
ASUS Launches Monitor with 3840 x 2160 IGZO Display - fdm
http://hexus.net/tech/items/displays/55965-asus-launches-pq321-monitor-3840-x-2160-igzo-display/
======
alberth
People talk about Retina displays etc ... but back in 2003 (yes, 10 years ago)
ViewSonic had even higher resolution display called the "ViewSonic VP2290b"
[1]

It was 3840x2400 in just a 22" display. It has a 204dpi and again, that was 10
years ago.

Any for the nay sayers, yes - this was mass produced to the point that IBM was
selling them as the T220 display [2]

[1] [http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/viewsonic-
vp2290b-lcd-m...](http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/viewsonic-vp2290b-lcd-
monitor/4505-3174_7-30967920.html)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors>

~~~
TylerE
Those cost like $20k though. If this is available for under $1000, it's a game
changer.

~~~
alberth
It cost approx $8,500 [1] when released.

Also keep in mind that it wasn't until _extremely_ recently (last few years)
that LCD priced have dropped liked crazy. People back in 2003 were use to
paying these kind of prices.

It's simply amazing how today, you can buy an highly performance computer ...
even laptop, for less than $800.

[1] [http://gizmodo.com/017019/viewsonic-vp2290b-mega-monitor-
lus...](http://gizmodo.com/017019/viewsonic-vp2290b-mega-monitor-lusted-after-
reviewed)

~~~
TylerE
That's a later model. The original IBM T220 cost $17,999 (In 2000 dollars,
$24,300 in 2013 dollars). It wasn't until 2 years later that the price dropped
below $10k.

------
bhauer
I have been waiting for this for years [1]. I am salivating at the thought and
I'm eager to know the price. Will I be able to afford to retire my 30"
monitors that were first manufactured eight years ago?

ASUS, if you're reading this: I'd say add an option to drop the integrated
speakers because I still want a very thin bezel so that I can orient two or
three side-by-side.

Edit: Ars has a photo of the PQ321 [2].

[1] <http://tiamat.tsotech.com/displays-are-the-key>

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/asus-brings-4k-to-
you...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/asus-brings-4k-to-your-desktop-
with-massive-31-5-3840x2160-monitor/)

~~~
vadman
They are using Sharp's 4K IGZO panel. The MSRP for Sharp's own monitor is
$5500, the street price is closer to $4800. ASUS will be in the same ballpark
most likely. If you can just order 3 of them to put side by side in portrait
mode, I envy you :)

BTW - one nasty thing about the Sharp display is that it's LED edge-lit, and
the ASUS is most likely the same (the press release says "backlit" but they
don't mention local dimming so I'm guessing edge-lit as well). Perhaps I am
being an unreasonable purist, but I don't like such corner-cutting on premium
displays.

~~~
bhauer
That is disappointingly pricey, but not all that surprising.

Maybe just one to start out with. :) I can rationalize such caution against my
desire to splurge thus: with any luck, this will spark a little bit of
necessary competition in desktop displays; an area stagnant since 2005's
introduction of 30" 2560x1600 monitors. Better to have not invested heavily in
the initial offering.

Plus, as you point out, there may be some odd corners cut. Edge-lit? Boo.

On the other hand, I've been dealing with four fluorescent backlit 30"
monitors for years. LED backlit would be an upgrade even with an edge-lit
design.

Is it too much to ask for OLED or similar 150+ dpi displays on my desktop
before the close of the 2010s? 50+ inch. Possibly even flexible/concave.
Please?

------
Xcelerate
This is great! I probably annoy my friends with how much I tell them I wish
there was an (affordable) high-resolution monitor available.

In fact, the retina MBP's screen is the only reason I switched from Windows to
a Mac; that display alone was worth it.

Looking forward to a non-pixelated future. I'm surprised ASUS was the one to
take the initiative though!

