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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

Admittedly 30 Hz sucks and the colors are not up to par with an IPS panel, but overall the Seiki offer a great deal for the price.

The brightness is great (only terrible if you like it really low), the 112 pixel density is higher than on 2x23 inch monitors, for example;

The colors can be calibrated from within the OS so it's not as much of an issue;

And as the black levels - if you found them horrible, it may be because you were using an nVidia card on Windows - the drivers are set to limited RGB range (because it thinks it's connected to a TV), giving you horrible black levels (and colors).

I spent a month wondering why my brand new monitors look like crap when every review said they were the best bang for the buck :-D.

Or maybe you just got a bad panel and/or the new revisions were improved...

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30 Hz is awful. The brightness problem is blow out and bleed. It is "very bright" it is so bright that when doing any sort of calibration the whites bleed on everything. The contrast ratio is good due to the excessive brightness, which means the blacks still suck. Horrible highlights and horrible shadows.

The calibration you can do in the OS is limited, as I said, I have two different sets of hardware equipment for calibration and I still couldn't make it less than horrible. The display is just ick (as expected at that price point) -- every color is signifigantly off out of the box, and trying to fix it even with physical calibration devices is a lost cause. You can't get it anywhere near "normal".

I tried the TV against multiple forms of input -- from Windows to OS-X to Ubuntu to QNX(I used to build command center software, which ran on TVs on top of QNX, so I have my own stack that is tested against TVs). From nVidia, to ATI, to Intel. I also tried it as a simple TV (my fallback so I didn't have to sell it) -- it even looked like crap as a TV... even with external upscaling to 4k.

I purchased mine (and used it for about a month before I was able to sell it on Craigslist) just about as soon as you could get one in the US. I doubt any radical changes have taken place since then, I have read of none outside of the price dropping. It is still generally reviewed as a poor TV and worse monitor.

Dells 4k 28" should be available in just a few weeks -- wait for that, don't purchase this lemon.

Excessive backlight bleed - could be that you got a real lemon...

Manufacturers do have frequent revisions on the panels - for example LG's e-IPS panels had 6 revisions (or more), each pretty different, initially with backlight bleed and ghosting problems, then AFRC and brightness changes (it varies a lot between revisions) and the bad reviews went to Dell, Asus, Acer and other display manufacturers...

Well -- at the time (way back in 2013, when it was signifigantly more expensive) -- the reviews echoed what I saw -- just Google around for them. Due to the number of reviews matching my personal experience (blown out brightness, bad color accuracy, unable to get it calibrated to good norms, etc) -- I was delighted to sell it off for what I paid for it.

I can't prove without access to a modern panel that they didn't get exponentially and magically better. But, I find that unlikely. They are fighting for cheapest slot.

But who knows, maybe it is the best panel in the universe now! Maybe the extra $3000 people are dropping on Sharp and Dell 4k panels is all markup! But, I suspect not.

There is apparently a firmware patch from Seiki to make the backlight adjustable. I don't think I'd do graphics work on it that requires absolute color-accuracy--the 30Hz would already be too painful with a wacom anyway.

What I'd like to know is if the viewing angles are so bad that you see different colors, inverted colors etc. just while sitting at a desk with it (since it is so large you are at pretty big angles from pixels on the edges).

Any IPS panel is better (even the cheap $200 ones) than TN, but from what you're describing it sounds like the worst TV/monitor in the world :-). I've got an old Samsung LED TV that still has acceptable contrast/black levels, surely a new panel can't be that bad unless it's defect...

Reports indicate that the Dell 4k 28" will be 30Hz @ 4k also :(

The Lenovo Thinkvision Pro 2840m and Asus PB287Q have both been announced (60Hz @ 4k, US$799), but you might have to wait a couple of months for release.

For a workstation, how is 30Hz refresh a problem? I could understand that wouldn't be ideal for gaming, but if your daily use is that if reading static text that doesn't move around, is it really a problem. If this were a CRT, I'd agree with you, but as an LCD panel, I don't understand why the lower refresh rate is a problem. It isn't as though the screen will flicker.

It increases the latency for displaying the mouse pointer, so you may find it harder to quickly and accurately move your mouse.

Go try it now. Connect your laptop to your tv, set the refresh rate to 30hz. Your mouse will become extremely "laggy" (e.g. unresponsive), all 60fps animations like dragging windows around, scrolling will become stuttered, etc.

Just the productivity decrease alone makes this monitor extremely expensive in the end, despite its price.

No need for a TV set, some (most?) computer monitors can display 30 Hz, it only needs to be enabled using "custom resolution" or similar setting in drivers.

I just tried:

- Dragging windows - not an issue, but maybe I am used to it from times when having window contents displayed during dragging lagged much more due to cpu/gpu power.

- Scrolling - it is slower, but with clickless scroll wheel and smooth scrolling it was not too noticeable.

But, oh god, the mouse cursor movement... It was like working through a high latency VNC.

> I doubt any radical changes have taken place since then, I have read of none outside of the price dropping.

Didn't the article mention something about a firmware patch to fix the backlight brightness?

(I appreciate your calibrated review/opinions btw)

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