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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I apologize if this is an incredibly stupid question, but why do these monitors cost so much? As I understand it, you can buy a good 4k TV for considerably less, so what features of this monitor make it a better deal?

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I've been using a Samsung 40" 4k TV as my main monitor for development work for about 8 months and it's been great for me.

A couple caveats -- Because I don't game or do graphics work, I don't know or care about color reproduction. I made sure to get a TV, graphics card, and cable that supported 4k@60hz with 4:4:4 chroma so the text is perfectly sharp and the refresh is not obtrusive. It's not hard to find a Samsung TV around $350 that supports that, but as far as I could tell, I had to go up to a GTX1050 graphics card to get that. I sit between 24 and 28" away from the monitor so the text is readable to me at full resolution. At that distance, I do have to turn my head to comfortably read text in the corners of the TV, especially the upper corners. In practice, that means I keep monitoring-type applications such as CPU charts, Datadog graphs, etc., in one of those corners for quick reference. While I still have two 1920x1080 monitors on either side of the TV, it's quite nice to be able to open up on my main monitor a huge IDE window and, when necessary, put 3-4 normal-sized windows next to each other for comparison work.

Does 60 hz keep windows from lagging when moved?

I detect no lag when moving windows around. It might not (or might -- I simply don't know) be good enough for gamers, but it's definitely smooth enough for development, document, or web browsing (aka productivity) tasks.

144Hz monitors do produce a very noticeable difference for gaming if you can rival the refresh rate with in-game FPS, outside of gaming I've only found it noticeable when moving windows about.

For productivity I'd go for the 40" 2160p over a lower resolution higher refresh panel.

You might be thinking of the issue early adopters had with TVs that only did 4K/30 over HDMI. At 60Hz, it's like any other computer monitor.

Any chance of a picture of your Monitor setup? - I'd love to see it.

I just bought (today) a 32" 1080p monitor and I'm lovin' it. I think it's more productive to use a single big screen then set up a two monitor setup.

My old setup consisted of two monitors, one 23" and one 21". One day I realized that my 23" monitor could not reproduce colors. I needed to photoshop a picture. I sent the retouched version to my phone, but as I couldn't see the color depth on the 23" one, the image looked ugly on the better screen. At that time I learnt not to buy the cheapest monitor, just by looking at its size and resolution. So, I sold that monitor, and bought a 32" 1080p monitor at a bargain price.

Of course it would be better if I could buy a 1440p monitor at this size, (or even 4K OMG :)). But considering my budget this was all I could purchase.

I had serious doubts about the pixel density, however there was nothing to be afraid of. In usual tasks (e.g. browsing, writing code in emacs, terminal) nothing disturbs my eye, it's beautiful. However, if I open a 1080p youtube video fullscreen, it looks like as if it were a high quality SD video, because of the pixel density. I am standing close to the monitor, and although I cannot see any pixel points, I can notice the difference.

I bought my monitor for 900 Turkish Lira, equivalant to 254 dollars and I think it is a great investment.

Here's an image of it while I was working on 3 or 4 documents for a non-development task: https://ibb.co/bWUYh5

I was expecting something much bigger, that doesn't look close to 40".

I think the fact that the 27" monitors next to it are closer to the camera in that photo makes the TV look artificially smaller. It absolutely dwarfs the 27" monitors. If you're close to any store that carries 40" 4k TVs, though, just go there and stand 28" away from one. I think you'll see what I'm saying about having to turn your head to comfortably read text in the corners, something that has never been the case for me with smaller monitors.

Model # of the Tv?

Mine is a 40" Samsung UN40KU6300 though Samsung appears to rev its model lineup frequently so they may have already released a successor to this model. It was a little difficult to confirm that it supported 4k@60hz with 4:4:4 chroma, but I relied on the experiences of some folks on an audio/video forum who confirmed that they had been able to run with those settings. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the forum or have it in my browsing history. I do wish manufacturers would make that information easier to come by though it's certainly a tiny minority of consumers that know or care about those kinds of specs.

Thank you!

rtings.com is a TV review site that is superb for finding such details, they test for 4:4:4 chroma specifically along with input lag in each mode and one of their sub-cores is "use as a PC monitor". A valuable resource.

