4K Displays Ready For Prime Time 207
An anonymous reader writes "After the HD revolution, display manufacturers rolled out gimmick after gimmick to try to recapture that burst of purchasing (3-D, curved displays, 'Smart' features, form factor tweaks, etc). Now, we're finally seeing an improvement that might actually be useful: 4K displays are starting to drop into a reasonable price range. Tech Report reviews a 28" model from Asus that runs $650. They say, 'Unlike almost every other 4K display on the market, the PB287Q is capable of treating that grid as a single, coherent surface. ... Running games at 4K requires tons of GPU horsepower, yet dual-tile displays don't support simple scaling. As a result, you can't drop back to obvious subset resolutions like 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 in order to keep frame rendering times low. ... And single-tile 4K at 30Hz stinks worse, especially for gaming. The PB287Q solves almost all of those problems.' They add that the monitor's firmware is not great, and while most options you want are available, they often require digging through menus to set up. The review ends up recommending the monitor, but notes that, more importantly, its capabilities signify 'the promise of better things coming soon.'"
Where's The Content? (Score:3, Interesting)
So I can get a 4k display for less than $700. Where can I get content worth watching on that display? Not only worth watching, but is somehow made better by all those extra pixels.
All that aside, seems like it would make for a really nice PC monitor.
Re:Where's The Content? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure David Attenborough's voice would sound even better in 4k
Samsung UD590 is nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
I got it recently, and it's got 4k at 60FPS, in a 28" size - great for programming.
Review link [ubergizmo.com]
Just to try it, I was able to get all the single-player PC Ultima games running in about half the screen real estate:
ALL THE ULTIMAS [imgur.com]
It's around $600 when its on sale, so I think it just about matches the model slashvertised here.
Ryan Fenton
OSX is not ready (Score:4, Interesting)
What surprised me is the poor OSX support for 4K. Windows can scale everything (although I had to manually add a display mode to the NVidia advanced settings to even get 1080p!?), but OSX cannot. I am running it on a recent MacBook Pro 15" with discrete graphics.
The problem is that you cannot chose to run at a lower resolution. Display preferences lists ONLY the native resolution. Using QuickRes (a 3rd party add-on for more resolution choices), none of the lower resolutions work, at least until you go all they way down to 1080p
In particular, you cannot use HiDPI on an external display (where the application sees a lower resolution, but the OS renders fonts at full resolution). (No, it does not help to enable HiDPI with Quartz Debug, nor with the QuickRes "Enable HiDPI" button). So the menus and all applications are absolutely tiny.
You could adjust the size of everything on a per-application basis, but then they won't look right when you're working on the laptop display, unless you use something like QuickRes to run the laptop display at its native resolution. I guess I will try that for a few days. So I mainly use my older, power-hungry 2550x1600 30" displays.
If I could just select the highest of the HiDPI resolutions available for the laptop display in the System Preferences, and mirror *exactly* that to this display, I would be a happy camper. You can't do that.
I understand an upcoming release will improve support with HiDPI on external displays. But as it stands, I could not recommend a 4K display for a Mac - or a Mac for a 4K display.
Re:Where's The Content? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah. I am not trying to be a douche but I am undoubtedly succeeding. *sigh* Such is life. Here is where I am coming from:
While the Commodore Amiga 500 was not my first computer, it was the one that brought me very deeply into computing. I first hooked it up to an NTSC television set. The fonts were extremely jagged and the images were extremely blurry. I should probably add that the color was absolutely terrible too. But it worked. I fell deeply in love with my Amiga 500. It was the most awesome computer on the planet. It had a flat 32 bit memory space and preemptive multitasking. It was god compared to the standard IBM PC and Microsoft DOS.
I eventually was able to afford to buy a used "real" monitor for it. Essentially the same resolution but much higher quality. The fonts were still jagged though.
Through the years, I have upgraded my monitors continuously, with one of the best monitors being the Apple 30 inch Cinema Display running at something like 3560x1600 or somesuch. A _very_ nice monitor. Currently, I am using a Samsung 48 inch 1920x1080 screen as a display.
One thing that was common across ALL of the displays is that curves never looked like continuous curves and fonts always looked blocky. It is possible that problem may not be resolution, but I doubt it. I look at photographs of handwriting, images that should show continuous curves, and it still does not look "right". Either it is fuzzy or the pixels intrude.
Maybe I put my face too close to the monitor. Maybe I just expect too much. Maybe I notice things that other people do not notice. Regardless, No matter how much anti-aliasing I use in Grand Theft Auto IV, lines that are not perfectly vertical or horizontal have a staircase effect. No matter what type of font hinting I use, fonts seem blocky and or fuzzy. Perhaps 1920x1080 is enough and I just want too much.
4K screens look gorgeous. I look at them at the Sony store in the mall. My eyes are still drawn to the imperfections in the red headed girl's hair (in the demo) despite the fact that it is mathematically and scientifically impossible to see them. *shrug*