Xiaomi launches 49-inch 4K TV for $640 | Hacker News Reader

Xiaomi launches 49-inch 4K TV for $640

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NB the linked page is currently for the MiTV 1 (1080p, 47"), but the topic is about V2;[1]

On the SOC side, it's 4x cortex A9 @ 1.45Ghz with Mali 450 MP4 GPU-- h265 decode at 4K/30fps, 2GB RAM

supports miracast, airplay, dlna, widi, SMB, dual band ac wifi, USB3, micro SD, bluetooth 4 (BT LE remote with finder). 15.5mm thick and 6.2mm bezel. It has everything, except the HDMI version is conspicuous in its absence-- so I'm guessing it's not 2.0, which is required for 60fps at 4K. Also not completely clear if it could actually play back 4K 3D-- perhaps this would work with h264, but for h265 it states 30fps. Released on the 27th in China, no mention of elsewhere.

1. http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&p...

Yup. The English version of the MiTV link is an old content description for MiTV 1.

However, the Chinese version of the web page does mention about 4K display on MiTV2.

http://www.mi.com/mitv

"On the SOC side, it's 4x cortex A9 @ 1.45Ghz with Mali 450 MP4 GPU-- h265 decode at 4K/30fps, 2GB RAM"

Is this because it is a "smart" TV, or should I expect all computer monitors to have this degree of complexity these days ?

I'd like my monitor to be as dumb as possible, thanks.

It's definitely a TV not a monitor.

The difference is more marginal than ever.

Look into NEC “commercial-grade” displays [1]. They're basically brilliant LCD displays with nearly no bezel, simple software & OCD (usually not much more than picture adjustement), control via RS232... They're not cheap, though.

[1] - http://www.necdisplay.com/category/large-screen-displays

The cynic in me believes that this allows them to OCR whatever you're showing on the screen so it can be beamed back to the mothership (MIIT).

Ditto. I really wish TVs made the smart part decoupled so you could opt for no smart part at all. On the other side of things, they could also use this as an opportunity to upsell the smart-tv part to consumers who might actually care about that feature.

Xiaomi is a really interesting company. This TV announcement is just one in a long line of recent products that promise high quality devices for low prices (recently announced Mi Pad, Wi-Fi Router, etc).

I own a Xiaomi MI2s phone which cost me about 200 euros to get shipped from a Chinese webshop and it's been working perfectly. They even update their phone OS (MIUI, based on Android) with weekly builds that are installed OTA.

Lei Jun (their CEO) really wants Xiaomi to become the Chinese Apple. Not sure if wearing black turtlenecks and hiring Hugo Barra will get them there, but I'm curious to see what they'll do next.

I find the "Chinese Apple" to be a curious desire. Which characteristics do we choose from the two? "high quality devices for low prices", is very chinese, but Apple is known for high quality prices based on innovative technology.

If he wants to build a company that makes high quality products based on innovative technology at low prices, then he could find great success.

Alas, in my experience, no companies besides Apple are actually interested in consistently producing innovative products.

This "Mi" site is full of derivative devices using off the shelf technology (android, for instance) in moderately nicely designed plastic cases.

I think he meant scale. Competing with Apple in Apple's niche isn't good idea.

Maybe, but you sound awfully like a marketing department!

Thanks, I guess? :)

I don't want to sound like I'm astroturfing, but I genuinely think they're interesting. Maybe I should clarify: I don't think they are at the same quality level as, say, Apple. The phone is still plastic galore and MIUI certainly isn't as elegant as iOS.

However, amidst all the Chinese companies that are churning out cheap electronics, Xiaomi doesn't seem to be content to "just" churn out clones.

Except, maybe, one of their new routers that has a design copied from an iPad stand.

So their wares are actually solid?

I've been looking at Android-based TV boxen and I've been disappointed - there are very few players beating the Apple TV in that space. All the devices are either miserable (buggy, poor wifi, underpowered) or cost more than Apple's deviec. If you can't beat Apple on price and you're a Chinese no-name company, you're in the wrong business.

