But the Seiki 39" TV has its framerate capped at 30Hz while on 4k resolution, which makes it inadequate as a monitor.
"Inadequate" for gaming, yes. Inadequate for computing? Hardly.
But this is why I said that if Seiki dropped an HDMI 2 version of the same display, things get interesting.
How about for watching movies? High framerates would obviously seem very important for gaming, but it's not clear how important they are to movies/shows. Your thoughts?
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This isn't perfect, since really each frame should be on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, which is why 120hz TVs came about -- 120 is evenly divisible by each of 60, 30, and 24. But it's also pretty much good enough, or else there'd be a lot more complaining about watching movies on computers or other 60hz devices.
A 30hz screen makes that harder, since you're going to have to repeat every fourth frame once, so the unevenness could be more noticeable since those frames are now twice as long instead of 50% longer. But I haven't tried one to tell you just how noticeable it would be.
Native 60fps content (sports is the most common one I know of) would require throwing away half the frames, but at least the remaining frames would all be shown for the same amount of time.
NTSC "video" content (stuff shot at 30 interlaced frames per second, so 60 fields per second, stuff like old TV shows) would work alright. You wouldn't be able to take advantage of deinterlacing methods that try to reconstruct 60 full frames, but it wouldn't be a huge loss.
Ah, the good ol' days, when blacks were black and "non-native resolutions" weren't a thing. :)
It can be adjusted to make any number of vertical "lines" as it sweeps over the phosphor matrix, but the matrix has a fixed dot-pitch. Because an electron beam is being shot at the matrix from a distance, there's a certain degree of bleed-over to neighboring phosphors. Firing electrons at the phosphors at coordinate 100,200 means a little bit of energy is also received by 99,199 and other neighboring "virtual pixels."
In other words, while the phosphor matrix was just as rigid as the pixel matrix of an LCD, the power source that caused light to be emitted was not perfectly matched 1:1 with the matrix. There isn't an electron gun for each pixel, there is a single electron gun for the whole display.
By comparison, each pixel in an LCD monitor (putting aside the three internal pixels for colors) is an individual mask over a uniformly white back-light. The panel adjusts the opacity of the mask to allow more or less of the white backlight through. The mask over a backlight is what gives LCDs a challenge with viewing angle (because there's a non-zero gap between the light source and the mask and the mask itself has a non-zero depth).
Finally, as I understand it, a plasma television is a bit like both. It's a matrix of phosphors like a CRT, but with individual power sources for each pixel like an LCD. Because light is emitted at the surface, plasmas tend to have very good viewing angles.
OLED then is, in my opinion at least, a spiritual successor to plasma. OLED emits light at its surface like an LCD or plasma, but uses no mask layer over a backlight, like a CRT or plasma.
(Take all of the above with a grain of salt because I'm just a layperson when it comes to hardware.)
I believe there were monitors that went both ways with this, not just letting you run lower than native but also higher than native (I had a 17" CRT that claimed to support 1600x1200, but not without a lot of blurriness, for instance).
edit: man, it's really hard to find specific info about how exactly that worked online these days
I suspect for video from a higher-quality source, my opinion would not be so forgiving.
But put briefly, for consuming crummy web content, I have no complaints.
Don't get me wrong. I haven't yet bought one for myself principally because I am waiting for Seiki (or someone) to offer me a similarly priced 4K monitor with HDMI 2 (60Hz). If I got the current model today and a v2 of the Seiki arrived next month with HDMI 2, I would be sad. The 30Hz limitation is the most significant disadvantage of this display. So I wait.
But if you don't want to wait, the 30Hz limitation is tolerable. At <$500 now, it's very hard to restrain myself from just buying another and being done with the temptation.
More of my crazy thoughts: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/seiki-4k
[1] http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682085/will-the-hobbit-start-a-...
But a few were. Outdoor pans, landscapes, busy scenes. There's a market shot in the beginning with about 8 mini-scenes in the frame, and you can look at any part of the film and see it far more clearly / less blurring than if it were filmed with any lesser tech.
The shots that didn't work: indoor shots where you could see caked on makeup... it's because no one, literally no one, seems to understand how much less lighting and makeup to use with an HFR camera.
This is a craft problem. We probably won't get widespread HFR until it gets cheap and widespread enough that some people are growing up experimenting with it.
Even with film projection, as long as the higher rate is an integer multiple of the lower, it should be trivial to have the same effect as long as you have camera equipment that lets you shoot at the desired rates.
I'm especially intrigued by those concerning media discs. The next FIFA World Cup is set to broadcast in 8K, so I think one can reasonably predict there'll be movies recorded in 8K by 2018. Now, imagine, something the length of the LoTR trilogy, in 60fps, 3D, and 8K. You're looking at a lot of data right there... that's asking for discs to contain half a petabyte worth of data by around that time. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
32" and definitely 24" would be too small for me to read the text. I'd have to hunch forward or blow the font up to read things. I already have that problem on my retina MBP.