Same here. I bought a Philips BDM4065UC monitor in 2015 (40 inch, 3840x2160 resolution) for 740 € (in Germany) and I'm loving it. The only cave-at with that model is that reaction time is a bit slow (I would guess 5 ms between full black and full white).

When I replace it, the replacement will be the same size and resolution, but I'll probably go for OLED and HDR-10 or better.

I happened to buy the same, and import it from Germany to the UK.

Was very excited for it as it featured a very similar DPI to a 27" 1440p Korean import, coming from 3+ 1080p monitors originally the lack of bezels was incredible.

It's not built for gaming at all though, extreme screen tearing and poor response times has me now looking to replace the 27" 1440p Korean import with something >144Hz and G-Sync, before replacing the Philips BDM40.

The tearing is the monitor's fault? I'd noticed some tearing, but attributed it to driver issues.

Yeah, I got that Philips too. For games 40 inch at 4K resolution is really a lot more practical then 38 inch with an odd resolution, and it's cheaper too.

It's designed for graphic design and other display-critical tasks, so it is calibrated to 99% sRGB color space. What it looks like on this monitor will be what it should look like in print and on the best of every other display. Plus, it's the UltraSharp top-end model, so all the mechanical construction will be top notch.

TVs, on the other hand, are designed to show the most oversaturated, "vibrant" colors on the demo loop on the show-room wall. And mechanically, they're designed to hang on the wall and never be touched.

Plus it's curved.

I have an UltraSharp and it's fucking rubbish. Half of the screen has a yellow tint, and it has dark corners. Obviously support says it's "within spec".

Not sure why this is getting downvoted... Seems relevant information to me.

He doesn't mention the model number, plus it's a new account, so there's little trust that what he's saying is true. (I didn't downvote)

> so it is calibrated to 99% sRGB color space. What it looks like on this monitor will be what it should look like in print and on the best of every other display.

That’s completely useless for graphic design. sRGB is defined as the lowest common denominator of CRTs on the market in the early 90s.

Actual monitors for graphic design purposes, every TV released in 2017, and most new gaming monitors use instead AdobeRGB or DCI-P3 colorspace or even Rec.2020, which is what is also used in cinemas.

For comparison, this is 100% sRGB (what you claimed is "for graphic design" vs. 100% Rec.2020 "what most new TVs and gaming monitors support"): https://dotcolordotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/rec2020-v...

I still use an old 30 inch model from 15 years ago and it's only just now starting to break down, so that's another thing to think about .

Similar! I'm still using an Apple 30" Cinema display I bought in 2005.

Anyway, it makes sense that displays should have a much longer life span than desktops - which is one reason I don't fancy something like the iMac.

The pricing is so odd. For $300 more, you can get a monitor with _much_ better resolution (5120x2880), though in a smaller screen size.

It's called an iMac.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac/27-inch

5K 27" displays are much less than this.

5K 27” with wide color gamut and good calibration? Please post links here.

For photo / graphics work, wide gamut and calibration are important. For text editing, less so.

High DPI is important for me, though.

LG 5K 27" display. 100% coverage of P3 gamut. $1299.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HKN62/lg-ultrafine-5k-dis...

This is a good display, and price has gone down. But anyway to connect it to a Windows 10 / nVidia PC and get the full 5K resolution? No GPU that I’m familiar with has support for USB-C.

MSI NVIDIA GTX1080Ti GPU with USB-C: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/57725/msi-first-graphics-card-...

Interesting! Too bad already bought a 1080Ti. Definitely good news for future purchases, though.

Not to mention all 2017 Macs are also 10-bits-per-channel, as well as P3, so they have “wide” color and “deep” color.

This screen is much bigger (37.5" vs 27"), has a better refresh rate (75Hz vs 60Hz), and is curved. All of those things correspond with higher price for both the panel itself and the resulting product that contains it.

* removed mention of FreeSync as this display lacks it

This does not have FreeSync

Quite right, updated

Why do people want curved displays. They get glare from evey angle, and the image is distorted.

I can't understand it either

Some people want a single screen to always be the same distance. And most curved monitors geared towards business users are anti-glare as this one is.

It's not odd. The size is what makes this expensive. It's 10 inches more screen, and curved to boot (which you may not care about, but it does affect cost).

> curved to boot (which you may not care about, but it does affect cost)

Not too long ago the curved models used to be cheaper with big discounts, at least for TV's, because nobody wanted to have a curved TV.