~~~
rogerbinns
Apple has at least also being using 16:10. This ASUS monitor is 16:9 so you
lose 11% of useful vertical resolution which is what matters a lot to us
techie folk.

~~~
lelandbatey
YES, I absolutely love 16:10 displays, but their always inordinately expensive
and hard to come by. I have one very nice 1920x1200 Acer P241w but I'd love to
have a nicer one.

------
kunai
It's disappointing that every new display I see is still stuck with the
archaic 16:9 resolution.

Sure, humans may have more periphery side-to-side. This is great for
television. But, when you read a book, I doubt you read it horizontally.

So, if we do a lot of text manipulation with our computers, why not use a
_taller_ aspect ratio, like 3:2 or 4:3?

It makes no sense why this display still has less resolution than some
ThinkCentre monitors from the early 00's. It makes no sense why there's still
that crap 1366x768 being sold now.

We went from 1280x800 to 1366x768 (fewer vertical pixels), from 1440x900 to
1600x900 (same vertical), from 1680x1050 to 1600x900 (far fewer vertical
pixels), from 1920x1200 to 1920x1080 (fewer), from 2560x1600 to 2560x1440 (far
fewer).

You could keep the vertical resolutions the same, and simply increase the
width, but that would be more expensive to produce, and for the same cost,
you'd get a more proportional 8:5 display, so why would you bother?

It's an extremely sad, sad, thing.

~~~
rsync
I disagree with a few points here...

First off, consumer offerings, like TVs, and perhaps laptops, are all at 16:9,
sure, but almost any decent _computer monitor_ (from Dell, HP, Apple, etc.)
are 16:10. Even if I'm off base, 16:10 is certainly not hard to find.

Second, while I agree that computing activities lend themselves well to
vertical orientation, like you suggest, they lend themselves _even more_ to
multi displays and multi tasking.

So the question is do you really want 2 or 4 or 8 vertical displays, with a
physical seam between each of them, or do you want 1 or 2 or 3 horizontal
displays, all split in two with your window manager, and with fewer physical
seams ?

I organize my workspaces vertically, and I have 3x 16:10 monitors split into
(roughly) 6 vertical workspaces. I only have two physical seams. If monitors
were not horizontal, I would have 6 displays with 5 vertical seams.

So if you're working on a laptop, or have just one screen, I feel your pain.
But big computer monitors are better off horizontal (and in threes :)

~~~
kunai
I'm working on a laptop right now, which is part of the reason for my
animosity towards 16:9. 16:10 displays exist, yes, but they're both expensive
and limited in range.

I can no longer find a decent 22" 16:10 monitor; they're all 16:9. The only
good monitor that's left is the 30" Dell Ultrasharp, which IS 16:10, but it's
$1299, which is godly expensive.

~~~
dman
There are many 24 inch 16:10 displays. The dell u2412m, hp has their zr24w.
You can get these between 300 - 500.

------
vladev
I can't wait to see all the broken applications/unreadable small fonts on my
Linux.

I've been excited for a high density display since Apple announced the retina
display, but I have a gut feeling that it will take a lot of time for the
Linux desktop to support it properly, if ever.

~~~
dman
Both dwm and xfce have worked just fine on my chromebook pixel. This is on
debian 7. The only two applications that have given me issues are ones that do
their own custom rendering - Chromium and Sublime text. Both of them have some
UI text that cannot be resized and does not appear to respect system dpi
settings.

~~~
seabee
It seems ironic that Chromium should give you issues on a Chromebook. Does
(non-free) Chrome work?

~~~
dman
On ChromeOS chrome works just fine. On debian webpages are rendered perfectly
because I can change font settings for those, but the tab titles are drawn
with text that is too small. There is no setting exposed currently from what I
can tell to control the font of the tab titles.

------
sdfjkl
Finally some movement in the desktop display market. I've been hoping for this
every time I dragged a window from my retina display to the desktop monitor
and it lost 3/4th of it's pixels.

------
fdm
More than 10 years after the IBM T220/T221 came out, but the IBM monitor still
has a significantly bigger resolution (3840x2400) and PPI (203.98 vs 139.56).

~~~
jtreminio
Yes but the problem is its low refresh rate. If you're looking at static
images, I'm sure it will do great, but if you are trying to watch a movie,
play a game, or do anything that has fast motion, you won't have a good time.

~~~
masklinn
Meanwhile the PQ321 has a refresh rate of ???.