So far the only company that seems to be taking that market seriously is Amazon, and Amazon's android fork is far-enough-away from stock Android that it doesn't really count.

I keep hoping somebody would get some momentum and take a solid toe-hold.

I use a Seiki 50" 4K display for coding and it was a revelation. I love all the bezel-free screen real estate and I would never go back.

For watching full screen video, I just drop the resolution down to 1920x1080 to overcome the 30hz limitation the display currently has.

More competition in the ~50" 4K space is welcome news.

I use a 39" 4k Seiki, and I've been very happy with it too. Paid $420 about a month ago (it's $500 from Amazon right now), and it's a pretty amazing amount of real estate without a bezel. 30hz is a little annoying for some tasks, but for coding and other static applications, it really doesn't bother me.

If you flash the 39" with the 50" firmware you get true 120Hz at 1080p. It also changes the scaling to a simple 1 pixel to 4.

Anybody considering the Seiki should know that it uses an unusual pixel format, BGR. So to get subpixel rendering to work be sure to run the subpixel setup program if you use windows or configure fontconfig if you use linux.

I've recently done the same. Still trying to get my work environment set up decently. We need some sort of user group for people doing 4k programming to exchange ideas, tools, methods, etc.

Seems like a good idea:

http://www.reddit.com/r/4kmonitors/

What do you mean "without a bezel," do you just take it off?

He means without the several sets of bezels you'd normally have from the normal way of getting this much screen area, i.e., by having several monitors.

How does one handle window placement in a single monitor setup like that? I quite often use Windows' fill right, fill left, maximize, fill height options for window arrangement.

I use a 39" Seiki with my MacBook, and managing windows is a relatively minor but real annoyance. I just drag and resize manually, and usually end up with overlapping windows of different sizes all over the place. I still love the display and would never go back, but it feels like I'm not using it quite as effectively as I could.

I suspect this is a gap that will be filled pretty quickly once these monitors become more common.

Have you tried BetterSnapTool? It's one of the most useful apps I use. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?m...

And on Windows running both AllSnap and AllSnap64 help me a great deal, even though I'm still on smaller monitors.

Check out divvy: https://mizage.com/divvy/

For Mac OS X, check out Moom (on the Mac App Store). It lets you arrange windows in various nice ways via clicks or keystrokes.

I second the recommendation of Moom; its grid layout can go beyond the 2x2 that most other tools support and its window snapshot restoration is great for laptops.

I use SizeUp for Mac. It lets you resize windows and move them between monitors/spaces

Presumably using a tiling window manager would solve that problem entirely. The window management in Windows/OS X is positively archaic compared to what you can get in Linux these days.

http://winsplit-revolution.com/ is a good option.

Haven't tried others because this has been simple to setup and has easy shortcuts that use cntrl+alt+keypad to move window into various spots.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

(15 minutes later)

Okay, this is great. It just works. Thanks for the recommendation.

I like divvy: https://mizage.com/divvy/

When I got my Seiki I basically tried all of the different Mac Window managers, most of them were immediately out of the running as they couldn't support a large enough grid to make sense (2x2 was the standard). With Divvy I could set up a 6x6 grid which is perfect as you can easily set global shortcuts to treat it as either a 3x3 grid or a 2x3 grid with your keyboard shortcuts on the Command and Numpad (see image) http://imgur.com/3E474eP This is awesome as you don't have to really 'remember' a bunch of shortcuts as the keyboard grids look just like what your screen grids are.

Possibly with this, https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

> Tiling window manager for OS X similar to xmonad

How far do you sit from the display ? Do you simply use it as a substitute for a multiple-display setup or do you sit further away from the screen?

>For watching full screen video, I just drop the resolution down to 1920x1080 to overcome the 30hz limitation the display currently has.

