Where are all the high-resolution desktop displays? | Hacker News Reader

Where are all the high-resolution desktop displays?

extremetech.com

43 pointsyarianluis52 comments

I current use three 3840x2160 monitors (4K displays) (55" each) which in my opinion is a huge upgrade to my previous six 30" Apple cinema display configuration.

I got mine from IDT (http://toshibadisplays.com) for around 30k USD each a couple years ago. I think they might be considerably less now especially with the new 32" 4K displays coming out in 2013.

The resolution is split so every display is basically 1920x2160 x2. The hard part is driving these since each one is considered two monitors by the host OS. I use a Quadro Plex 7000 to power two of them and just use my third one with Synergy on a second machine.

Nvidia has a tool called Mosiac which allows you to turn the screens into one big screen. I also think the ATI Eyeinfinity cards are an option but I personally never tried those.

I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining working on so much screen estate, I think it would rather distract me. However I'd like to try some flight simulators there ;).

What field do you work in?

id like to know what are you work in to justify that kind of setup :)

I, too, would like to learn more about a) why you are using such a setup, and b) how having so much screen real estate affects how you work.

I consider my line of work a general technologist. I find I have to consume huge amounts of information so I can advise the people I work with. Though for programming or reverse engineering its amazing. I love the fact I can run Visual Studio on one screen and still have the ability to have WinDbg and IDA Pro as well as the app I am working on all running and visible as well as keep whatever dashboards open at the same time. I also like to have at least one Linux virtual machine open simply because I prefer Linux for quick tasks so I always have a terminal open and ready to go (VMs really are awesome for compartmentalizing but its a whole another topic).

Its really hard to describe the effect of this size of screen and resolution. You can consume information at a much faster and natural rate as compared to a smaller display that is high resolution (ie: a 2880x1800 retina). I think your brain has to use extra processing power to scale the fonts up or something or maybe the patterns your brain uses to build the letters and words just work better when its clearly visible without any thinking. Who knows... I just know it increases my productivity leaps and bounds.

I figure for something that I spend over a third of my life in front of I want them to make me as efficient as possible. Some people like to buy cars. I like to buy things to be more efficient and these monitors help me do this.

BTW, All of these mount nicely on a geek desk without the top (the smaller of the two versions they sell). They just fit perfectly. So I use four Geek desks.. 3 for the monitors and one in the center. If you want an amazing desk setup that is the way to do it. That way you can sit or stand when you work.

Can you quote the make and model of these monitors? The site you linked only seems to list 1920x1080 displays.

Even though they sell them as Toshiba monitors they ship you Chilin brand model ST-HB561X. Here is a PDF of the specs: www.chilinsolutions.com/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=51570 according to the rep they are the same.

It may also be worth noting that these operate at 50 Hz (I didn't see it int he specs above). Which is fine for me for pretty much anything. I mention this because 10 years ago or so I was using an IBM T220 with a refresh rate of 24 Hz with a similar resolution and it was brutal. Though I honestly never am bothered by the 50 hz refresh and only notice it if I am trying to push some game to max settings.

I declare BS. I'm sitting on my couch looking at my 55" TV right now. I can not contemplate a work environment where three 55" monitors would be usable for coding. You'd spend way too much time swivelling your head back and forth at any distance that text would be reasonable to read. Either that, or you have the monitors so far away that it's like using 30" monitors at low res.

In a NOC? Maybe. Day trader? Possibly. Not someone using a computer with the information density of source code.

Distance is 3 1/2 feet for the front monitor and 3 feet for the side monitors but with a bit more angle on the sides. Also, worth noting for me I find I use the left and middle one 90% of the time and the 3rd one is mostly for dashboards and email etc. I would assume that is probably very similar any any multi monitor setup.

I am trying to relate to your comment on your 55" TV. I guess the best way I can explain it is If its like any other TV out there it has a resolution of 1920x1080 at 1080p. So if you tried to do any work at any distance it would be useless like you stated above. As a thought experiment take your TV and chop it into four sections and take your TVs resolution and put it in one of those squares. That is what 3840x2160 resolution is like. Its any easy way to remember 4K as 4 times your 1080p resolution (though it really means 4K as in 4000). Hopefully that helps explain it better. If not just let me know.

