Dell Wasn't Joking About That 28-Inch Sub-$1000 4K Monitor; It's Only $699

It's sort of like how only software engineers care about GB vs GiB. The average consumer will not care about some cropping here and there, but someone working with graphics or video will. And I suspect that anyone looking to drop nearly a thousand dollars on a monitor is going to care deeply about its actual specs (ie "can this monitor render my project at native resolution?").

Does this monitor have a built-in scaler, or do you get a small picture if you run at less than the full native resolution? I saw some earlier articles complaining about the lack of a scaler on some of the new "4k" monitors, but I couldn't find anything right now about this one.

4K means multiple things and we just have to get used to it. There is the DCI 4K native resolution of 4096x2160, 4K UHD of 3840x2160, and then there is the 4K in 16:10 at 4096x2560. Of these the UHD is likely to be the thing anyone cares about because it's what TVs will use. The native DCI resolution is probably the least interesting, because actual content will have different resolutions in practice depending on the actual aspect ratio being used. In a computer monitor however I'd prefer the 16:10 version instead of the 16:9 of UHD.

That's not correct. The resolution you are referring to is the native running resolution of 4K projectors in cinemas established by DCI. If you were being legal about it, which your comment is a little bit, "actual" 4K is 4096x2560.

A "proper" 4K film shown at DCI resolution is cropped by removing lines due to the combination of aspect ratio between film and projector. The trend in film photography, however, is towards the DCI standard; the RED EPIC shoots at DCI 4K while its predecessor, RED ONE, shoots more lines (I cannot recall off the top of my head, but it is definitely larger than DCI because it didn't fit in my Media Composer DCI workspace the first time I worked with it; I'm really reaching in long-term memory so I might be wrong about this).

All of that, however, is in the cinema world. Since NHK demonstrated 4K TV a couple years ago, everybody in the consumer electronics world has understood 4K to mean 4x 1080p, arranged 2x2, and that is what ITU standardized in recommendation 2020. That's intentional.

It's much easier to evolve 1080p equipment to 4K TV than cinema 4K; it's multiplicative and most of the same equipment can be overhauled. Other resolutions affect aspect ratio, and lenses are a significant portion of the expense of a television camera. You're going to have a hard time selling a standard that makes everybody buy lenses again. Don't forget that everybody just did to go HD. (The last lens I shot on in news was $20,000 by itself, which is part of the reason the average photog will get really mad at you if you grab it, as people who don't want to be videotaped are wont to do.)

If a consumer is buying 4K equipment, its resolution is 3840x2160. This will also be the resolution at which 4K content targeting consumers should be encoded, so I'm not sure what cropping you are referring to. If a DP is buying 4K equipment, its resolution is higher. This isn't marketing droids winning, it's completely different industries having a different history of resolutions: DCI 4K builds upon DCI 2K as 4K builds upon 2K builds upon 1080p; cinema has always fought for 16:10 while consumer electronics stubbornly fight for 16:9, as well.

Wikipedia doesn't help this situation by blurring the history of the two, leading to comments such as this one. Cinema 4K and consumer 4K are not in competition with each other, and there was never a chance of 4K content coming out of the camera at 4096x2560 and making it to a consumer display. They're for different purposes. It's also worth noting that ATSC v3 is still in early stages and is not finalized, which will dictate the broadcast of OTA 4K TV content and pull the industry accordingly.

I am aware some 4K monitors have been released to market at cinema resolution. Those are targeted toward film editors and as monitors for shoot work. There's also some other crazy markets; an engineer I worked with in television installed a bunch of early 4K monitors, the ~$20k ones, in an air traffic control tower. They like the resolution because screens get busy, he said. I don't know if that's true, I merely remember the story.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks 4096x2160 (256:135) will ever become a standard for consumer monitors? 16:9 has already won TV and computers. Are we really going to want to watch all of the 1080p content fractionally stretched or with bars on the side?

4096x2160 is fine for expensive cameras because it is designed to be cropped to 3840x2160, but I doubt there will ever be consumer content made in that format.