Why is 30hz a limitation for video? Most video is 24 or 30fps, so 30hz should be fine, no? I can see 30hz being a limitation for gaming but you wouldn't be able to get good fps at 4K resolution anyway. So basically you should be able to run this at 4K all the time.

24fps video on a 30hz display isn't going to be smooth. Every fourth frame of the video will last for twice as long as the rest.

I haven't seen it in person - one of the downsides of being in rural New Zealand is no friends with cool toys :) - but I've seen much less severe problems on paper be quite nasty.

In game development, my day job, the industry has recently been cracking down on micro stutter, where even randomly skipped single frames at 60fps can destroy the appearance of smoothness.

>24fps video on a 30hz display isn't going to be smooth. Every fourth frame of the video will last for twice as long as the rest.

I see what you mean. Doesn't the HDMI standard have a way to fix this? It could just have a mode where you have 30 frames per second sent to the screen with the indication of which 60hz or even 120hz timeslot to use them in. It might need a little more/faster memory in the screen but should work fine.

That sounds like what Nvidia's G-Sync does. A in-monitor computer buffers frames and displays them at a rate specified by the computer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7436/nvidias-gsync-attempting-...

It sounds like it indeed. Although that particular implementation won't go below 30hz so wouldn't fix this particular case.

In that case you can display movies at 48 Hz.

Just change the refresh to 24Hz. Many modern video players will do this for you when you initiate full-screen mode.

That completely contradicts my experience and everything else I've read from others.

Less than 60 hz is generally annoying when trying to use a screen as a monitor because of cursor lag, but almost all video is at 30 fps or less so 30 hz is fine for video.

Where does this say that it's 4k? Everything on the linked page says it's 1080p, which is NOT the same thing as 4k. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

Edit: Yeah, Ok, I just scrolled down, and realised the actual link for the TV in question is https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&...

It's clear from the Chinese version of the site that it's 4K: http://www.mi.com/mitv

That's a different display. Look on the tech specs page for the chinese one: http://www.mi.com/mitv#params and compare it to the OP: http://www.mi.com/en/mitv#fullspecs

For example, the CPUs are different, one's a snapdragon 1.7GHz, the other is a Cortex A9, 1.4GHz. (Different GPUs too.)

Not to mention one explicitly says it's 1920x1080, while the other is "4K".

You're right. There's a number "2" after the name of the TV in Chinese. Maybe the Chinese site is the second generation Mi TV.

The price on the Chinese page is 3999 yuan, which translates into $641, indicating this is the model the OP meant. So it looks like the OP linked to the wrong page by mistake and got version 1 instead of version 2.

The tv on chinese page is MiTV 2, which is the second-generation MiTV, while the one on en page is MiTV, which is launched several months before. It seems that MiTV 2 in en page has not updated yet.

Does this display offer a 60 Hz refresh rate at 4K via either modern DisplayPort or HDMI 2? As I mentioned in "4K is for Programmers" [1] and its follow-up [2], the 30 Hz refresh offered by the current generation of 4K televisions is the principle deficiency when using them as monitors.

30 Hz is of course workable, which is precisely why 4K is for programmers, after all. :) But all of us would take a 60 Hz option in a heartbeat if it were available.

That said, I prefer the 39" form factor offered by Seiki for 4K. Around 50 inches, a computer's display should be 8K+.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/4k-is-for-programmers

[2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/4k-is-for-programmers-redux

"This site does not support Internet Explorer 8 or older."

Au contraire, IE does not support your site. Actually, I can't even test if at least it renders the page in text mode because you blocked it, end of conversation.

I'm at work and our desktops were migrated from XP this year and we're stuck with IE 8, beucase it's "compliant" (with what, I wonder). I can't even load the cached page from Google...

This is very annoying, the site is just a blog, not a complex webapp that must ensure correct rendering and JS execution.

