> if you remotely care about color accuracy or gaming

Lots of hackers only care about having enough pixels to legibly represent characters in their tiny coding font.

> Resolution isn't the only consideration when buying a new monitor.

Sure it is! Reading on a monitor is pure torture ever since I bought a Retina MBP. If this is anywhere close to being affordable (realistically: no) I'd buy it for that reason alone.

True, but resolution so massively outweighs every other consideration (for me) that it might as well be the only.

In this new high-res world, virtually all desktop monitors are just broken. Ugh, I am typing these very words right now on a 30" Dell 3008FWP, and I want to gouge out my eyes...

Until the monitor supports at least 60hz I would say it's unusable for gaming.

I think this is a problem too. I can understand the manufacturers wanting their logo on the bottom though.

If I was a screen manufacturer I would have a speaker bar on the bottom that has the logo and a few easy brightness controls on it - total Fisher Price usability.

I would then add in a feature for the pros - have it so the speaker/controls bar can be folded up under the screen.

In that way people that like their bling logos could have the logo on view, those that just want a panel can have no distractions.

If engineered nicely you could have USB and video inputs on the drop-down bar made accessible from the front.

Just paint the logo black. Or as close as you can get to the rest of the front's color. I'm doing this on all my Dells (using a paint marker), including a dot over the light of the power button.

When selling in retail how will people know whose monitor they are looking at? Logos serve many purposes, but in the wild they are a good source of marketing. Should we ask them to not brand even the box the CPU comes in?

At most they could make the logo easily removable, too me that would be a fair compromise.

Why's that? I picked up a QHD+ Samsung a few weeks ago and have been loving it for development work. All of the development tools I've needed so far have respected Windows' DPI scaling (which came set at 200% on the Samsung, making it easy to spot when a program failed to scale correctly).

The only major culprit so far has been Dropbox, which is infuriatingly frustrating to use at HiDPI. So bad it makes me want to move everything to SkyDrive or Google Drive.

I've been living on a Retina MBP, which has a comparably 4x resolution, and I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion: if you work with text, you need a super-dense screen ASAP. I don't know how Windows handles it, but in OS X, "Retina" support means that e.g. my Emacs windows look amazing -- even as Java-garbage like Intelli-J look like some sort of Motif abomination.

The intent with these kinds of high DPI screens is usually to use scaling and keep interface elements roughly the same physical size (like Apple does with the RMBP), not to make everything tiny and still pixelated. If you spend all day looking at text it looks fantastic on a high density display.

Support on Windows isn't perfect, but most programs handle it well by now.

Set DPI scaling to get it to 2560x1440 "equivalent"? Not a general solution since so many apps misbehave, but if you're coding and spending most of the time in the editor, you get the extra real estate, plus the extra crispness in font rendering.

With DPI scaling set to 2x in Windows 8.1, text editors look no different than on a 1600x900 screen.

I code all day in Sublime on a 2560x1440 13" laptop at 1.5x scaling (Asus UX301LA-DH71T).

And in 10 years we may even return to CRT refresh rates.

4K is totally doable with a single GPU if you drop to using medium/high instead of very high/ultra quality settings for even the most demanding of games: http://hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_...

For the majority of games 4K won't pose an issue whatsoever with a modern high end video card.

Oh yes, we are way, way off at this stage. Check this recent benchmark from Phoronix (on Linux, at least, Windows gaming may be a little better in performance...): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_uhd...

With a Titan card from nVidia, maxing out at 20 FPS on Unigine, it's pretty depressing. We need to see a 2 to 3x fold performance increase in graphics cards for gaming to be realistic on 4k screens.

that what GPU vendors have been waiting for, as with the current Full HD max resolutions there wasnt really a need to upgrade in the last few years.

Err ... color resolution was never really the problem with CRT technology.

There's a new colour space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020 coming for the UHDTV (4K TV) standard; gonna be a son of a gun.

The Monoprice 27" (using the same panel as the Apple Thunderbolt display) is under $400 this weekend: http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=109&cp_id=10909&cs_id=...

I have one beside the same size thunderbolt display and I like the monoprice one better (it seems to have a more effective anti-reflective coating).

The whole idea behind 4k is that you can feed it 1080p content and it will be displayed no worse than it would be on native 1080p display. In other words it allows easily swap between having conventional 24" 1080p performance or full 4k resolution, and this swapping can be relatively easily be done on a per-application basis, or possibly even more granually. Imagine eg having a WebGL context being pixel-doubled while the text on the same page being rendered at full resolution.

In comparison, in a 2560x1600 24" monitor you'd get either quite big/ugly double-pixels, or scaling artifacts of non-integer multiple scaling.

At $3,500 for the 32", the 24" will probably be $2,500-3,000. So, whether or not you will be getting 2-4 I guess depends on whether you'd rather have these monitors, or a car.

I picked up a couple Korean 27" 1440ps for the desktop for around $300 and loving them. They're even overclockable.

Although not 55", a post above refers to: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/seiki-4k

It seems like if you do not do gaming, you should be fine.

Off-topic but thanks for the noscript message.

(A) Horrible is a vast overstatement. Unless you need calibrated color, it is fine.

(2) Being too large is relative, my 30" 2560x1600 quickly became normal sized. For the additional pixels the additional inches of a 39" seems about right.

(iii) HDMI at 30Hz is just fine for anything but gaming. I used to have an IBM T221 that also ran at 30Hz and it was no problem at all for text and video. Some people expect there will be mouse lag, there wasn't.

a) Not really. Obviously, Seiki isn't setting a benchmark for build quality. But it's also not "horrible." My wife's Seiki has zero dead pixels and is crisp and clear. Brightness isn't even around the edges, but "horrible" is going too far. It's far less horrible than a TN panel, for instance.

2) 39" is not way too large. I want 50" on my desktop.

iii) Yeah, HDMI 1.4 is limiting, but 30Hz makes it still usable for non-gaming. DisplayPort? I guess I won't balk at it, but just give me HDMI 2.

I am critical of the monitor for other reasons: a) it doesn't power up on DPMI on and has a splash screen, 2) it has a semi-glossy screen and professional monitors should be matte, and iii) it's HDMI 1.4.

Your point about the importance of pixel density is a good one, but the pedantry is misplaced. Resolution in the context of display resolution has referred to pixel count, not pixel density, for decades.

Well, a 4k 39" TV still has about a 12% higher pixel density than the 1920x1200 24 inch monitor I'm using right now.

Additionally, you can take that extra size and just sit a little bit further away from it.

I have a Seiki 39in that I use as a second monitor for my rMBP - the PPI (110) is the same as the Apple 27in Thunderbolt and they have roughly the same picture quality once you calibrate the Seiki. 39 Inches of uninterrupted space is awesome the only downside I've noticed is some mouse lag under OSX which can be fixed with some quartz settings that then cause screen tearing, I've read it's not present under windows so maybe it's something that can be worked out with a software fix.

Exactly: the most interesting thing here isn't the 4k, but rather the 183.5ppi.