Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014 • Hacker News Board

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#161

Post by mortenjorck » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:01 AM UTC

shurcooL wrote: post #139

mortenjorck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the 28” is going to have the wrong pixel density to use with OS X in Retina mode. Non-Retina MacBooks start at 110 PPI. Cinema Displays have hovered around 100 PPI for about a decade, with the 27” Thunderbolt Display topping out at 109 PPI (same for its sister 27” iMac). At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which, dividing by two to get the equivalent non-Retina PPI, comes to only 78.5, a redu…

> At 28", a 3840 x 2160 Will look exactly like 1080p in "Retina mode" (more accurately, HiDPI). A 28" 1080p monitor isn't that far-fetched. You're talking about DPI but not how close one sits to a monitor. People sit a lot closer to 13" MacBooks than to 28" 1080p monitors.

You're right about the importance that distance from the screen plays, but in my experience, a 27-28" 1080p monitor (of which there are quite a few on the market) would have to sit too far away to use for anything but movie viewing and gaming.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#162

Post by tempestn » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #160

encoderer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UltraSharp UltraHD is awful. You're right, they have to use UltraHD. But "UltraSharp"? That's what I was getting at. Also, how about just a simplified product line like, I don't know: Dell UltraHD 24" Dell UltraHD 32" Along the lines of Cinema Display.

UltraSharp is an established Dell moniker though, been around much longer than UltraHD. Anyway, as for unifying the product line- Dell being Dell, that would mean simply cutting the UltraSharp product line, which I would consider a loss.

Why do the new UltraHD monitors need to have the same name as previous Dell monitors? It's just a name. In fact, UltraSharp vs UltraHD seems like a great way to distinguish between 4K+ and lower res monitors, while still making both seem "good" to consumers.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#163

Post by prewett » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

So if I understand the tech specs correctly, this 24" monitor is 185 DPI. (24" diagonally, sqrt(3840^2 * 2160^2) = 4406 pixels, 4406px/24" = 185 DPI) By comparison, the MacBook Pro 15" retina has 220 DPI, so it's a respectable monitor. Although for "Ultra HD" I was kind of hoping for something "ultra impressive"...

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#164

Post by bhauer » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:27 AM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #159

bhauer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, we've not yet watched a film on the Seiki. We have fired up a few Youtube videos at full-screen and aside from looking comical (due to the large lossy compression artifacts present even in Youtube's highest quality videos), the video seems as smooth as Youtube ever does, at least to my eye. I suspect for video from a higher-quality source, my opinion would not be so forgiving. But put briefly, for consumi…

I don't understand why you would want HDMI 2. DisplayPort is pretty much better in every single way.

DisplayPort is indeed superior and I'd gladly take a cheap UHD monitor with both HDMI 2 and DisplayPort.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#165

Post by bhauer » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #129

bhauer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, of course. Current interfaces are not well suited to high-DPI large form-factor displays. But if we wait for interfaces to happen first, I worry the wait will be prolonged. Plus, if you gave me a 65" 400 DPI screen today, I would drop everything and immediately put it to use. I would set it up on a drafting-style standing desk and would enjoy extremely high-clarity text throughout my desktop user inter…

"Current interfaces are not well suited to high-DPI large form-factor displays." Actually, a simple, tiling window manager (ion3, ratpoison, OSX with SizeUP) does just fine. I am running triple u3011 monitors with OSX Leopard, running Sizeup, and its basically like having 10 small, no-bezel displays in front of me (left and right screens are split into a quad, and middle screen is split down the middle). Lose the gra…

I agree with you as well, which is why elsewhere I said I would definitely take a large high-DPI display and make it work.

Even with no change whatsoever to our current operating systems, my enjoyment of my desktop computer would increase tremendously if I could scrap my multi-monitor setup, replacing it with one high-DPI very large monitor.

