While it's true that all these displays technically need is DisplayPort 1.2 over USB-C (unless ASUS is throwing in some other ports driven specifically by PCIe via Thunderbolt), that's really not at all the same thing as claiming it has a Thunderbolt 3 input. A port capable of only DisplayPort over USB-C and not Thunderbolt 3 will not be capable of driving a display expecting Thunderbolt input.
HDR with help of local dimming is sort of hack with unwanted blooming as huge downside. Seems the same tricks as dithering, 'additional' colors from FRC and similar. Look like evolution of LCD is finished with contrast 1000:1, few ms lag, viewing andles and similar
If this thing is priced to high I don't see a point. There was a $5k dell monitor that was OLED, but unfortunately it seems Dell backtracked and turned it into an IPS / quantum dot panel.
I don't get how TVs are significantly cheaper yet have OLED and all the colorspace options.
It's my understanding that OLED for computer monitors is a tricky proposition due to the facts that OLED has burn-in issues which would be particularly nasty for computers as many screen elements are often static for long periods of time and that computer monitors typically have much higher DPI which may complicate OLED production. TVs usually have much more screen space to work with and it's expected that the viewer will be much further away from the screen. Even LG, the king of OLED panel producers, decided to go for TV production before computer monitor production. Although I suspect that has at least as much to do with the huge markups they can get for "home theater" TVs as it does the technical obstacles to making highly dense OLED monitor panels without the pesky quality consistency issues. Take a look at the REAL OLED computer monitors from Sony and Flanders and they can set you back tens of thousands of dollars. There are reasons for that.
Incidentally, I remember reading a while back that QD Vision had been able to achieve about 90% of REC 2020 coverage from their quantum dots in the lab and lo and behold now we are starting to see actual monitors being released that are approaching that. And look at how relatively cheap it is! I wouldn't pine too much over the dearth of OLED monitors. Add quantum dots to Panasonic's new LCD tech and you may end up with something that makes OLEDs pretty much obsolete.
It's going to be an interesting year for AV technology. I wonder if the big boys (Sony, Eizo, etc.) will be releasing anything new this year. As the capabilities of these prosumer sets become closer and closer to their professional offerings I think there is more and more pressure on them to keep a step ahead.
Sony ones are not computer monitors, but production monitors. They can be hooked to a PC but their main function is to achieve the best fidelity so they scrap tons of panels to get the final product-
138 is a bit awkward, but it's definitely not a joke... In Windows you need to hit 150% display scaling to get into high-DPI mode.
Most 4k displays fall into 2 categories in terms of size. A - Large enough that they are for desktops and target 150% display scaling B - Small enough that they are for laptops and target 200%+ display scaling.
4K scaled 150% gets you the real-estate of a 1440p display 4K scaled 200% gets you 1080p real-estate If the display was super small like 10-12" you could target 300% scaling and get a 720p amount of real-estate
Back to the 138 joke. 32" monitors at 1440p look perfectly fine, everything is a little bigger since this amount of space is more typical for 27-30" screens. In high-DPI mode it's still going to look sharp, just a little blown up. Either you would welcome the bigger sharp fonts or you would skooch this back a litter further on your desk! :D
Yes. 4K (3840x2160) is inadequate to be considered "perfect" for anything bigger than about 20" for desktop monitors. Remember what perfect stands for. Really flawless. Good or even great is not perfect.
I personally have a 24" 4K screen on my desk at around 70cm viewing distance and I don't consider it being perfect in terms of visual resolution. It is good and easily above "adequate", but it is not perfect and anyone claiming must have overlooked some the slight inadequacy of the finest details. I can still see some "fuzzyness" in font rendering, depending on the algorithm used and a bit higher DPI would make everything a little bit more sharp still. And no, I'm not saying it is "horrible" or "bad". Just that 240dpi would be better than 185dpi that I have now and it would be visible with naked eye (and I don't have perfect or even exceptional eye-sight, just decent perception when I try).
Just the same way as ipads 9.7" 264dpi 2048x1536 screen is not perfect either, since individual pixels are still visible and higher dpi would make rendering of small fonts better / less fuzzy.
Even iPhones "retina" could benefit from somewhat higher dpi as Apples smooth font rendering would require higher dpi to look really sharp with very small text sizes.
