The UP3214Q is 3840x2160, but it's huge, 31.5", so it's only ~140 DPI.
Neither of these are mind-blowing, especially the U2414H. I suppose it is nice to see >100 DPI on a really large monitor, given how stagnated/shitty external monitors have been for so long.
But, still, doesn't quite seem "front page of HN" exciting?
It's exciting because there is movement at the top end of the general monitor market (ignoring specialist stuff like medical imaging), for the first time in almost a decade. Dell moving into this new segment is particularly important because they make excellent monitors as a rule.
Movement is terribly slow though. I remember keeping an eye on anything greater than 1920x1200 (16:10) since I got my monitor at this resolution 8 years ago. The best thing has been 2560x1600 that are still priced higher [1] than the price I paid for this one 8 years ago (~$800).
To put it another way, after 8 years, you still can't buy a 24" monitor at a resolution above 1920x1200. And when I saw this link, I thought the drought was finally over -- only to realize that it's still not.
So yeah, this news didn't really excite me.
It seems that display technology advances much more slowly than that of any other component, especially on pixel density of larger (20+ inch) displays.
Check out the ASUS PB278Q. $549.00 on Amazon right now, 27", 2560x1440, 16:9 ratio. I upgraded from a HP LP2475w (24", 1920x1200) and it is a night and day difference.
I now have two of the ASUS monitors (one at home and one at work) and could not be happier. I run them on a $6 Monoprice Mini DisplayPort->DisplayPort off a Retina MBP.
Unless you need 16:10 for some reason, the ASUS are the best deal around right now.
I picked myself up an Auria EQ276W earlier this year and couldn't be happier. It is a 27" 2560x1440 IPS (16:9), same as the Asus, but it can be found for $399. I did replaced the stock stand with an HP branded Ergotron LX stand ($80) as the stock stand only had tilt control, though.
I got an Auria, and I think I got a dud based on what my friends say. :( I can see colors shifting on the screen even when clicking different "inbox" tabs inside of Gmail. The text isn't very sharp, it's fuzzy. At first I thought it was because of the AD coating...but now not sure. I'm going to go talk to the place I bought it from, hoping they'll exchange it or something (even though it's been a few months since I purchased).
The point, as you have indirectly struck on, is that everything has stagnated. Movement anywhere is important, because it creates the possibility that improvements will move inwards from the largest and smallest monitor sizes to the mid-to-large-sized monitors where developers do most of their work.
Thought I have a newer monitor (see below), I'm still using a really good Dell 24" (2408) that I bought many, many years ago. I've gone through several computers since, but this monitor's been awesome.
Money spent on good external monitors is well spent, and it actually amazes me more isn't happing on this front on desktop monitors.
that's just another confirmation that PC is dead. nobody is buying desktops, only portables. Businesses still have desks but they mostly care about the bottom line.
It's exciting because there is movement at the top end of the general monitor market, for the first time in almost a decade.
I'm profoundly saddened by the situation. I have been waiting nearly 15 years for DPI to improve. I cut my LCD teeth on the old 110dpi SGI 1600SW monitors. Since then DPI went down and is only now starting to come back up.
But now my near-field eyesight is going and I'll have to start wearing reading-glasses in order to make use of these long overdue improvements. 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps back...
Seriously. If we can have 220+ ppi displays in laptops, and 260+ ppi displays in tablets, why are there no desktop displays which are even 180 or 200 ppi. If the resolution is going to be 3840×2160, I would rather see that in a 20 or 22″ diagonal. Those would be much better for a 2-display setup.
The 24″ 1080p display is some kind of sad joke: we had better pixel density on a comparably sized monitor with the Apple Cinema HD Display in March of 2002! (1920×1200, 23″)
Edit: sure a retina desktop display is going to be very expensive, so maybe there’s not a mainstream market there yet, and margins would have to be high. But it’s disappointing that you can’t find them yet at any price. I’m hoping Apple makes some moves in higher resolution desktop displays sometime in 2014, considering they now have machines designed for pumping so many pixels.
In the medical monitor world there are higher pixel density displays at a a much higher price: the 5-10MP (21-30") displays from Barco and NEC cost between $12,000 and $20,000, and slightly more for 510(k) approved models. Some of them are grayscale only (mammography), but increasingly we're seeing good IPS displays with 30bit color for pathology.
It's not that the technology doesn't exist, but the device yields for these parts are so low that only people who absolutely need the pixel density (life or death decisions) are actually able to afford them.
I don't buy this line of argument. I'll accept that the flawless yield goes down, but a few dead pixels amongst millions isn't the end of the world, especially if they're very small pixels. We have pretty perfect small panels (the Nexus 7 has the same resolution as the 24" on my desk).
If the yield y is high enough on those small panels to make them as cheap as they are, and on the slightly bigger panels that go into laptops, why would the yield on a display n times larger be lower than y^n? Because they would need to be lower than that IMO to justify 5 figure prices.
I think the TV industry has made 1080p panels so cheap from mass manufacturing that they've created a big price / performance gap, and manufacturers have believed that consumers don't want the higher quality enough to pay the premium considering this competition.
It doesn't help that most of the software ecosystem hasn't been ready for scaling.
Fabrication of any kind of semiconductor is full of fixed costs. Not only are the yield rates low, but your cost per panel increases dramatically since you have fewer units to spread over all your tooling and fab buildout.
It's also risky as hell - making a high-DPI LCD panel isn't like making a rocking chair in your garage, there is an enormous startup cost.
It takes a large measure of guaranteed demand for anyone to drop that kind of cash. The only people who have been able to move the needle on this sort of tech and fab are Apple, Google, Samsung, et al. They're the only ones who can go up to a OEM and say "I want you to build this brand new part, to these specs, and I can guarantee you millions of units".
