Ask HN: What's the best 4K computer display available on the market?

tl;dr: "we don’t think it’s the right time to buy one."

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-4k-monitor-doesnt-exis...

HDMI 2 is OK, but there are no video cards that do HDMI 2.

DisplayPort 1.3 is also OK, but there are no monitors or video cards that use it.

DisplayPort 1.2 can do 4k by pretending the monitor is two 1920x2160 monitors and using two DisplayPort streams. How this interacts with your video card depends on how many hacks your driver vendor has implemented. Linux with XRandr treats one monitor as two, leading to much frustration. The Nvidia Linux driver has a bug where if you turn on Xinerama, it breaks both Xrandr and Xinerama, leaving you with one big monitor, which is nice. The Nvidia driver on Windows works correctly by special-casing known 4k monitors. ChromeOS does not do any hacks, and so you get two screens, and windows can't span screens, making it unusable. (It also doesn't ship with HiDPI assets on most platforms, so if you were hoping to run at 2x, some icons are ugly. I have a bug open for this, though.)

HDMI 1.4 can do half of 4k, so if your monitor supports two HDMI inputs, one for each half of the screen, a computer can drive it that way. I did that for a while and it works fine; video cards have long been able to sync vblank between multiple monitors, so there are no weird artifacts. Obviously the same driver hacks must exist to convince the OS that two "monitors" are actually one.

If you were hoping to just plug in the monitor and have it work, too bad. (You may also have to deal with your BIOS not detecting the monitor, and then the machine not booting as a result!)

That said, if you're happy with 30Hz, which is usable but introduces noticeable keyboard latency, 4k works fine with current versions of HDMI and DisplayPort, so you should get a plug-and-play experience. This is especially acceptable if you're just going to play back video, which is all 23.976, 25, or 30Hz anyway. (But there is almost no 4k content available, so just get an HDTV and use the $5000 you saved to crowd-fund some 4k content.)

Now that you have a signal being supplied to your monitor, you need to get the applications to work correctly. Windows zoom feature is awful, or was when I tested it 6 months ago. Avoid. Linux has nothing. Chrome OS has 2x support (at least as of very recent dev channel releases on Panther, the Asus Chromebox), which works quite nicely. Many applications can be zoomed to good effect, like terminal emulators and Chrome. (If you set Chrome to higher than 100% it fetches the "2x" assets from the webserver and displays them correctly; Google Maps looks especially nice at 200% zoom, but so does any site designed by someone with a retina Mac.)

As for hardware... I have the Asus PQ321. It's fine. It is not retina density, of course. I set Chrome to 150%, bump up the fonts in my terminal and Emacs, and leave everything else at the normal settings. Some things are too small, but not unusably so.

4k is not dense enough to turn off font anti-aliasing for most reasonable screen sizes. What we really want is 8k.

While you're waiting for 8k, I'd just save yourself the money and stress and buy a 30" monitor. Every OS handles those perfectly, and the pixels are still pretty small. I have an HP ZR30w monitor; it's nice. The Asus PQ321 is also nice, of course, but are 1.5 extra inches worth the driver pain and $2000?

First of all, a lot of them can only drive a 4K display at 30hz (for example, my late-2013 Retina MBP). The currently available HDMI only goes up to 30hz, and DisplayPort 1.2 only supports 60hz with MST enabled. It seems like high-end desktop graphics cards can do this.

Second, native 4K on a 28" screen is too small. I can't read it, and my eyes aren't all that bad. I'm guessing a 32" screen would be a bit better, but probably still too small. Any larger than 32" probably wouldn't be feasible as a computer monitor.

It seems like 4K would be perfect at HiDPI mode on a 24" screen. Unfortunately, my Macbook Pro can't do HiDPI on a 4K display. 1.5X HiDPI mode (effective 1440p) on a 28" would probably also look good, but my Macbook Pro can't do that either.

My guess is that the resolution we really want is 5K @ 27". I was playing around with the Retina iMac at the Apple store, and it was still completely readable at 3200x1800. Unfortunately, Apple apparently had to hack the Displayport spec to get this working, and Displayport 1.3 (which has enough bandwidth for 8K) won't be out for a while.

My guess is that we will have reasonable 4K/5K displays as well as computers that can support them in a year or two.