I have a 5k iMac myself, but for my work, which is Linux based, I would rather have that wide-screen. The iMac for sure has the way better font rendering, but the real estate is that of a 27" screen. With Linux, HiDpi support isn't quite there yet - so for now the 38" screen gives you the larger desktop.

> but the real estate is that of a 27" screen

By default. A couple of clicks in Preferences will get you higher or very-high-indeed effective real estate.

10 years ago, I might have agreed to you :). But at a certain age, you are happy if you can focus on the default size resolution.

Internet is full of opinions.

A recent positive: https://www.techspot.com/article/1439-using-4k-tv-as-desktop...

A negative from 2014:

http://www.itworld.com/article/2832687/consumerization/don-t...

and some discussion:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/28...

The main headache seems to be blurry fonts which probably mean a lack of 4:4:4 chroma support or the inability to enable it.

I cannot speak for 4K TVs, but as I was making a research for my own purchase I found the following differences between monitors and TVs.

TVs are said to be configured to display the best-looking colors, monitors try to stay true to the real color.

TVs have an immensely higher refresh rate, 50hz/60hz usually suffice for a TV. But on monitors we speak of milliseconds. The refresh rate makes a lot of difference, if you intend to game on your computer/monitor. An e-sport professional Redittor claims he had improved his playing performance multiple-folds after switching to a monitor instead of TV. (https://www.reddit.com/r/FIFA/comments/5whb9v/did_the_change...)

Other than these differences and the occasional overscan/underscan problems on older televisions, I personally see no reason to prefer a Monitor over a TV, if there is huge price difference. If the price difference is minor, I'd opt for a monitor.

Refresh rate and response time are different. Refresh rate is how often a new frame is displayed, i.e. 50/60/144Hz. Response time is the amount of time it takes for the display to process a frame and display it, i.e. 1/2/4/16ms.

I stand corrected.

  >>Over a decade has passed since the LCD monitor unceremoniously ousted the boxy CRT monitor into obsolescence, but with that ousting came a small problem: CRT monitors redrew every frame from scratch, and this was baked into the fundamentals of how PCs sent information to the screen. Monitors redrew the screen with a refresh rate of 100 Hz, (100 times a second), and they were silky smooth.

  >>LCD monitors don’t have this problem, because the pixels don’t need to be refreshed.  
  Instead, they update individual pixels with new colors, and each of those updates takes a certain amount of time depending on what the change is. 
  The response time refers to how long this change takes. LCDs started with a 60-Hz refresh rate but a response time of about 15 milliseconds (ms).

For more information on the subject: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/refresh-rates-vs-response-times...

There's also factors like input lag that are separate from display refresh that can be a problem for people playing action games. Even casual players can notice some high input delay from time to time (we're into the 100ms+ range) so it's a good idea to check the display's input lag if games are anywhere near a possibility. While I like my 34UM95P for professional purposes it's really not that great for games that are much more than interactive movies. In contrast, nothing stops me from using an Acer x34 monitor for coding 95% of the time.

And it double-sucks, because here in Italy we have to pay "TV tax", even if you don't have the TV service hooked up. Modern LCD/OLED TVs are perfectly fine for most tasks, except maybe high-end FPS gaming. The colors are good, the refresh rates are decent.

That's an ownership tax on tv's as there's an ownership tax on cars. The fact that the proceedings of the Tv ownership tax pay for the public (national) tv service is just a side factor. As very few people were actually paying it, the Tv ownership tax has been embedded on the electricity bill. _Italians, good people_

E basta co sta storia del canone!

È una tassa, pagatela e smettetela di lamentarvi.

I was just saying that above, it's an ownership tax. A lot more people are paying it as it's now embedded on the electricity bill, so it's useless to recommend to pay it as it's now been basically enforced. I believe you should comment in english if you wish to be understood.

It's like how megapixels are a bad measure of camera quality. This is a pro monitor with accurate color reproduction, low fading on the edges, minimal dead pixels, etc.

I know someone who uses a 1080p TV as a monitor for his gaming PC. The picture quality is poor; it's too blurry to be tolerable for work. That's okay in this particular case, since he uses a different PC for work, but that one needs a proper monitor.

Granted that's 1080p, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same thing is true of 4k.