First up, my initial comment was a bit harsh. Sorry. Should have been phrased more like a question.

Here's what I was imagining: I've worked with 30" monitors in the past and I found that there was a trade off between what I could view at one time vs panning my eyes around. I can entirely take in a 15" mbp at about arms length, but I have to move my head slightly to see from bottom corner to opposite top corner on a 30".

I'm guessing a 55" inch screen is about the size of 12 mbp screens in a 3x4 block (based on the size of my 55" tv). At about 3' away I would only ever be able to see about 1/3 max. Multiple that by 2 screens and my chin would swivel from shoulder to shoulder to see two of them.

More screen real estate is better in general, I just can't imagine it's comfortable to work with so much space I need to move around to see it all.

That makes sense. I don't think I really swivel that much as I just slightly turn my head which gives me basically two monitors of screen. So basically I have my main screen which is full view. I turn my head slightly to the left and I see half the left screen. Same goes with the right.

The other half of the screen on both the left and right sides are used for less common things like email, dashboards , etc (though most of my right side is used for that too.. its a lot of space hehe).

So in reality you may have three big screens but you are really only using two without actually swiveling your head (one + half + half).

If I want to use the far half on either of the side monitors I do tilt (which is why they mostly have static stuff).

Though for everything you need to kind of break it up in sections because your eyes are moving around a lot if you are trying to do stuff with the whole screen (ie: if you play a game its harder because you have to keep looking at the four corners to get all the info), but for programming and other stuff you might use a split screen or triple split and just be working on X file in a part of the screen.

Because the demand for HiDPI desktop displays isn't there yet. You would buy one, and so would I, but overall they wouldn't sell much, compared to the standard 1080p panels. We have to wait another year until Apple introduces Retina iMacs, tells everybody how awesome they are and why people absolutely need Retina displays. Then suddenly there will be steep increase in the demand of HiDPI panels, and a few month later every manufaturer starts offering them. If I learned anything the last few years, it's that's how it works.

So, we all agree that "Retina" displays are better? The problem is that it won't become popular until a company, which tends to be Apple, comes along with the right marketing so the average consumer feels the need to spend the extra money on the technology. Personally, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft joined in and promoted HiDPI, for example, with Windows 8.

Apple introduced USB in the later 90's. It took forever before the PC industry adopted it. I don't think anyone has to pay licensing fees for Thunderbolt connectors. How long do we have to wait before every PC ships with a port?

Also, bring back 16:10! Stop putting 1366x768 screens on laptops that are 14, 15 and even 17 inches and saying it's HD! Get off my lawn!

16:10? Let's just go all the way - 16:12!

I see what you did there.

Where are all the high resolution desktop displays? They are stuck in the 90s. Back then I had a 21" CRT that could run at something like 2400x1800. Not all the way to retina but still in a different league than todays screens. It could also run at something like 120Hz refresh rate, but then you had to turn down the resolution to more like 1280x1024.

exactly. I loved those displays, running at at least 90Hz. That in a dual moitor setup was hard on your desk becasue of the weight, but awesome for programming. Being so used to the vast amount of vertical space, I felt sort of let down by the 'now let's make all widescreen displays' movement. 1080 pixels vertically really doesn't do it for me. But maybe it's just me? Sometimes I see people programming, with the editor taking up only half of the screen and the rest all IDE windows and toolbars and whatnot. That's like 15 lines of code on one screen. I don't get it.

Yep, this is why I try to avoid IDEs whenever I can. The best "IDE" is Vim running in Screen in urxvt.

"Amen."

I hope that is not the sole reason you avoid IDE's? Cause any decent IDE can be configured to behave properly and get out of your way on the screen. The example I gave was just to clarify that apparently some people do not seem to bother about vertical space (or don't know any better)

Rotate the screen 90 degrees :)

Also; there's been an international LCD price fixing conspiracy,

That... makes the most sense compared to the other arguments http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/lcd-price-fixi...

This is old, and includes an update mentioning Apple's Retina Macbook Pro, introduced after the article was published.

I think a better question is why nobody else is offering high-res panels on laptops. The Nexus 10 tablet has more pixels than any non-Apple laptop ever produced.