It's just funny that even though 4K is basically the highest res you can obtain now (and will cost you $5000 to exceed later this year) you are basically telling the display manufacturers, "Yeah this is ok, but can you make the display smaller please?"
Do you not multi-task? When your total number of pixels is constrained, why would you want them to be small enough that you can no longer see them?
1000nits, 1000000:1 contrast, 99%p3 (but eye ball estimate of the color space triangle puts it far outside dci-p3, so 85% of rec.2020 looks to be about right), 31.1" with dci-4k (4096x2160)
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30 Comments
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mobutu - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
Very nice!chaos215bar2 - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
While it's true that all these displays technically need is DisplayPort 1.2 over USB-C (unless ASUS is throwing in some other ports driven specifically by PCIe via Thunderbolt), that's really not at all the same thing as claiming it has a Thunderbolt 3 input. A port capable of only DisplayPort over USB-C and not Thunderbolt 3 will not be capable of driving a display expecting Thunderbolt input.Morawka - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
could this monitor achieve 100% DCI-P3 with proper calibration? like if i didnt need sRGB or Rec color accuracy?nagi603 - Saturday, January 7, 2017 - link
If it could, ASUS would have written it as 100% in the spec sheet.TristanSDX - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
HDR with help of local dimming is sort of hack with unwanted blooming as huge downside. Seems the same tricks as dithering, 'additional' colors from FRC and similar. Look like evolution of LCD is finished with contrast 1000:1, few ms lag, viewing andles and similarhalcyon - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
So well said. LCD needs per pixel level backlight modulation (and quantum dots and)...HDR is an idea the techonology of which has not come yet.
hechacker1 - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
If this thing is priced to high I don't see a point. There was a $5k dell monitor that was OLED, but unfortunately it seems Dell backtracked and turned it into an IPS / quantum dot panel.I don't get how TVs are significantly cheaper yet have OLED and all the colorspace options.
Magichands8 - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
It's my understanding that OLED for computer monitors is a tricky proposition due to the facts that OLED has burn-in issues which would be particularly nasty for computers as many screen elements are often static for long periods of time and that computer monitors typically have much higher DPI which may complicate OLED production. TVs usually have much more screen space to work with and it's expected that the viewer will be much further away from the screen. Even LG, the king of OLED panel producers, decided to go for TV production before computer monitor production. Although I suspect that has at least as much to do with the huge markups they can get for "home theater" TVs as it does the technical obstacles to making highly dense OLED monitor panels without the pesky quality consistency issues. Take a look at the REAL OLED computer monitors from Sony and Flanders and they can set you back tens of thousands of dollars. There are reasons for that.Incidentally, I remember reading a while back that QD Vision had been able to achieve about 90% of REC 2020 coverage from their quantum dots in the lab and lo and behold now we are starting to see actual monitors being released that are approaching that. And look at how relatively cheap it is! I wouldn't pine too much over the dearth of OLED monitors. Add quantum dots to Panasonic's new LCD tech and you may end up with something that makes OLEDs pretty much obsolete.
It's going to be an interesting year for AV technology. I wonder if the big boys (Sony, Eizo, etc.) will be releasing anything new this year. As the capabilities of these prosumer sets become closer and closer to their professional offerings I think there is more and more pressure on them to keep a step ahead.
Lolimaster - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
Sony ones are not computer monitors, but production monitors. They can be hooked to a PC but their main function is to achieve the best fidelity so they scrap tons of panels to get the final product-scaramoosh - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
PPI is too low, it needs to be 200+, 138 is a joke..boozed - Saturday, January 7, 2017 - link
I can't tell whether you're joking.Anyway that would require three times the density of FHD rather than "merely" twice FHD.
javishd - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
138 is a bit awkward, but it's definitely not a joke... In Windows you need to hit 150% display scaling to get into high-DPI mode.Most 4k displays fall into 2 categories in terms of size.
A - Large enough that they are for desktops and target 150% display scaling
B - Small enough that they are for laptops and target 200%+ display scaling.