I think that the 24:10 aspect ratio alone will cause higher prices because of much lower economies of scale for the panel...

I Googled a good answer for you:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xsaaw/e...

Related musing: why is it seemingly easier to make very high resolution small screen (phones) than large screens of the same resolution ? Instinctevly I would think smaller leds are harder to make, but it doesn't seem it's the case ?

There is a greater failure rate the larger you make apanel. a great many are discarded from production lines. If the screen is smaller then it is less likely to incur error.

Also that cost is hidden in a phone, i'm not sure what the value of screen components would be.

A large defective panel can be cut down into smaller panels most of which will have no defects. You can sell most of your faulty large panels as small panels, but there is no extra source of large panels.

Well the point stands that statistically its much easier to make a smaller panel than a larger panel. A larger panel being n times smaller ones.

I'm going to guess the square law? This monitor has about 75 times the screen area of a typical phone.

Right, and a Phone could spend $50 to build that screen on a $700 device (not that they do). Just a raw 75 * $50 is near $4000, which would explain a high price.

The parent's point is that making a larger screen with _the same pixel count_ should be much cheaper, not one with 75x the resolution.

I could be wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That is if it is the pixels per unit that lead to cost, vs the size of the display itself.

Obviously it is harder to make a 1 inch x 1 inch display with 1 million pixels vs 1000. But maybe the difference from 600ppi to 200ppi is not enough to matter...

The probability of manufacturing a bad pixel is some constant plus a function of the area of that pixel, and not the number of neighbours it has.

Also, incidentally, I'd happily pay a bit of premium for a TV / Monitor that has good image quality but no other features. Perhaps not 2x as much, but 20% might be doable.

Probably a lot less volume being sold on ultra wide monitor panels. Therefore higher price.

High-end monitors are niche products. 40" TVs aren't.

HDMI 2.0 is a pain compared to DP, other than that, there's almost no reason not to buy a TV if you just care about office use. I've been using a Samsung UHD TV for almost two years.

Monitors are designed to be viewed at close range, from multiple near angles. TVs are designed to be viewed several meters away, at roughly the same angle.

TVs play content of the same frame rate, so there's no reason for them to be any more precise. Monitors can go at very high frame rate as the content can be very fast paced, especially gaming monitors.

Freesync/gsync also integrates with the graphics card to reduce lag. This is the most expensive part of these monitors.

This is not a gaming monitor, it only does 60Hz. And it does not have freesync. The article mentions both facts.

Oh I skimmed it to the stats. It was showing a competitor monitor's stats. Still the same principle.

Honestly, it just looks like price gouging. You can get a 40 inch LG IPS 4K TV for half the price.

And this Dell isn't even 10 bit IPS, which is what monitors for professional graphics use, it's the standard 8bit IPS, very likely made by LG.

It's curved though.

Several reasons:

- TV's are generally low framerate, as much as they'd like to claim 240FPS, it's mostly all 30FPS, with software interpolation to increase the frames.

- Bulk. TV's are solid in higher numbers, justifying the lower price

- Distance from face. Your 60" TV can be two smaller panels "glued" together. Not noticeable from watching distance, but having a monitor so close to your face, you're more likely to notice the millisecond tearing.

"- TV's are generally low framerate, as much as they'd like to claim 240FPS, it's mostly all 30FPS, with software interpolation to increase the frames."

That makes absolutely no sense. If the panel is incapable of 240 refreshes per second, how does software interpolation "increase the frames"? You are confusing content and panel.

5min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxvu7qf6rDw

Mainly it is that for more than 60fps you need dual-link DVI, display port or HDMI 2.0 and you won't find many TVs with either of those. So even though the screen can do more than 60fps the input and processor can't take it.

That’s not what was said in the comment. Obviously, the point of a interpolation is to take a signal with little samples and increase those. What the comment said was that the hardware (panel) was not capable, so the software somehow was able to do it. It makes no sense.

> What the comment said was that the hardware (panel) was not capable

The word 'panel' is not in that part of the comment.

The hardware is incapable of getting high fps signals through most of the pipeline.

More like: the panel supports 240hz, but you can't get 240hz content into the TV (they don't exist and require high end interfaces), so you interpolate 30hz (which you do have) to 240 hz. Why go through all this trouble for fake 240hz? Probably because it sounds good as marketing.

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