Looks great, can play games at full res and most programs suit the dpi. No major problems.

However,

Linux is a completely different story. I had a hell of a time getting the drivers to work and after about a week of crashes, reinstalling and trying to tweak the size of things so they were visible I gave up and went back to M$.

So if you can bear Win 8.1 and have a powerful gpu, the reasonably priced Samsung is a good bet.

Here are my questions. If i used a central monitor at 4k (the samsung U28D590D) and used 2 x 144 hz Asus on either side, would that work with windows 8.1? Basically one Titan would be hooked up to the 4k monitor via display port, and the two Asus 144hz would be hooked normally to the second Titan card via DVI.

OR another solution would be to do away with all these 27" or 28" monitors and use one larger TV as a 4k monitor? Tv's do not have display port in do they? How about these vizio P series? Since the Titans WILL only output 60hz from the display port...how do I plug in the display port into a 4k tv? I'm so confused, and keep throwing money at something that may be impossible?

Generally, if you are seeking color gamut, 99.9% of the consumer displays are nothing short of awful.

The only one that seems to be remotely along the lines of acceptable color reproduction would be the Dell UP3214Q or any other display with the same panel.

Can anyone with fluid Korean can confirm?

http://www.samsungsvc.co.kr/online/faqView.do?domainId=NODE0...

http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-31MU97-B-4k-led-monitor

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/29/lg-digital-cinema-4k-moni...

On a Mac, you have 1x and 2x, which means a 27" 4K monitor will either show everything too small at 1x or too big at 2x, so go for a 24", which will be like a Retina version of the older 24" Cinema Display. On Windows 8, you have 1.0x, 1.4x, and 1.8x, so you'll probably be fine with 1.4x on a 27" or 1.8x on a 24".

28" UHD LED CrystalPro 4K 60Hz DisplayPort, HDMI/MHL, DVI Monitor (Picture In Picture |Picture By Picture) - Black / Aluminum Bezel

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=...

There were a few caveats that prevented The Wire Cutter from recommending any monitor, but some of those don't seem to apply as readily now as they did at the time of last edit.

I got the Dell UP2414Q - a 24" ~4k monitor, making it around 183 ppi. The primary issues The Wire Cutter brought up in their rundown (of this display and generally) seemed to be the following:

- price (in this case $1100)

- the resolution being too high for the screen space

- poor refresh rates (30Hz in this case)

On the first point, you can now get it for around $750, maybe less, in the US. The second point was somewhat platform-specific, but on OS X you can tell it to display in HiDPI mode and it'll deal with the resolution in pretty much the same way that it deals with a retina Macbook Pro's 2880x1800 display. Namely, it'll scale everything at 2x. This is idyllic. If you have an rMBP, imagine that kind of sharpness across a 24" display and you're in the right ballpark.

The last point, about refresh rates, is trickier. My understanding is that this display has no trouble displaying at 60Hz once you enable it, but I have this display hooked up to a hackintosh, so myriad driver quirks make it impossible for me to say definitively whether the video card, the monitor, or the whole universe is conspiring against my success in trying to get it to display at 4k@60Hz. I think it's the buggy nature of the solution I came upon, which I could only describe as "not working in varying degrees". I'm still looking around, but I'm not optimistic for a real fix to get 60Hz for another month or two, if I'm lucky.

If I had a 2013 or later rMBP, I understand I could test it since that supports the DisplayPort 1.2 standard, but mine is from 2012. So I'm stuck testing with a desktop that shouldn't really even exist, heh.

So bringing it full circle, I recommend that you give waiting a chance. The Dell monitor I have has been fantastic, but not without its frustrations. If you can wait 6 months (or better yet, a year) I emphatically believe that the long term solutions to these kinds of displays will have shaken out by then. DP 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 will almost certainly be ubiquitous in video cards and probably in most laptops. It'll just be a lot easier to get things up and running.

That being said, if you're willing to put in some work and get frustrated a couple of times along the way, the reward is quite nice.

It looks great; at first having a 40inch display is crazy; but (again, for doing work.. programming, graphics, writing) i find the lower pixel density great. i am a bit further from the monitor with it being so large; so the bigger text is fine

SAMSUNG UE55HU7100 LCD, curved, 55" (140cm), hdmi2 CHF 1'498.00