4K scaled 150% gets you the real-estate of a 1440p display
4K scaled 200% gets you 1080p real-estate
If the display was super small like 10-12" you could target 300% scaling and get a 720p amount of real-estate
Back to the 138 joke. 32" monitors at 1440p look perfectly fine, everything is a little bigger since this amount of space is more typical for 27-30" screens. In high-DPI mode it's still going to look sharp, just a little blown up. Either you would welcome the bigger sharp fonts or you would skooch this back a litter further on your desk! :D
zepi - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
32" 4K display is just as fine as 960x540 at somewhere around 4.5-5" display or thereabouts.Ie. Not fine at all once you've gotten used to 300+dpi in smart phones and 200+dpi in tablets and around 200dpi in desktop monitors.
Lower than this just looks pixellated and not sharp.
zepi - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
Dell seems to be bringing out 32" 8K monitor this spring:http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/secure/201...
Lolimaster - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
You're not looking a PC monitor below 40-50cm.javishd - Monday, January 9, 2017 - link
"32" 4K display is just as fine as 960x540 at somewhere around 4.5-5" display or thereabouts."-This is nonsense.
Do you talk crap about all the 4k screens that are bigger than 20"?
zepi - Monday, January 9, 2017 - link
Yes. 4K (3840x2160) is inadequate to be considered "perfect" for anything bigger than about 20" for desktop monitors. Remember what perfect stands for. Really flawless. Good or even great is not perfect.I personally have a 24" 4K screen on my desk at around 70cm viewing distance and I don't consider it being perfect in terms of visual resolution. It is good and easily above "adequate", but it is not perfect and anyone claiming must have overlooked some the slight inadequacy of the finest details. I can still see some "fuzzyness" in font rendering, depending on the algorithm used and a bit higher DPI would make everything a little bit more sharp still. And no, I'm not saying it is "horrible" or "bad". Just that 240dpi would be better than 185dpi that I have now and it would be visible with naked eye (and I don't have perfect or even exceptional eye-sight, just decent perception when I try).
Just the same way as ipads 9.7" 264dpi 2048x1536 screen is not perfect either, since individual pixels are still visible and higher dpi would make rendering of small fonts better / less fuzzy.
Even iPhones "retina" could benefit from somewhat higher dpi as Apples smooth font rendering would require higher dpi to look really sharp with very small text sizes.
javishd - Monday, January 9, 2017 - link
By all means, be the authority on perfection.It's just funny that even though 4K is basically the highest res you can obtain now (and will cost you $5000 to exceed later this year) you are basically telling the display manufacturers, "Yeah this is ok, but can you make the display smaller please?"
Do you not multi-task? When your total number of pixels is constrained, why would you want them to be small enough that you can no longer see them?
zepi - Monday, January 9, 2017 - link
5K 27" monitors have been available "cheaply" for a while already.tuxRoller - Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - link
This shouldn't really be an issue with this dpi if your desktop supports high quality system-level (implemented by the compositor) fractional scaling.haukionkannel - Thursday, January 11, 2018 - link
You need 8K for that. And 4 titan1080ti in sli running it ;)zodiacfml - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
Pricey. I saw an Nvidia HDR monitor somewhere with 4k, 144 Hz, Quantum Dots, and DP 1.4 for just $1,100pixelstuff - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
You are thinking about the Asus PG27UQ probably.halcyon - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
That is a tool for gamers. This is a tool for pros. Look at the relevant specs for each audience.David_K - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
27" 1440p display with 100% sRGB coverage, you already enough monitors doing that just fine.pixelstuff - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
How about the PG27UQ in a professional (i.e. plain) looking enclosure.wrkingclass_hero - Saturday, January 7, 2017 - link
If only it had a hdmi 2.0 port it would be the perfect monitor for my use case.wrkingclass_hero - Saturday, January 7, 2017 - link
I mean hdmi 2.0a (or higher)Lolimaster - Sunday, January 8, 2017 - link
You can't call it pro if you miss the most important thing, contrast. OLED or nothing.tuxRoller - Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - link
Very similar to this eizo:http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/coloredge/cg314...
1000nits, 1000000:1 contrast, 99%p3 (but eye ball estimate of the color space triangle puts it far outside dci-p3, so 85% of rec.2020 looks to be about right), 31.1" with dci-4k (4096x2160)
Btw, that eizo will run you about $5.5k