of times along the way, the reward is quite nice.
The biggest problem I've seen is that most laptops can't adequately drive a 4K display. First of all, a lot of them can only drive a 4K display at 30hz (for example, my late-2013 Retina MBP). The currently available HDMI only goes up to 30hz, and DisplayPort 1.2 only supports 60hz with MST enabled. It seems like high-end desktop graphics cards can do this. Second, native 4K on a 28" screen is too small. I can't read…
HDMI 2 is OK, but there are no video cards that do HDMI 2.
DisplayPort 1.3 is also OK, but there are no monitors or video cards that use it.
DisplayPort 1.2 can do 4k by pretending the monitor is two 1920x2160 monitors and using two DisplayPort streams. How this interacts with your video card depends on how many hacks your driver vendor has implemented. Linux with XRandr treats one monitor as two, leading to much frustration. The Nvidia Linux driver has a bug where if you turn on Xinerama, it breaks both Xrandr and Xinerama, leaving you with one big monitor, which is nice. The Nvidia driver on Windows works correctly by special-casing known 4k monitors. ChromeOS does not do any hacks, and so you get two screens, and windows can't span screens, making it unusable. (It also doesn't ship with HiDPI assets on most platforms, so if you were hoping to run at 2x, some icons are ugly. I have a bug open for this, though.)
HDMI 1.4 can do half of 4k, so if your monitor supports two HDMI inputs, one for each half of the screen, a computer can drive it that way. I did that for a while and it works fine; video cards have long been able to sync vblank between multiple monitors, so there are no weird artifacts. Obviously the same driver hacks must exist to convince the OS that two "monitors" are actually one.
If you were hoping to just plug in the monitor and have it work, too bad. (You may also have to deal with your BIOS not detecting the monitor, and then the machine not booting as a result!)
That said, if you're happy with 30Hz, which is usable but introduces noticeable keyboard latency, 4k works fine with current versions of HDMI and DisplayPort, so you should get a plug-and-play experience. This is especially acceptable if you're just going to play back video, which is all 23.976, 25, or 30Hz anyway. (But there is almost no 4k content available, so just get an HDTV and use the $5000 you saved to crowd-fund some 4k content.)
Now that you have a signal being supplied to your monitor, you need to get the applications to work correctly. Windows zoom feature is awful, or was when I tested it 6 months ago. Avoid. Linux has nothing. Chrome OS has 2x support (at least as of very recent dev channel releases on Panther, the Asus Chromebox), which works quite nicely. Many applications can be zoomed to good effect, like terminal emulators and Chrome. (If you set Chrome to higher than 100% it fetches the "2x" assets from the webserver and displays them correctly; Google Maps looks especially nice at 200% zoom, but so does any site designed by someone with a retina Mac.)
As for hardware... I have the Asus PQ321. It's fine. It is not retina density, of course. I set Chrome to 150%, bump up the fonts in my terminal and Emacs, and leave everything else at the normal settings. Some things are too small, but not unusably so.
4k is not dense enough to turn off font anti-aliasing for most reasonable screen sizes. What we really want is 8k.
While you're waiting for 8k, I'd just save yourself the money and stress and buy a 30" monitor. Every OS handles those perfectly, and the pixels are still pretty small. I have an HP ZR30w monitor; it's nice. The Asus PQ321 is also nice, of course, but are 1.5 extra inches worth the driver pain and $2000?
I'll state at the outset that, provided you have the ability to output using DisplayPort 1.2, you should consider the Dell UP2414Q, which I'm using and really like. Otherwise (and even in this case), you might be happier waiting it out. There were a few caveats that prevented The Wire Cutter from recommending any monitor, but some of those don't seem to apply as readily now as they did at the time of last edit. I got…
The colors are fantastic as each unit is individually calibrated and checked at the factory.
The size of the screen at 24 inches is just right - any bigger and I don't think it would be comfortable for me to use. (for coding primarily) This was the smallest 4k display I could find available at the time.
There is only 1 slight problem, the monitor needs to be in DisplayPort 1.2 mode in order to run at 60 hz @ 4k resolution - and 60 hz is required, otherwise the mouse will feel jerky, even though I have a i7 4790 CPU and GTX 780 TI graphics card.
The problem is when in DP 1.2 mode and you run a game that uses a lower resolution, the image won't scale to fill the screen. It took a long time (and a lot of frustration) to figure it out, but you need to drop down to DP 1.1 mode - which drops your 4k Windows desktop refresh rate to 30 hz - and then the lower res will scale to fit the screen.
It is annoying that you need to do this, but at least it can be done on the fly, ie. about to play a game, then go into the monitor menu and disable DP 1.2, then run the game, no need to reset the computer.
Once you are in DP 1.1 mode, games will run full screen at lower resolutions up to 60 hz. Obviously this monitor isn't targeted at gamers.
So: HDMI and DisplayPort can't do 4k@60Hz without hacks. HDMI 2 is OK, but there are no video cards that do HDMI 2. DisplayPort 1.3 is also OK, but there are no monitors or video cards that use it. DisplayPort 1.2 can do 4k by pretending the monitor is two 1920x2160 monitors and using two DisplayPort streams. How this interacts with your video card depends on how many hacks your driver vendor has implemented. Linux w…
[edit: related -- I just found this:
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/archive/2014/08/msg00180.html
No mention of refresh rate... no real 10bit support with the r290 under Linux doesn't sound good either :-/ ]