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Comment by publicfig | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit curious why both the 24" and the 32" are priced over 1k, yet they are able to get the 28" down below that mark. That's not to say that I'm not incredibly excited to see how this ends up! I've been looking for a sub-1.5k 28" monitor with high resolution for a while, and though I love my Apple Thunderbolt Display I use at work, I am hesitant that if I buy one for myself, I'll be buying right before a refresh.

I've been feeling that way for a long while though, so who knows

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Unfortunately, the 28” is going to have the wrong pixel density to use with OS X in Retina mode.

Non-Retina MacBooks start at 110 PPI. Cinema Displays have hovered around 100 PPI for about a decade, with the 27” Thunderbolt Display topping out at 109 PPI (same for its sister 27” iMac).

At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which, dividing by two to get the equivalent non-Retina PPI, comes to only 78.5, a reduction of over 20% from the lowest-PPI Cinema Displays. This means, on a Mac in Retina mode, everything in the UI will be 20% bigger than normal. Maybe that’s something you could get used to, but it’s far from the much more optimal 24” panel, with a PPI of 184 (92 PPI non-Retina, very close to a 24” Cinema Display).

I expect there will be scaled modes like there are with the Retina MacBook Pro's. So you'll be able to use a desktop that's effectively 2560x1440 pixels like the 27" Cinema display.

It's going to be pretty heavy on GPU's mind. The rMBP's do it by rendering a 2x density frame and scaling it down for the display. This means the GPU will have to render a 5120x2880 pixel frame and scale it down to 3840 x 2160.

Ugh. This is why true DPI independence in the OS is so important. There should be no such thing as a "wrong" pixel density.

There used to be a flag for that. Starting in 2006, there was a special "DPI Slider" in Mac OS X that allowed you to set the resolution from 1.0 to 3.0. Each WWDC they claimed that by next year they'd activate it as a user feature, but that never happened. Instead we got retina mode. The reason probably is that they never really got all apps and all use cases to look terrific in all supported scale variants. I remember playing with it a lot from 2007 to 2010 and usually there were always apps (oftentimes even Apple apps, like Textedit) that simply looked awful at 1.3 scale or other variations.

Indeed. Acorn's RiscOS had resolution independence in the 80s with scalable fonts and icons being shipped as vector graphics; it's a pity everyone else is 30 years behind.

I'm afraid you're mistaken. RiscOS certainly had scalable vector fonts (anti-aliased too!), but the icons and interface elements were all bitmaps and the OS was not resolution independent.

> At 28", a 3840 x 2160

Will look exactly like 1080p in "Retina mode" (more accurately, HiDPI). A 28" 1080p monitor isn't that far-fetched.

You're talking about DPI but not how close one sits to a monitor. People sit a lot closer to 13" MacBooks than to 28" 1080p monitors.

You're right about the importance that distance from the screen plays, but in my experience, a 27-28" 1080p monitor (of which there are quite a few on the market) would have to sit too far away to use for anything but movie viewing and gaming.

There was a time when DPI and PPI were effectively the same thing (72 per inch). As monitors became more dense (but before retina) this approached 96 and then 130.

If you've got a Linux workstation handy, try manually setting your x86 DPI to match your monitor's specs. Everything will look giant because most apps are written assuming DPI is an arbitrary constant (75 or 96), but most people use monitors that are more dense than that.

When you set your DPI to be its actual value, you'll realize that people have become accustomed to screens being more dense over time, but there was certainly a time when DPIs in the 70s were considered par for the course. In fact, many older people prefer less dense pixels because it's easier for them to see bigger things.

I'd bet it's panel type. The 32/24 may be IPS while the 28 may be IGZO.

WHY WHY WHY is this so CONFUSING? DELL! C'Mon man!

The "24" that you mentioned actually seems to also be a 28" screen?

"With the same remarkable, pin-point clarity, the Dell UltraSharp 24 Ultra HD Monitor, users can enjoy color consistency and precision from virtually any angle thanks to an ultra-wide viewing angle on a 28.3-inch screen. "

That is almost certainly a typo.

Even so, The difference between the high-end and entry-level models is the former are "Dell UltraSharp XX Ultra HD Monitor" and "Dell XX Ultra HD Monitor".

It doesn't have to be this way.

What way should it be?

Dell: Manufacturer

(UltraSharp): The high-end moniker

XX: Size

Ultra HD: The name for that resolution

Monitor: What it is

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and not a normal person, but the naming scheme seems quite reasonable. Way better than the utterly indecipherable "Dell 324y5943X" crap you get with some other manufacturers. The resolution name, "Ultra HD", is stupid, but that wasn't Dell's decision to make, and the industry has been naming resolutions like that for twenty years.[0] (VGA, SVGA, XGA, SXGA, etc...)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.sv...

UltraSharp UltraHD is awful. You're right, they have to use UltraHD. But "UltraSharp"? That's what I was getting at.

Also, how about just a simplified product line like, I don't know:

Dell UltraHD 24" Dell UltraHD 32"

Along the lines of Cinema Display.

Because not everybody needs a wide-gamut monitor with plenty of room for calibration at what most users would consider low brightness levels? (Where "low brightness levels" means that monitor-white is not significantly brighter than "bright white" paper under ISO-spec lighting at 95 cd/m^2.) $1K-ish is cheap for a graphic arts monitor (compare with LaCie and Eizo), but it's a heck of a lot more than the average consumer needs to spend for their purposes.

UltraSharp is an established Dell moniker though, been around much longer than UltraHD.

Anyway, as for unifying the product line- Dell being Dell, that would mean simply cutting the UltraSharp product line, which I would consider a loss.

Why do the new UltraHD monitors need to have the same name as previous Dell monitors? It's just a name. In fact, UltraSharp vs UltraHD seems like a great way to distinguish between 4K+ and lower res monitors, while still making both seem "good" to consumers.

Ultrasharp is to Dell monitors what "MacBook Pro" is to Apple laptops. Dell clearly intends, with their 24/32 vs cheaper 28, to have pro quality and mainstream quality displays both at UltraHD/4k resolution the same way they have both pro quality 1080p (ultrasharp) and cheap crappy 1080p (not ultrasharp).

It is unfortunate for dell that the 2160p resolution got labeled something so similar to their existing brand.

Sure. But as someone who has owned several Ultrasharp monitors, I don't feel that it would hurt their brand to come up with a different differentiator for 4K monitors. The brand is Dell, not Ultrasharp. I can almost guarantee that anyone who even knows what Ultrasharp means would be the kind of people to research the specs of a monitor before buying it anyway. So maintaining that 'brand' across all their high-end monitors just doesn't seem necessary.

You don't just toss out branding. When was the last time Apple, king of branding, casually discarded a branding?

Macbook

Macbook Pro

Mac Pro

These names have been with us for, what, nearly a decade?

I think the press release may be incorrect. The "Tech Specs" tab on the product page[1] says the diagonal for the 24 is 23.8 inches.

[1] http://dcse.dell.com/us/en/gen/peripherals/dell-up2414q/pd.a...

28.3

23.8

I think someone just had a minor dyslexic moment

The press release is saying that the 24"/32" will support 99% of AdobeRGB. So, better gamut on the 24"/32" means more money than the 28".

It would be a heck of a coup if it was the same gamut. One can dream...

I suspect it is because there is much higher expected volume. Not hard to imagine Apple buying a gazillion of these panels.

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