~~~
jfb
8ms, according to the OP.

~~~
bestham
8ms is the panel switch rate, not the same as the slow refresh rate of the
Lenovo due to the bottleneck in the interconnect with the GPU (4 DVI-channels
and 41 Hz refresh, when the panel surly did 60 Hz). It is a massive datarate,
especially for a 12 year old system.

------
jfb
So a 24" Retina Thunderbolt display at WWDC is pretty much a given, then.

~~~
mortenjorck
Maybe a bit premature, but I'd say you're spot-on in execution. This is almost
certainly how Apple will bring Retina to the desktop: A 24" 1080p @2x, which
just happens to be the same resolution as the emerging 4K standard. 27" is too
big for 1080p-scaled UI elements, but 24" is just about right (and being
Retina, you'll no doubt be able to crank it a bit higher if you give up the
pure 2x multiplier).

If they launched this summer, I think it'd be a $2000+ display, which is
probably more than Apple wants to enter the market at. In another 6-12 months,
I can see them being able to hit something more like $1499, which sounds about
right.

~~~
jfb
It'll be 16:10 (3840x2400), not 16:9 (3840x2160), but otherwise, yeah, that's
what I figure.

~~~
nsxwolf
What makes you think they'd switch back to 16:10? (I'd love it if they did)

~~~
jfb
I'd like to claim Special Knowledge, but of course it was strictly a
brainfart.

------
dochtman
I'd much prefer having higher-ppi 24" screens.

~~~
sliverstorm
Take what you can get. The biggest obstacle right now is getting over the
1080p "hump"; once 4K is common, you'll see a variety of sizes available.

------
MattDL
Honestly I think my next monitor will have to be a 120Hz 4k screen.

I'm not sure I could take the step back down to 60Hz after getting used to it,
for me it's a much bigger deal than resolution.

~~~
adlpz
Why is it so important? Is it for gaming, maybe? Because I am pretty sure it's
impossible to notice that while working, because there is no flicker between
frames anyway. And gaming on a 4K screen (at PC viewing distance) is pretty
crazy.

~~~
arianvanp
Yes. Quake players swear by 120Hz+ screens. We're all geeks and nerds who
still use CRT monitors because those new hip 'flat' things have too much input
lag and too low refresh rate. In a fast-paced game like quake, these things
make the difference between winning a duel and losing one.

Also in the fighting game community (King of Fighters, streetfighter) input
lag is a killer. if your monitor has lag, you won't be able to chain your
combos as well as the pros.

For working and document editing and browsing, 50Hz with slow input time is
fine, but for 'serious' gaming it's not, I guess.

It's also one of the arguments I hear why PC gamers consider themselves 'more
awesome'. "Why would I play on an xbox, on one of those TVs with the horrible
refresh rate, and all the post-processing that adds milliseconds of delay"

~~~
oftenwrong
Gamers may swear by them, but that does not mean there is an actual
difference. Have there been any double-blind tests between 60hz and 120hz?

~~~
DanBC
If I ever get fu money I'm going to start double-blind testing _everything_ \-
screen refresh rates; mouse rates; coffee preparation methods; speaker
cables[1]; bitrates for media; compression for media; _everything_ I can.

~~~
oftenwrong
A site focused on conducting controlled double-blind tests would be amazing.

~~~
nwzpaperman
Blind Busters

------
akurilin
Would do anything for an affordable ultra high resolution 24" or 30" monitor
for development. Think of all the tmux and vim panes you can cram into one of
these puppies :)

------
paddy_m
Seiki has a 4k 50 inch screen for $1300. It has poor inputs and is currently
sold out, but it signals things to come.
[http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-
det...](http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-
details.asp?EdpNo=7674736)

------
veidr
Disinclined as I am to use Apple's "Retina" marketing term, it is a
conceptually useful distinction. On a given display at the real world distance
you use it for work, you can't see the pixels.

That is what we as users want, and it is also the limit of what is useful:
packing additional pixels into the same surface area doesn't help anything.

This monitor isn't quite there. But it is still a big leap in terms of
progress over the standard 2560x1440 27" inch panels currently used by Apple,
Dell, etc.

We already have similar monitors in Japan for like $4000... it will be
interesting to see how this one is priced.