Short of that the risk is insanity, and the OEMs themselves are unable to create a market for these new parts themselves. If they came up with an innovative, new LCD panel, they'd still have to wait for someone else to throw it in a shipping product before real demand materializes. I think there's a rational reason why the big, vertically integrated companies are the ones driving new panels.
Woah, wat? Who's dropping $20,000 for a monitor in pathology? Are these Leica branded to go with their new Aperio scanners? I work with some of the researchers who helped aperio develop get their first studies. let me tell you, they aren't using $20k monitors.
Heh, you caught me. Barco is trying to market these fancy monitors for pathology as the slide scanner wave rises. Really these are rebranded versions of the displays they sell for mammography/radiology applications.
There are a few deployments of these things, but mostly the smaller (cheaper) displays[1]. I think Ventana (formerly Bioimagene) also used to ship Barco displays with their Virtuoso package[2]
Nobody says that the display vendors have been successful with this marketing so far; the people I've worked with are also not buying these things. 17-19" Dell 2MP will do...
NEC has 21.5" 5MP (2048 x 2560) displays[1], and Barco[2] and EIZO have 30" 10MP (4096 x 2560) displays. These come out to 154 and 161 PPI respectively; you're right that it's not the 180-200ppi target listed, but it's still higher than anything consumer grade.
It only makes sense the closer the viewer distance the higher the PPI. I view my cell phone normally at less than 8" away. My laptop at maybe 14" away. My desktop at 30"+ away. For people with less than great vision even 1080P at 24" is pushing things. The places you see larger PPI monitors are in medical situations etc. where people need to be able to get much closer to the screen than normal use to examine high quality images.
The news is this: First computer monitor capable of 60Hz 4K arrives. Previous 4K monitors have been 24Hz. That opens up a number of important markets including 4K playback of video and 4K gaming.
Sure this isn't a retina display. That would be a different market.
The ASUS does not do 120Hz. It does not even do 60Hz unless you use two DisplayPort cables and drive the left half of the screen as Monitor 1 and the right half as Monitor 2.
Hmm, actually TomsHardware had it running at 60hz with two HDMI cables, but the article points out the challenge is the display card. The spec on the ASUS glass is 8 mS pixels, you can only change a by refreshing the screen, if you are changing them every 8 mS you are refreshing the screen every 8 mS which is half of 16 mS or 120Hz. Typical 60Hz displays have 12mS pixel change times.
Now I'll certainly concede that running 30bits of color per pixel to a 3840 x 2160 screen at 120hz will require 3.7GBs of bandwidth but each display port can provide 2.16GBs [2] for a total of 4.32GBs across both panels.
It will be interesting once the "4K generation" of graphics card hits the street to see what this monitor can do.
[1] "Asus’ $3500 PQ321Q is one of the only 4K screens capable of 60 Hz. But in order to achieve that refresh rate, you’re forced to run either one DisplayPort or two HDMI cables between your PC and the monitor." -- http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pq321q-4k-gaming,3620.ht...
[2] "The DisplayPort connector can have 1, 2, or 4 differential data pairs (lanes) in a Main Link, each with a raw bit rate of 1.62, 2.7, or 5.4 Gbit/s per lane with self-clock running at 162, 270, or 540 MHz. Data is 8b/10b encoded where each 8 bits of information is encoded with a 10 bit symbol. So the effective data rates after decoding are 1.296, 2.16, and 4.32 Gbit/s per lane (or 80% of the total)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort
Erm, I pretty sure the old 17" crt Dell monitor at home was able to deliver SXGA (1280x1024) -- and even if we assume a generous 16" of picture, that's over 100dpi.
edit: It would claim to do 1600x1200 as well, IIRC -- but that wasn't really usable.
Most desktop OSes (except OS X) don't scale well. At super-high DPIs, everything will look tiny. This is why it doesn't make sense to get a high-DPI display -- especially if you care about your eyes.
What don't you like about OS X's Hi-DPI scaling? It works pretty sensibly for me -- I actually prefer to run my rMBP at ¼ native, because the text is astonishingly sharp.
That's the genius of Apple's Retina - they jumped straight from 1x to 2x with nothing in between. Even multiples are much easier to work with and give a better user experience.
HiDPI scaling is only useful if you're working on a retina 2x screen. On a larger, 27", everything is just small. It's be nice to have big monitors with lots of working space, but have icons, fonts, etc, scale to be a useful size, independent of the actual DPI.
OS X sucks at scaling. I still can't change global font sizes, so I have to rely on individual programs (and hope the devs did a decent job implementing font scaling in their app). Sure, I can scale the size of the dock, but that seems to be about it.
I remember in Windows, being able to adjust font/icon sizes, so I'm not quite sure I ever understand when people say OS X is awesome for scaling well and Windows sucks. Maybe most are just referring to the doubling of everything for OS X retina displays?
Enlightenment for Linux has built-in scaling that blows OS X out of the water. I also used Windows 8.1 on my MBPr and it is making HUGE progress in terms of HiDPI support.
It's not about a high DPI, it's about maintaining the same DPI with the scale of the monitor. A 32" 1080 monitor would be just as useless to me as a 23" 4k. But if you scale the monitor large while adding real estate it's amazing. I bought a 27" 2560x1440 and replaces my three monitor setup with one.
Using Apples definition of Retina 140dpi is Retina quality when viewing from approximately 60cm. That is about how far I sit from my screen, 140 would definitely be great.
The UP3214Q is 3840x2160, but it's huge, 31.5", so it's only ~140 DPI.
Neither of these are mind-blowing, especially the U2414H. I suppose it is nice to see >100 DPI on a really large monitor, given how stagnated/shitty external monitors have been for so long.
But, still, doesn't quite seem "front page of HN" exciting?