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Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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...

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

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

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

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

> Tiling window manager for OS X similar to xmonad

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.

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

>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.

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