Sorry about that. I'll make it a point to remove that too-forceful block soon. In the meantime for what it's worth, you can read the ramblings via the RSS feed: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/tiamat.rss

Do I want Android TV? Yet another clunky interface, yet another clunky remote, etc?

I recent got a Chromecast and now manage my TV via my tablet or laptop. I get a better experience with my tablet and would love to see TV's shipping with Chromecast built-in. I retired my Boxxee and I no longer think about buying a Roku or AppleTV.

I see a few people in this thread saying you would need an amount of luck to actually get one of these, can anyone shed some light on why?

And possibly what someone might do to actually get one shipped out to Australia?

Whenever they release a new gadget, they make the announcement and then make you to wait. Their online shop has this queuing system which is super hard to get in whenever they make a new release. And it usually get "sold out" in a matter of minutes or even seconds. The majority of the consumers won't get hand on it months after its initial release. And interestingly, when this happens, usually the component price has dropped quite a lot where the price/cost ration is far less impressive. However, they still get to keep the reputation that they sell "quality" stuff at an insanely low price.

The whole process sounds like a shady business to me, but apparently they grow super fast with this kind of strategy. So yeah, I guess what do I know.

xiaomi creates hype through scarcity.

Last year I wanted a xiaomi box (a bit like apple tv but optimized for China)

They only release x amount of units on a certain day at a certain time on a monthly basis. These will be sold out in seconds. I'm pretty sure most of these items are bought by scalper bots then resold on taobao.com etc. I never successfully managed to order and eventually bought on the secondary market for a small markup

This is great for xiaomi. They create hype and each of their sales are a sellout. The next month they come out with a slightly improved version of their product based on user feedback

As their founder said Electronics are like seafood you don't want it hang around a warehouse too long

to sum up

your chances of getting on of these from xiaomi.com are really really low

As for all the too-good-to-be-true Xiaomi products, you have to enter a lottery draw before you can actually buy one. The chance of winning is pretty slim.

You can easily find a all new resale with 10% more on Taobao. It is still a reasonable price. You can consider Xiaomi outsources retails.

I'd love this as my primary monitor for work. Finally the perfect Monitor for a tiling window manager.

49" is fairly small for a 4K TV; you have to sit quite close to be able to perceive the resolution difference and get the IMAX fill your peripheral vision effect.

[1] gives an ideal distance of 1 to 2 meters.

Gamers often do sit that close, so it would be interesting to see how well it does as a monitor replacement, like the 39" Seiki's that some are using. 49" UHD is the same as 4 24.5" 1920x1080 panels so would not need any sort of scaling in legacy operating systems.

1: http://referencehometheater.com/2013/commentary/4k-calculato...

Amusing experiment: have people hold their two index fingers in front of them aligned with the sides of their TV, with their elbows bent an 90 degrees. I find people tend to sit progressively further away from a screen the larger it is, so the screen size proportional to their field of vision remains the same.

Article link should be to here: http://www.mi.com/mitv

This article is linking to a 2K tv:

From main page: "Mi TV is virtually frameless. We use one of the best panels from Samsung and LG to create a 47” 1920x1080 Full HD television with a super slim profile and an 8.4mm frame"

From specs page: "Size47" Resolution1920×1080(1080P)"

Maybe $640 is a great deal for an android TV with all these features? I don't really know, but it's a very different thing from a $640 4k TV, like the Seiki.

It isnt 4K!

  Samsung and LG to create a 47” 1920x1080 Full HD

It is, check the Chinese site: https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&...

Different display completely than the one linked here.

Is this actually possible? Can they really make a 49-inch 4k screen with a Snapdragon processor, etc., for $640?

No retailer good relationships with the factory bulk buying No marketing costs

Does this have a TV tuner? I thought a tuner was the difference between a TV and a monitor.

We changed the url from http://www.mi.com/en/mitv, which as countless users have pointed out in this thread, did not show the TV in question.

Anyone put its traffic through Wireshark to see what it's up to yet?

