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The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

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Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#61

Post by jwr »

huskyr wrote: post #52
QuotedForTruth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive never seen "HD Ready" refer to 720. As I remember it, HD Ready meant that the TV was HD (720 or 1080), but it didnt include an ATSC or QAM tuner. It was more like a monitor than a true TV. The distinction I've seen with 1080p is calling it True or Full HD.

Maybe this is specific per country, but in the Netherlands 'HD Ready' always referred to 720 instead of 1080.

Actually, it referred to 768, as that was the number of lines that the cheap panels had. Which meant that even to display 720p content you had to scale it.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#62

Post by AdamTReineke »

pbreit wrote: post #48

Has anyone tried the 39" Seiki on a Mac? At $389 seems like an easier purchase. Plus it doubles as a TV. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889522...

I have it but on Windows with no scaling. I paid around $500. 39" is a bit large for a single monitor, in my opinion, since looking towards the corners or edges becomes such a long look. 30hz for the 4K is annoying but livable.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#63

Post by aheilbut »

geekam wrote: post #2

I'd like to know if anyone is using a 4K monitor and their experience with it. I have an Apple thunderbolt display and I am ok with it. I do not have a 4K. I use it with macbook pro 15" (retina display) and even though I do not get the same resolution, it does not look flaky at all and is decent enough for reading. Moreover, it connects with the pro using thunderbolt and thus does not require multiple connections for…

I have the 39" Seiki, and I'm very happy with it, especially for the price, though it required some fiddling to make the colors look decent. I just like being able to have a lot on the screen at once, and I use it mainly for programming, so the 30hz issue doesn't bother me much.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#64

Post by neckro23 »

potatolicious wrote: post #34
devindotcom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind playing games in a lower resolution and letting it scale up to the monitor's res - I consider the stretching to 4K a form of "natural" (if sloppy) anti-aliasing.

Scaling is a problem on a lot of 4K monitors right now. IIRC the Dells will display everything at their native resolution - so a 1080p signal will sit as a box in the center of your screen surrounded by black. There's a reason why the current batch of 4K monitors are considered immature. The lack of "real" (single-tile) input, the inability to handle 60Hz inputs, the inability to scale, etc etc. Looks like the latest…

GPU scaling has been a standard driver feature, on Windows at least, with both NVidia and AMD video cards for awhile now. It doesn't really matter what the monitor does.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#65

Post by sitkack »

ariwilson wrote: post #38
potatolicious wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling is a problem on a lot of 4K monitors right now. IIRC the Dells will display everything at their native resolution - so a 1080p signal will sit as a box in the center of your screen surrounded by black. There's a reason why the current batch of 4K monitors are considered immature. The lack of "real" (single-tile) input, the inability to handle 60Hz inputs, the inability to scale, etc etc. Looks like the latest…

I have the Asus PB287Q and it scales perfectly to 1080p (and does the 60Hz input, single-tile input), etc, etc. The only downside is the TN panel but it's much better than any TN panel I've ever used.

Please tell us more.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#66

Post by robotresearcher »

programminggeek wrote: post #5

4K is going to really not matter much for a while simply because the average computer doesn't have good enough graphics to make good use of it. The resolution jump is huge and so you need a lot more GPU memory and processing power to do the same things at a higher resolution. Games are now really taking good advantage of 1080p, so we are another 5-10 years away from 4k being a real thing in terms of mainstream gaming…

The killer app for hi-res displays is text, not video or games, in my opinion. Text looks terrific at 4K and text is what most working users look at all day. I would certainly trade some frame rate for super-crisp text in my editor. If others agree with me, we'll see high-res-but-slow-rate catching on in business before the home gamers are ready to go 4K.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#67

Post by rpedela »

eterm wrote: post #8

What bothers me about 4k is the switching of terms. 4k makes it sound like it has 4 times the vertical resolution of 1080p, but for pure marketing reasons, suddenly instead of the 4k referring to vertical resolution as 1080 did, it refers to horizontal resolution, so is really only twice the horizontal resolution of the 1920 that 1080p had. Overall that's 4 times the pixels because of squaring, but still!

The term 4k has been around much longer than 1080p, etc. It is a term from computer graphics and the movie industry which means 4096x2160 (17:9 ratio) or 4096x3072 (4:3 ratio). I have helped build, test, and used "4k" tiled wall displays for scientific visualization. It is cool that you can now just buy a single monitor for the same purpose.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#68

Post by tbrake »

pbreit wrote: post #48

Has anyone tried the 39" Seiki on a Mac? At $389 seems like an easier purchase. Plus it doubles as a TV. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889522...

Two people at work have them. I found it just slightly too small when watching them use a 4x 1920x1080 setup with DiplsayFusion.

I decided to try a 50" TCL 4k display. I find I don't mind the 30Hz refresh rate as I don't game on it. However I do find it just a tad too big.

I believe the sweet spot is somewhere around 44" or 45" for 4k-tv-as-a-monitor but absolutely no one is making one in that range. And if I could just get that curved, I think it would be perfect.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#69

Post by alexqgb »

enos_feedler wrote: post #43
programminggeek wrote: post #5

4K is going to really not matter much for a while simply because the average computer doesn't have good enough graphics to make good use of it. The resolution jump is huge and so you need a lot more GPU memory and processing power to do the same things at a higher resolution. Games are now really taking good advantage of 1080p, so we are another 5-10 years away from 4k being a real thing in terms of mainstream gaming…

I think this makes it a perfect opportunity for Apple to swoop in with Retina-based iMacs. It plays right into their style of curating all the hardware components and support developers via their SDKs to create a beautiful 4k experience for end-users.

A 27" 4k touch-screen iMac would be perfect.

Re: The best 4K monitor doesn’t exist yet

#70

Post by qwerta »

mortenjorck wrote: post #20

...though you’d be foolish to buy a 24-inch 4K display, we can only hope that Intel and Samsung’s ambitions can push down prices on larger displays. Unless you're a Mac user, in which case you'd be foolish to buy anything else. Reposting from my comment last year: At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which sits right between Retina and non-Retina densities. This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one…

I guess as KDE user I was foolish to buy 3x30" :-). Setting font size works just fine...
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