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Comment by Amadou | Hacker News Reader

With the 39" Seiki 4K "tv" at less than $500 shipped, the $3,500 pricing level on the Dells seems excessive. I'm certain the Dells are better monitors, but are they 700% better? If Seiki revs their model line-up to include display-port, all these official monitors will really be in trouble.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DOPGO2G

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I was a little floored by the Seiki price drop. When it happened, I Tweeted at Seiki to ask if this is a precursor to a replacement unit that functions more as a monitor (60Hz, HDMI 2, no splash screen, DPMI on, no speakers, matte surface). That's wishful thinking, of course. The tweet was mostly just to put the demand in front of them. :)

Incidentally, my review of my wife's Seiki: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/seiki-4k

4K at 24" is really interesting, however. Not necessarily because I want to use a small monitor again, but rather because it's a sign that we are slowly inching toward high-DPI large form-factor displays. And I've been waiting for that to happen for a decade.

Next would be extending that pixel density to 30" (~6K) and larger (~8K). Then I will celebrate a bit.

Off-topic but thanks for the noscript message.

There's some price discrimination going on here, yes, but keep in mind that a) the PQ on that Seiki will be horrible; 2) at 39" it's way too large; and iii) as you note, it does not have a useful way to get a signal into it.

The win with a ~200dpi 24" 4k will be OS X-style Retina upscaling, not simply screen real estate.

(A) Horrible is a vast overstatement. Unless you need calibrated color, it is fine.

(2) Being too large is relative, my 30" 2560x1600 quickly became normal sized. For the additional pixels the additional inches of a 39" seems about right.

(iii) HDMI at 30Hz is just fine for anything but gaming. I used to have an IBM T221 that also ran at 30Hz and it was no problem at all for text and video. Some people expect there will be mouse lag, there wasn't.

I have an ASUS PQ321Q. Due to lack of support in OS X Mavericks for DP1.2 MST, OS X can only do 30Hz, but Windows on the same hardware can do 60Hz.

The difference is staggering. 30Hz is terrible, and the lag when moving the mouse, dragging a window, or scrolling text is perceptible and annoying.

Your monitor's electronics may be doing more processing at 30Hz (like frame-doubling) than at 60Hz thus adding latency that is not inherent in the lower refresh rate.

I used the T221 at 30Hz in a multi-monitor system with the other two monitors at 60Hz. I could drag a window so it straddled the 30Hz monitor and a 60Hz monitor. The DPI was severely mismatched so it wasn't very useful to straddle like that, but movement across the monitors was not obnoxious, not terribly fluid, but not annoying either.

I'm sure different people have different tolerances for latency, but I tend to think my tolerance is pretty low.

a) Not really. Obviously, Seiki isn't setting a benchmark for build quality. But it's also not "horrible." My wife's Seiki has zero dead pixels and is crisp and clear. Brightness isn't even around the edges, but "horrible" is going too far. It's far less horrible than a TN panel, for instance.

2) 39" is not way too large. I want 50" on my desktop.

iii) Yeah, HDMI 1.4 is limiting, but 30Hz makes it still usable for non-gaming. DisplayPort? I guess I won't balk at it, but just give me HDMI 2.

I am critical of the monitor for other reasons: a) it doesn't power up on DPMI on and has a splash screen, 2) it has a semi-glossy screen and professional monitors should be matte, and iii) it's HDMI 1.4.

30hz is not to me usable; nor is 39", and I'm used to Apple's build and picture quality, so I guess I should've prefaced my post with "IMHO."

Seiki is still HDMI/1.x and doesn't support 60FPS. Nor will it help gaming at it's limit refresh rate. The good is that they're putting pressure on the big brands. If it was HDMI/2.0, I'd be all over it.

A 4K 39" TV has less resolution than a 4K 24" monitor. Just do the math!

This isn't about real estate; it is easy to buy a big monitor, but about pixel density.

Exactly: the most interesting thing here isn't the 4k, but rather the 183.5ppi.

Well, a 4k 39" TV still has about a 12% higher pixel density than the 1920x1200 24 inch monitor I'm using right now.

Additionally, you can take that extra size and just sit a little bit further away from it.

That isn't going to work in my cubicle, or any kind of coding situation, really.

I used to use 2x30" very comfortably for coding, I don't think this is that tough.

I tried two 24 inches once, my neck got sore for a week. My cubicle is simply too small for it to work well.

Ah, yeah, I WFH in a home office with a standing desk. Right now I'm using 3x1080p + my rMBP panel and I find it pretty solid.

Your point about the importance of pixel density is a good one, but the pedantry is misplaced. Resolution in the context of display resolution has referred to pixel count, not pixel density, for decades.

Yes, that was a mistake on my part. I meant to just talk about pixel density and somehow wrote in resolution.

I have a Seiki 39in that I use as a second monitor for my rMBP - the PPI (110) is the same as the Apple 27in Thunderbolt and they have roughly the same picture quality once you calibrate the Seiki. 39 Inches of uninterrupted space is awesome the only downside I've noticed is some mouse lag under OSX which can be fixed with some quartz settings that then cause screen tearing, I've read it's not present under windows so maybe it's something that can be worked out with a software fix.

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