I just bought a $500 laptop for my father and was surprised at how laptop displays haven't gotten much better since I last shopped over 3 years ago. They're all x768, even on 15.6" notebooks. The pixels are easily noticeable on the 15" Samsung I bought for him. I would have thought displays improved over all these years, even on low end laptops, but I guess other than the shift to LED-lit screens a few years ago, not much else has happened outside of MacBooks and some Ultrabooks.

At 500$ I wouldn't be surprised at all. Did you read the article? That's just 200$ over the manufacturing cost of a retina iphone. I'm rather surprised that lenovos retailed at 2500$ are still stuck at low resolutions - and they still have quality control issues like overheating GPUs. People that call out rMBPs as expensive clearly don't get what they're about, there are simply no comparable alternatives at that price point.

Note: Other points critizised such as repairability are very valid however.

Its a good strategy, make the best first impression and the best of everything visible.

Repairability and upgrade costs are hard to SEE at purchase.

Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops? At least this time around they have offered sane maxed out Ram options, so those who know they'll need that in the future can buy it that way - which is what I did. Yes the 16GB option is expensive, but it's still a reasonable price for the value you get (a high chance of plus 2-3 years in lifetime since the build quality is very solid plus the comforting feeling to never care about Ram - fire up your VMs as you like).

Well to be honest - was upgradeability ever a big deal with laptops?

For most people, I imagine not.

I have upgraded the RAM in every laptop I've owned in the past decade, and either upgraded the hard drive, or moved an old one over in most. In my current laptop, I also upgraded the motherboard to one that wasn't quite intended to work so that I could have a UXGA IPS panel and 8GB of RAM in the same machine. I also upgraded the CPU on that board, and will upgrade to a QXGA panel if I can find a good price.

I'm not sure I'd care much about upgradeability if I was selling laptops, but it matters a great deal to me when I'm buying them.

I can't quite believe the bit about the retina iPhone screens being a large cost. If I can buy replacement panels (screen, touch sensor and glass) for under $10 shipped, I highly doubt they cost more than $8 a pop to make.

A replacement LCD and digitizer for an iPhone 5 currently sells for a few hundred dollars:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=shop&q=iphon...

That's insane! You'd be better off getting a replacement iPhone from Apple at those prices. I guess Apple is being tighter with their manufacturers this time around.

It is because the PC industry doesn't innovate. It was driven to commoditization and 4 to 5 percent profit margins.

Until recently, graphics scaling didn't work very well - so high resolution meant tiny icons and text over-running its allocated space.

OS and software vendors didn't fix this because no-one had high resolution displays, and display makers didn't make high resolution displays because everything looked like ass.

I'm not a big apple user, but I'll admit there are times when having the hardware and OS designed under the same command has its advantages.

I'm inclined to think that since Windows 2000 or so, the OS provided the functionality a vendor would have needed to include some sort of zoom-and-smooth software so as to render vector fonts sharply and bitmaps at sane sizes. That nobody made the effort is yet one more symptom of the general lack of courage and originality in the PC market.

It's that the software (Windows primarily) can't adapt for high PPI displays. 1920x1080 displays on laptops were around several years ago.

2048x1536 displays were available on laptops a decade ago[0], and they were IPS. That's a megapixel more than 1920x1080.

I'm sure the inability of Windows to cope with the high resolution gracefully was part of the reason those never really caught on, but there wasn't much of an effort to market them either. Did you know they existed? I barely did, and I pay a great deal of attention to such things. There was no meaningful effort to market them. They were custom-order options that only a few enthusiasts and institutional IT departments would even be aware existed.

My mother knows what a "retina display" is.

[0] If you're curious, the models offering QXGA panels were the NEC Versa P700 and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50p. Such panels can be made to work with several other 15" 4:3 Thinkpad models.

I don't see how they could actively market something that is broken for the majority - most people don't want tiny text and icons.

I'm quite pleased with the el cheapo 2560x1440 Korean 27" IPS panel I bought on eBay a few months back. Set me back less than $300 including shipping to Europe.

It's nowhere near the pixel density of the small devices of course, but it's quite adequate for my use.

If monitors are stuck at 2560x1600 forever because it's "good enough", I'm going to be very disappointed. I'm sure I'm not the only one who sits 10 inches away from his screen.

