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

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

#181

Post by HNaTTY » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:19 PM UTC

BadassFractal wrote: post #34

I can't believe we might finally start seeing some movement in the resolution world outside of the Macbook realm. Think this will ever make it to laptops? Dell announces the year 2025 Ubuntu Programmer Edition ;) On an unrelated note, I have a last-gen Intel Haswell CPU with the HD4600. There's no way I can power this, can I?

I'm successfully running a 50" Seiki 4k monitor off of the HDMI port on my motherboard. Only 30Hz with HDMI, but I also have DisplayPort, I might be able to upgrade to a 60Hz monitor without having to get a dedicated graphics card.

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

#182

Post by thenomad » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:21 PM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #84

timr wrote: post #77

Am I the only person for whom that many pixels in a 28" display sounds like overkill? Maybe I'm just getting old, but the resolution on a cinema display is more than sufficient to make things unreasonably small. And getting closer to my desktop screen isn't really appealing either (again, maybe I'm getting old, but to see the pixels on my current screen I have to get my nose almost right up to the display, which I'm…

In theory stuff should be the same size but alot sharper. That being said, i don't really feel alot of difference when looking at my 24" monitor and on my 5inch phone which has almost the same resolution. For me a huge 40inch 4K monitor would be more useful as the DPI would be roughly the same to my setup now (2x 1920x1200) but more vertical space and no bezels.

Yup, this is exactly what I'm hoping for too. 39", 4k, 60hz or more - and that's my next upgrade sorted.

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

#183

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #178

wmf wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App developers cannot write code that correctly renders at an arbitrary multiplier. It's been tried and it never works. Having 1x mode and 2x mode does work, which is why Apple uses that approach.

Considering that every 3D game qualifies as an app that renders correctly under arbitrary multipliers, that argument seems a little suspect. The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. Selecting integer multipliers (so far: "2") allows those assets to continue to render as des…

  The real answer is that there is an industry of designers 
  accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and 
  this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled 
  anyway.

That's an effect, but not the cause – the roots of the raster-based paradigm of modern GUIs are far more technical. I would point to the tradeoffs between speed and memory limitations in early GUI systems: If you look at the original Macintosh UI, you'll see a system more constrained by rendering speeds than by RAM, and thus a high emphasis on bitmaps versus vector rendering.

Look at this Folklore.org story on the origin of the roundrect in System 1: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E... It was only through a combination of Jobs' perfectionism and Atkinson's ingenuity that such a simple thing as rounded rectangles could be accomplished on the original Macintosh; can you imagine how long it would have taken to render a Finder window full of vector icons?

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

#184

Post by mbreese » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #178

wmf wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App developers cannot write code that correctly renders at an arbitrary multiplier. It's been tried and it never works. Having 1x mode and 2x mode does work, which is why Apple uses that approach.

Considering that every 3D game qualifies as an app that renders correctly under arbitrary multipliers, that argument seems a little suspect. The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. Selecting integer multipliers (so far: "2") allows those assets to continue to render as des…

Let's be reasonable... 3D games and traditional desktop environments have a very different set of HCI expectations. You aren't often clicking an icon in a 3D game.

While, I'd probably prefer to have vector graphics for desktop assets just for the flexibility, hand-tuned scaled images usually look better than their vector scaled siblings.

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

#185

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

hyko wrote: post #165

JackC wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, ... or at 2x Huh. Are you maybe thinking of iOS, or have you confirmed this with a high-PPI external monitor on a Mac? Because it's not true of the built-in screen for retina MBPs. I typically use the 1.5x resolution (1920x1200) or 12/7x resolution (1680x1050), which are both supported by the built-in system prefs, and both look perfectl…

I think mortenjorck is talking about HiDPI mode, which doesn't provide as many options as retina mode: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enabl...

Yep. It would be great if Apple added full Retina scaling support to the next version of OS X, but I'd imagine the hardware might start to creak scaling 5120 x 2880 to 3850 x 2160.

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

#186

Post by jsmthrowaway » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #121

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misinterpret how? By expecting that the sides will be four times larger? That exists, and it's called 8K. "Megapixels" already exists as an entrenched concept, and I don't think it's deceptive to call 4K 4x larger than 1080p or 8K 16x larger than 1080p.

720 = 720 vertical pixels 1080 = 1080 vertical pixels 4k = 4000 = 4000 vertical pixels? Nope. Shit's confusing. 2k or 4x would be less confusing.

I don't know, 3840 is fairly close.