Why? Are you implying that it's going to do something nefarious because it's made by an Asian/Chinese company? How would you feel if people said that about American products? Maybe I should be scared about getting irradiated from American products because Americans have killed a metric ton of people using nuclear weapons within the last century?

It's not unheard of for smart TVs to snoop on you. LG did it.

Don't be an ass. https://spideroak.com/privacypost/cloud-security/is-your-sma...

You could have just linked to the article in question, rather than calling me an "ass". But thanks.

Don't be intentionally obtuse, then. Ass is a bit ambiguous.

What on earth are you going on about?

What exactly was I obtuse about? And for that matter, what is ambiguous about calling me an "ass"? Especially in the tone the OP used it, which was as some sort of insult because he disagreed with my opinion.

Why ? Because any general purpose computing device should be suspect, that's why.

Instead of a dumb monitor, purpose built for being a display, this is a general purpose computer with:

"On the SOC side, it's 4x cortex A9 @ 1.45Ghz with Mali 450 MP4 GPU-- h265 decode at 4K/30fps, 2GB RAM"

... that's a lot of complexity and capability. Too much to blindly trust.

In fact, the only correct answer to the question "what does it do on wireshark" is: "nothing, since it's not capable of a network connection".

Since the NSA scandals started, people on HN do imply exactly this about American hardware. And say that American service providers are guaranteed to spy on them and such.

Not just American. I'm suspicious of any random household device that has general purpose computing capabilities, especially when internet-connected and not local-user accessible and rootable.

>Are you implying that it's going to do something nefarious because it's made by an Asian/Chinese company?

No. I'm implying it might because it's a 'smart' device. All sorts of American/British/Western European 'smart' devices are horrendously insecure too. Also, in the case of china, for example huawei, the government/manufacturer collusion goes far deeper than in the west; i.e. the surveillance portion is installed in the factory rather than later via exploits.

I would love a massive 40-50"+ monitor with the standard PPI of 94. Loads of space, with no worrying about scaling issues or ridiculously tiny fonts/icons/etc.

Yeah, honestly, my favorite coding monitor is 37" 1080P cheapo Vizio TV placed a like five feet away. The eyes are most relaxed at far distances.

4K to me sounds useless, but hey, maybe it will drive down prices and if I'm stuck with one I can half the res. or scale I guess.

Is it just me or are they advertising it can run popcorn time a the bottom of the page?

Very chip, but you would need a little(I mean very much) luck to buy it.

Why is that?

In the early sale, there's not enough XiaoMi TV been produced, objectively or subjectively. if you want to buy one, you would have to rush to buy it. it needs some luck.

Is that a reference to Goodluckbuy?

47" 1920x1080 Full HD television

Am I looking at the wrong link?

Yeah, check https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&...

This looks interesting. Will it come to US?

Any idea if this would be sold in the US?

And how would one order that?

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-fashion-Xiaomi-TV-3D-andr...

Although I wouldn't trust that completely...

Thats the old version (v1).

you're right

Site says it's 47 inch?

They just announced it 4 hours ago. MITV2 http://www.mi.com/mitv is 49-inch. They haven't updated their english site yet.

For the lazy people like me https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&...

I wonder how America's Apple will respond to this.

They won't because they don't make TVs and they don't respond to competition.

I don't know. The hideous mock-up of a 4.7 inch iPhone 6 that's been floating around certainly looks like a transparent response to the trend of larger Android phones.

Apple themselves admit that growth is coming from phones they can't compete with[0]. Their $600+ phones with 4 inch screens have been surpassed in both resolution and price.

[0]http://9to5mac.com/2014/04/06/why-apple-has-to-make-bigger-s...

We will probably have a 4k iMac soon, maybe 4k cinema displays too.

Whatever it is its safe to say it won't be 30hz.

how do you get one of these?

whats the refresh rate on it, couldn't find where it says about it.

"H.264、H.265支持到4K@30帧/秒". 4k@30fps

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