I don't think you'll need to worry about that. At least a couple manufacturers are working on 4k (3840x2160) monitors. The most promising one I've seen is Sharp's PN-K321, expected to be about $5500 when it comes out [1].

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/27/sharp-pn-k321-4k-igzo-lcd...

Why are 4k monitors and TV's so much more expensive than 1080p ones? If it's priced per pixel, they still should be only around 4x more expensive, but the current prices are much higher. I mean we're even seeing 10" 2560x1600 (2x the pixels) very high quality IPS displays in sub $500 devices, where the 10" display itself is probably $100 at most. So what's going on? Is it just the "rip off the earlier adopter with a 10x-the-cost price tag" strategy at play here?

It's not as simple as charging per pixel. First of all, raising the resolution that high is still fairly new compared to 1080p. Lots of screens are going to come out not 100% perfect. See Catleap as evidence that lots of panels come out with defects even at non-4k resolution.

Second of all, because the screens are harder to make and prices are high because of that, adoption is lower too. With lower adoption comes lower economies of scale which mean higher prices again. So two factors at least that push prices up.

We won't see low prices until they can improve the manufacturing process enough to drop the price, which will increase adoption, which will drop the price, which will increase adoption, etc..

Good point 4x the pixels = 4x more defective pixels, given the same manufacturing.

Given that we're talking about components where more precision is needed, the odds of a defect aren't necessarily the same either.

It's basic economies of scale. --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

So the actual view point is that the intention isn't to "rip off the early adopter". It is that the early adopter isn't subsidized by a product that is produced in volume.

Here is the simple theory: - Buy 1 Custom T-shirt = $50/unit - Buy 10,000 of the same "Custom" T-shirt = $5/unit

Is the person who pays for a custom t-shirt being ripped off? Taking all things into consideration, No.

Have you considered that 4x the pixels means 4x the pixel density? This is going to make them rather more difficult to manufacture, I'd think.

A major factor in the cost is the defect rate. If you consider each pixel to have the same probability of being defective, you'll see that a 4k display (3840 × 2160, 8.3 megapixels) is 4x more likely to have bad pixel than a 1080p display (1920 × 1080, 2.1 megapixels).

So now the manufacturer is throwing out 4 times more units than before AND those units were already more expensive in therms of materials and time. This cost is then passed on to the consumer.

The defect rate is not 4 times as high, it is actually higher than that. If there is some probability x that a single pixel is not defective, the defect-free probability for a display is x^(width * height).

If we choose x to be 99.99999% that a single pixel is not defective, the probability of generating a defect-free 1080p (19201080) display is 81.27%, and the probability of generating a defect-free 4k (38402160) display is only 43.63%. This means that in order to produce one defect-free 1080p display, on average 1.23 displays need to be produced, and on average to produce one defect-free 4k display 2.29 displays must be produced. In pixels, this translates to 2.55e6 and 1.90e7 respectively.

The difference between the two is the number of pixels comprising 7.9377 1080p displays, about 6.4 of which would be expected to be defect free. This should indicate that the raw cost of a defect-free 4k display should be at least 6.4 times the raw cost of a defect-free 1080p display, assuming that a full display is manufactured all-at-once, and there is no interim testing to discard bad panels early, and that the cost-per-pixel of manufacture is a constant. In reality, I would expect the defect-tolerance and the pre-defect cost per pixel of the 4k display to be higher than a 1080p display. There probably is a small early-adopter penalty, but the cost isn't very out of line.

Thanks for the thorough analysis! You are totally right and I was playing too fast and loose.

Typing this on a 27" 2560×1440 I don't see myself needing much more.

Text remains crisp down to sizes much smaller than what I can comfortably read at a normal viewing distance, so there's little I could do with even more pixel estate.

That is not to say that I wouldn't like a display with even higher resolution, but the returns diminish really rapidly from here.

I'm definitely looking forward more to panels improving on other metrics such as contrast, color reproduction and viewing angles (IPS glow).

Prices are insane because monitor manufacturers are the scum of the earth. They are constantly getting in trouble for price fixing.

It's ridiculous that in today's day and age we still have inferior monitors compared to the mid/late 90s. The korean 27" S-IPS 1440 monitors are $275-300ish US.

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