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

#187

Post by rsync » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #174

rsync wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain why this isn't just a continuous dial ? That is, why are there discreet "steps" in monitor scaling for these elements that you are talking about ? I would think that if I have 157 PPI or 220 PPI or 400 PPI that I would just adjust the dial to fit the element size I want. What's up ?

You can't just take a rasterized image and scale it up or down, the result would look horrible. You need to scale things while they're rendered, and as long as you only do vector graphics like drawing lines and rectangles, that's fine. However, real-world UIs traditionally use lots of bitmap graphics, and those, again, simply can't be reasonably scaled. And PPI scaling even the vector graphics stuff requires major ch…

"You need to scale things while they're rendered, and as long as you only do vector graphics like drawing lines and rectangles, that's fine."

Yes, I'm with you so far ... my confusion is, I thought that is what the "ready for 4k blah blah" improvements in iOS and Mavericks, etc., were.

I thought that was the whole problem they solved, and I am surprised to see it is not. I can see various apps being broken in this way, but the OS elements should all be scalable arbitrarily...

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

#188

Post by wnissen » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:55 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #180

jbri wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> again, maybe I'm getting old, but to see the pixels on my current screen I have to get my nose almost right up to the display, which I'm never going to do The point of going to higher and higher resolutions is that eventually, you don't see the pixels. Pixels are an implementation detail, what you're really wanting to see is the image they represent.

Gee, thanks. All these years, and I've been looking at the pixels and not noticing the image! You've changed my life! ahem... Condescending explanations aside, you know that there's a limit to the human eye's ability to resolve detail, right? We can resolve up to about 150ppi at 2ft. The Apple Cinema Display is at 109ppi. There's room for improvement, but not 60% more...

109ppi is good enough, but there is a significant difference. It's true that beyond a certain point it doesn't make a difference (1080p phones, I'm looking at you!) but 109ppi is not that point, for most people. Retina web content and applications look decisively better.

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

#189

Post by JackC » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 7:59 PM UTC

hyko wrote: post #165

JackC wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, ... or at 2x Huh. Are you maybe thinking of iOS, or have you confirmed this with a high-PPI external monitor on a Mac? Because it's not true of the built-in screen for retina MBPs. I typically use the 1.5x resolution (1920x1200) or 12/7x resolution (1680x1050), which are both supported by the built-in system prefs, and both look perfectl…

I think mortenjorck is talking about HiDPI mode, which doesn't provide as many options as retina mode: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enabl...

Ah hah! I actually think that HiDPI mode and retina mode are the same thing, but the issue you're getting at is that OS X doesn't yet have drivers for external 4K monitors that support HiDPI mode.[1]

Here's what's going on: on a retina MBP, the screen basically always runs in HiDPI mode. That means everything is rendered twice as large as it should be, for a screen twice as large as the virtual resolution you want, and then scaled down to native resolution. Icons that would be 32px are 64px, fonts that would be 12pt are 24pt, etc., and then they're shrunk down to their proper size.

This is really cool because it lets us run at _any_ resolution between 1x and 2x with minimal loss of quality, even though apps are only coded to run at one of the two extremes.

So, say I have a 2880x1800px screen on my rMBP, but I want a virtual extra-sharp 1920x1200px screen. I render the screen twice the size I want it (3840x2400) in HiDPI mode where everything is twice as large as it should be, and then I scale it _down_ in the graphics card to my native resolution of 2880x1800. This technique allows me to pick _any_ resolution between 1x (2880x1800) and 2x (1440x900) and have it look pretty good, because I'm only scaling down to my native resolution rather than up. Some stops along the way are nicer than others, and 1440x900 looks the best because it requires no scaling at all, but I have lots of options along the way that look good.

The first thing you need for this to work is, obviously, for your apps to know how to render at 1x or 2x. 95% of Mac apps seem to be there by now. (The ones that aren't fixed still work fine -- they just look obviously low-resolution because they've been scaled up and back down.)

Then you need your graphics card to be capable of rendering a screen with twice the virtual resolution you want, and scaling it down to your native resolution in realtime. That's a serious amount of processing, and apparently it's not supported so well yet for external 4K monitors. But importantly, it's something that only has to be solved at the driver level -- the OS and apps are already there.

[1] See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... and search for "HiDPI."

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

#190

Post by bluedino » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 8:19 PM UTC

Jongseong wrote: post #118

Such high resolution displays may sound like overkill for many people, but improved resolution is a big deal to those who care about screen typography—specifically, in layman's terms, about how fonts look on screen. When displaying letters in small sizes, the pixel grid becomes increasingly coarse and the result often becomes ugly and less readable. To prevent this, "hinting" instructions need to be built into the fo…

Even better, you don't have to do subpixel hinting at 'retina' resolutions.