I know 4k is slowly hitting the market, but you think about 10 years ago in the mobile world, we were using 84px monochrome screens on our Nokia 3315's.
And also why is the price difference between a laptop screen and a desktop screen so massive? You can buy a 4k screen complete with a whole computer for $1500, where a 4k desktop screen is going to cost you almost twice that.
http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra/d...
e- just did the ppi calculation and it only comes out to 113, so probably not what I'd call "retina" quality
Upsides:
1. Yay, it's 2007 finally, and we have more than 2560x1600 in a desktop display!
2. Jokes aside, 3840x2160 is fairly breathtaking. It is quite choice. If you have the means...
3. Only $700. Sure, that's still not as low as a 3840x2160 display would be today had the living room television not converged with the desktop computer monitor, infecting our workspace with the taint of HD. But it's not $4,000, so that's something to celebrate. And, lo, it's cheaper than a name-brand 30" display. It makes me want to shake Dell, HP, and Samsung fiercely until they admit they've been price-fixing 30" because desktop-be-damned.
4. It's sufficiently large to be nearly immersive, which is something I really want for my desktop environment. I want to be able to completely fill my field of view with very high-density pixels. VR goggles need not apply, yet.
5. It's fairly lightweight and thin. Something bothersome about desktop monitors is that, unlike televisions, they are manufactured with serious heft. Nothing about an LCD should require a four-inch cabinet depth, but there it is in every one of my U3011s. For shame, Dell. The Chinese have shown you up. Of course all laptop displays since the early 2000s have done the same.
6. The bezel is fairly trim at about 1.5cm. Trimmer than my U3011s.
7. While it's glossy, it's not offensively glossy like some consumer monitors.
8. 3840x2160 for $700. Why not, right? Right. RIGHT.
Downsides:
1. It's a television. It's got speakers. Yeah, no kidding. And a remote control! Very well, I'll just stow that in a drawer somewhere. But more onerous than these features I'll never use are the "features" that are not features at all, such as a 5 second SEIKI splash screen when you turn on the monitor. No, monitor, don't do that to me. Just wake up and let's get to business. Oh, I forgot, you're a television. That also explains why you just turn off when you lose the signal on the HDMI connector, not to re-awaken when the HDMI warms up again.
2. It's a Seiki. Yes, they deserve huge amounts of credit for kicking the collective ass of the incumbent manufacturers. Thank you Seiki! But also, it means it's not exactly the finest engineering around. The backlighting is uneven and the materials are second-rate. The back is utilitarian. Incumbent manufacturers at least fashion some fairly nice looking plastic bits and bobs on the back side of monitors. But so be it. I'm not buying the monitor as a piece of furniture.
3. The power buttons are very crunchy/clicky hard buttons on the back side. Since you have to click one of those every time you sit down (due to HDMI not awakening the monitor), I worry that eventually the button will break.
4. Most importantly, it's HDMI 1.4 and not HDMI 2.0. This means at the showcase 3840x2160 resolution, you're going to get 30Hz—30 frames per second. This causes a notably sluggish feeling to animation and mouse control. It's serviceable for getting work done and consumption of Facetube content. My wife doesn't play games, so she is tolerating it. If Seiki drops HDMI 2.0 into a next-generation of this monitor, I'm grabbing one.
5. Yeah, it's 39". I'd prefer to see this resolution at something closer to 30", thereby increasing pixel density. Better still, I'd like a 50" display that cranks something closer to 8,000 by 5,000. I can dream, no?
6. Windows 8.1 is NOT (I cannot emphasize this enough) engineered to work with high-density large form-factor desktop displays. Metro apps are a joke on my 30" displays and they're a tragedy on my wife's monitor. Metro Skype at 39" is ... I am at a loss for words ... you have to see it to believe how idiotic it is. Further ranting at [1]. Similarly, it's not touch-enabled.
7. It's glossy. Matte for life!
The 2004 30" Apple Cinema Display was 98.44 PPI and cost $3300 at launch. Today that same $3300 buys you a 31.5" 4k monitor at 140ppi. I wouldn't call that "pretty much the same resolution".
Also it's coming to devices which don't have to rely on 3D performance. It is an astronomical hit rendering on such high resolution, because you still need anti-aliasing.
I figured out this Dell screen is 235 ppi so pretty similar to Macbook and other 'retina' equivalent laptop displays.
And I was comparing the current 27" 2560x1440 Cinema Display to the 30" 2560x1600 Cinema Display. The ppi increased a bit, but it is essentially "pretty much the same resolution".
The fact of the matter is that manufacturing large, high-resolution displays is expensive, and that's due to a number of factors: the limited market for high-end desktop displays, the 2-4x increase in subpixel failures as resolutions scale 2-4x, and Windows.