But I think the point still stands that interfaces could be improved (and probably quite a bit) to take advantage of this kind of hardware. As dragonwriter said elsewhere in this thread, it may start as just simple things such as providing more flexibility on top of existing quality of life improvements that have been added to window managers based on the recognition that these monitors are larger and you can view more information at once. I would like to see such a monitor coupled with gesture input (along with mouse). I'd love to be able to do gestures to pick up a stack of windows and arrange them in a quick hand motion, for example.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#166

Post by bhauer » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 2:36 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #135

bhauer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, replace "manufacturer" in my original message with "brand." 1080 displays are commoditized, and have been for some time now. 2560x1600 displays were not commoditized for 8 years. The process has very recently started. The incumbent brands did not want Ultra HD commoditized so quickly, as evidenced by the $4,000+ prices. Seiki dropped a small bomb on them with the $700 (now $500) 4K televisions. With luck, Ultra…

Of course, without those $4,000 TVs it's likely that Seiki would have no cheap reject panels to sell.

Yes, perhaps so! Thanks to the early adopters who have made these things affordable to cheapskates such as myself.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#167

Post by majormajor » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 3:07 AM UTC

joosters wrote: post #115

majormajor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Displaying 24fps content on a 60fps screen repeats frames. If you repeat half the frames of the 25fps stream twice, and alternating half of the frames three times, then you get 60 frames per second, with a stream looking like: AABBBCCDDDEEFFF... This isn't perfect, since really each frame should be on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, which is why 120hz TVs came about -- 120 is evenly divisible by each…

Drop the screen refresh rate to 24hz to match the video then...

That was an option on CRTs since you could control the speed of the beam, but I'm not aware of any LCDs that have an adjustable native refresh rate.

Ah, the good ol' days, when blacks were black and "non-native resolutions" weren't a thing. :)

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#168

Post by derekp7 » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 3:16 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #167

joosters wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop the screen refresh rate to 24hz to match the video then...

That was an option on CRTs since you could control the speed of the beam, but I'm not aware of any LCDs that have an adjustable native refresh rate. Ah, the good ol' days, when blacks were black and "non-native resolutions" weren't a thing. :)

That's one thing I never understood. With CRT's, you still had discrete pixels (either clusters of 3 RGB dots, or 3 RGB bars). But no matter the resolution (within the CRT's limits), nothing looked blotchy. Whereas on an LCD, you can always tell when it isn't running in a native resolution (or even divisor). So what is the difference? Other than a CRT would naturally do analog interpolation, couldn't an LCD or graphics adapter be programmed to simulate the same effect?

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#169

Post by WesleyJohnson » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 3:21 AM UTC

Any hope of getting full resolution at 30hz on a late 2011 MBPro? I'm using a 30" Cinema Display right now, but it's pretty banged up as I got it from an as-is liquidation auction. Would love to replace it with something newer, lighter and that doesn't raise the ambient temperature of my office by several degrees.

Re: Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014

#170

Post by majormajor » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 3:28 AM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #168

majormajor wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an option on CRTs since you could control the speed of the beam, but I'm not aware of any LCDs that have an adjustable native refresh rate. Ah, the good ol' days, when blacks were black and "non-native resolutions" weren't a thing. :)

That's one thing I never understood. With CRT's, you still had discrete pixels (either clusters of 3 RGB dots, or 3 RGB bars). But no matter the resolution (within the CRT's limits), nothing looked blotchy. Whereas on an LCD, you can always tell when it isn't running in a native resolution (or even divisor). So what is the difference? Other than a CRT would naturally do analog interpolation, couldn't an LCD or graphi…

The hardware side is where things start getting out of my area of knowledge, but my understanding is that yes, CRTs had a native upper bound on their resolution which had to do with the dot pitch of the display. I would guess that the way this worked in practice is that for lower resolutions they were effectively partially lighting up multiple phosphors per pixel on each pass? I imagine the difference between this an an LCD is that the amount of time a single pixel was lit by the beam on a CRT is far, far lower than the refresh rate of an LCD.

I believe there were monitors that went both ways with this, not just letting you run lower than native but also higher than native (I had a 17" CRT that claimed to support 1600x1200, but not without a lot of blurriness, for instance).

edit: man, it's really hard to find specific info about how exactly that worked online these days