ASUS PQ321Q UltraHD Review: Living with a 31.5-inch 4K Display
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
I am sick of having to choose between screen estate and PPI. Give me my unicorn.
http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra/d...
The main downside seems to be that it only has HDMI 1.4, so you only get 30Hz at 3840x2160.
They also have a 50" version for $1,114.
Sign me up also for a 21-24inch 4k display to write code on.
Of course people have different taste in displays, so what works for me may be different from what works for you. I just like higher-density displays.
" The scaling is perfect at it's default settings and everything is very crisp & clear. Just don't expect to read anything from the couch unless you increase the DPI scaling and/or font/text size within your OS. The text is quite small!"
I was responding to the guy above me. He wanted a reasonably priced 4k display and I showed him one.
Amazon reviews are exactly worth the paper they're printed on, in my opinion.
> I am sick of having to choose between screen estate and PPI.
Resolution really stalled out on the larger screens, until people realized how nice 'retina' is on the screens that they keep 1 foot away from their face. Smartphones are finally starting to hit resolutions that match the upper limits of the human eye, and people are finally starting to want that on larger screens.
I imagine that once monitors have started to max out the human eye, there's going to be a much larger push for higher resolution TVs. I'm still surprised that TV resolution stalled out for so long, but I think that 4K TV will be the future (eventually). The eye is good enough to see that many pixels.
If you want to benefit from the "retina" type of sharpness, then Windows should really show it at an effective 1080p resolution, and Windows sucks at doing that. It only enlarges some icons, and that's about it.
That said, Android can do it, Apple did it (though the way they implemented non-integer scaling is costing them a lot of performance [1]) and interestingly enough, web pages can do that too. Linux display system is going through a bit of rebirth after decades of X and should be able of resolution independence as well.
So it looks the times ahead will be better.
[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6409/13inch-retina-macbook-pro...
I ask because I sit 11' from a 52" 1080p TV and can certainly notice the difference between 720p and 1080p content.
For comparison, the ThinkPad W520 I'm writing this on has a 15.6" FHD display with 141 pixels per inch, slightly more dense than the PQ321Q. Windows 8 runs fine on this display and so did Windows 7.
The MacBook Pros with the Retina display have 227 or 220 pixels per inch in the 13" and 15" screens, about 60% higher than the PQ321Q or W520.
The only scaling trick I use on the W520 is to set the logical DPI in Windows to 140% and to use "XP-style scaling" instead of the bitmap stretch scaling used by default for non-DPI-aware apps - to my eyes the old XP scaling looks better for most apps. Most Linux distros I've tried also look fine after some font size adjustments.
If you ran the PQ321Q at 1080p (FHD) resolution, you'd be getting effectively only 69 pixels per inch. It's the same pixel density I'd get if I ran my ThinkPad at 960x540.
There may be issues with driving the sheer number of pixels on the PQ321Q, but the actual pixel density shouldn't be an issue at all.
I need to have all my displays at about the same distance from my eyes, because I'm past the age where my eyes can refocus easily. I use two different pairs of glasses: progressive lenses for "up and about" use, and single vision lenses for computer work.
(Single vision lenses focus at the same distance all across the field of vision. Progressive lenses are like bifocals, with near vision at the bottom and distant vision in the middle and top, except there's a gradual change between these focus distances instead of an abrupt jump.)
Since I use my ThinkPad all the time, I have a pair of single vision lenses made for that focus distance, about 20" or so. It's like a typical "reading" prescription except a few inches farther out.
If I use a second display next to the ThinkPad like I do at home, that display has to be at about the same distance, give or take an inch or two.
So I can't really put a 31" monitor farther away. If it were my only monitor, then I could get a different pair of computer glasses with a longer focus distance. But I'd still need my ThinkPad glasses too, unless I never used a laptop and only used the 31" monitor.
I did get to spend a week using a 32" 2560x1440 monitor on a client visit last fall. As a secondary monitor next to my ThinkPad, it didn't work that well. It was just too big and required too much head movement to look around at the different parts of the screen. So you're certainly right, if you do have a monitor this size you probably want it farther away.
I guess what this says is that I'm not in the target market for a 31-32" monitor at all. It's too small to put across the room and wear my progressives (except as a smallish TV), and too big to enjoy using at my current "computer vision" distance.
What I would buy is a much smaller 4K monitor. A 24" monitor with the same resolution as the Asus would be 184 pixels per inch and be small enough for close use. Or take it all the way down to 20" and you've got a retina-class display with 220 PPI.
For a young person whose eyes can refocus, it's different of course. You can put a monitor at any convenient distance - even if multiple monitors are not all at the same distance.
BTW Is there any indication that next HDMI standard will be able to standardize both 4K _and_ 3D, while keeping performance above 60fps?
Displayport is vastly superior and, unlike HDMI, there is actually some use for >60fps with displayport (something that is wasted on TV content anyway).