Now that 4k tech is figured out, and Windows is no longer a complete failure at scaling to high pixel densities, expect the market to increase and prices to fall accordingly.
http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1717
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/w-series/w540/
My ideal laptop would be the ThinkPad 9 Slim (13", 3200x1800), with its TrackPoint, but with actual buttons to go with the TrackPoint. Or, to look at that another way: the X1 Carbon with a 3200x1800 or better screen.
Im sure they get discounts... but how much can it be?
with the exception of the touch screen, which you can pretend isn't a touchscreen.
On the other hand, "fastboot" can be an issue: many current Windows systems skip the BIOS screen and don't support USB boot, on the assumption that you'll use the Windows option to shut down and boot into BIOS setup. That option doesn't exist in the Windows setup UI those same systems boot up into when you first get them, thus forcing prospective Linux users to disassemble the system and disconnect the disk to trigger BIOS setup.
13" rMBP (Late 2012): 226 dpi
The new 15" MacBook Pro has specs that are very much like this DELL laptop. Same screen size, same resolution. Same SSD, RAM, and GPU. The MBP has a slightly faster CPU, i7 2.3Ghz instead of DELL’s i7 2.2Ghz. The DELL is 10% cheaper.
The DELL has a 15.6" screen, the MBP has a 15.4" screen. The screens both have the same resolution and aspect ratio. That means the MBP’s screen has a slightly higher DPI (221 versus 218).
Windows 8 and Valve's upcoming Steambox are the sole reasons I am no longer considering PCs in my upgrade options.
15.2" PowerBook G4 1152x768 (2001, updated in late October, same res): 91 dpi
Do they still come covered in Windows stickers and with all sorts of bloatware installed?
Or, perhaps, does the ordinary folk/gamer care about bloatware on a laptop this fast, with i5/i7 and 16GB of RAM?
That might be fine if you're buying a Dell. They're easy to get drivers from. (Though, who else has had to deal with those handful of Dells that required a custom Dell build of the Intel PROSet/Wireless software to work? -.-)
But if you bought an ASUS? With the Impossible Website From Hell? HELL NO! Anyone who has had to download a driver or firmware update from their sites will tell you just how unpleasant the experience is (if they can even do it). I swear their webserver's connection to the outside world is a 14.4 modem.
Running a non-ADK/OPK'd Windows install on a modern laptop reminds me a lot of running Linux on a laptop or OEM desktop 15-20 years ago. Hey, anyone remember how fun winmodems were?
It's just not worth the risk. For me, laptops without Apple branding haven't been a sensible choice in a long time, and there was a good half-decade before that where the only serious manufacturer made ThinkPads.
If I have to run windows, its in a VM, and only for cross browser testing purposes.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-62-...
Ive always been thinking of buying one in the back of my mind. Do dell support linux well in the XPS line?
Barton George, the project lead, has confirmed that there will be a follow-on Sputnik coming out sometime in the next month. This (long) thread has the information, especially on the last few pages. http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/46...
Thank you for the link. Sadly Australia never saw the edition which shipped with Ubuntu, but I'm fine with that as long as i know the hardware supports it.
I know the laptop comes with Win 8.1 which supposedly has decent hi-res screen support but if you wanted to wipe windows and put a Linux distro, which one would be best?
Only works with GTK at the moment, but if you're using GNOME shell, you probably are only mainly using GTK apps anyway.
Every time I see a high-DPI portable device, I long for my preferred consumption and creation context (desktop) to get some needed love from manufacturers.
(Yes, my wife has a Seiki 4K and I have several 30" 2560x1600 monitors, but I want better. The 30" form-factor is from 2004! These displays are the equivalent of a Motorola RAZR flip-phone.)
Edit: see my spur-of-the-moment review of the Seiki lower in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6631442
1920x1080 is more than enough on mobile phones and I don't use tablets or laptops so I don't care about them.
Where are the 23" (give or take a few inches is fine) 4k displays?
Thats what we really need, a high ppi screen for something I stare into for hours a day.
The laptop is basically a Macbook Pro clone and the trackpad holds its own. It's the solid build of a Macbook Pro minus the (unwanted) Mac experience. The only place it really falls short is battery life.
The trick is to disable the gestures in the Synaptic driver and install TwoFingerScroll. Once you do that, the trackpad feels just as smooth as a Macbook.
Aside from that... This laptop isn't intended for gaming. Honestly, I'd think that if Intel HD graphics can drive an rMBP display, then the 750m will suffice for this. Though I would love to see QHD+ come to some of the gaming laptop lines...
I've ordered a couple of the Asus 4K screens from him to try out but man $3500 (4K) vs $350 (1920 x 1200) vs $150 (1920 x 1080). That doesn't sound like a sustainable market to me.
Being touch, I guess it is glossy and not matt?