I have a couple 30" and a newer 27" monitors, but I'd trade all three of them
for one 24" truly retina monitor.

------
cclogg
Can anyone explain how 10 bit color would work for a monitor? Would we even
notice it since most image formats are 8-bits-per-channel... and what does the
OS do?

Is the monitor able to more accurately show the difference between the sun vs
a desk-lamp? (Where today both would appear as RGB 255 in a photo, unless you
took 3 exposures and combined them into a 32 bit HDR file... but anyway...)

~~~
mark-r
I think you can take advantage of the extra bits for color calibration. Your
source is still 8 bits, but those 8 bits are converted to 10 in a way that
provides better accuracy.

~~~
cclogg
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this works, I guess. If I am
viewing a JPEG that is only 8 bit color (per channel), how does a 10 bit
monitor make that any better without having a 10 bits per channel image
source?

Or what if I'm in Photoshop in 32 bits per channel mode, doing some HDR
work... does this 10 bit monitor mean I'm seeing slightly better colors (more
dynamic range) than my old 8 bit monitor?

~~~
nitrogen
The data channel from GPU to display is most likely still 8-bit. The path from
the display controller to the panel, however, is 10-bit (some monitors even
use 12). This allows the display controller to apply gamma, contrast, and
brightness curves to the incoming data without sacrificing any color
resolution. When you make the same adjustments on your PC, the GPU has to
dither the result back to 8-bit for transmission.

------
potatolicious
Anybody have more info on this "IGZO" tech? My main interest in viewing angle,
color stability, and color reproduction.

~~~
vld
I'm guessing they're using the Sharp panel announced last year.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1wRivEeIU8>

------
dawkins
I just bought a 2560x1080px monitor just to discover that there is no way to
use it with my laptop. It seems that most laptops are limited to 1920x1080
despite that the graphics card may support higher resolutions.

~~~
gknoy
I had a similar problem at work getting my external (27" 2560x1440) monitor
working with my laptop (a Sony F-series) running Ubuntu. We solved it by
lowering the refresh rate used by the HDMI output. It took quite a bit of
tweaking to find the right values, and frankly I've forgotten what most of it
meant, but this may help you:

In the "Monitor" section, we defined modelines:

    
    
        ModeLine       "2560x1440_33" 164.99 2560 2688 2960 3360 1440 1441 1444 1468 -hsync +vsync
        ModeLine       "2560x1440_30" 146.27 2560 2680 2944 3328 1440 1441 1444 1465 -hsync +vsync
    
    

Then, in the Screen section, I appear to have modes selected from there:

    
    
        Option         "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+360, DFP-1: 2560x1440_33 +1920+0; # ... and a bunch more that seem to be auto-generated by nvidia-settings?
    

The down side of this is that I can't connect my laptop to use any of our
projectors in on conference rooms, but it's a small price to pay in order to
be able to drive the larger screen.

------
daniel-cussen
I can only slobber at the thought of 24 (3 monitors * 8 columns per monitor)
columns of emacs open at once.

 _That's almost 3 KLOCs._

------
driverdan
8ms GTG response time is probably fine for most users but isn't great. Even
Monoprice's cheap IPS displays are 6ms.

------
Jakehp
I swear technology is working against me; I just finished buying my IPS panel
monitors.

------
mtgx
Random guess - under $1,000? Would that be an okay price for it?

~~~
sciurus
I doubt that a 31.5-inch 3840 x 2160 monitor will be less than $1,000. Dell's
U3014, which is 30-inch and 2560x1600, is $1,200.

~~~
jacquesm
And that one is worth every penny (looking at it right now).

~~~
jacques_chester
You can get the same panels for 1/3rd to 1/2 the price from the usual Korean
suppliers.

I bought two.

~~~
jacquesm
Fortunately I am no longer in the spot where I have to order things from
halfway around the world to save a few bucks but I can just go to
dell.com/dell.nl and order what I need for my job.

I'd feel if I still had to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to get the
tools I need for my trade at 48 that I'd be doing something seriously wrong :)

It's good those cheaper options exist, me, I just buy what I need at the list
price if it's tools, I have one of these at home and one of them at work. It
may be a bit more expensive but the time spent and possible frustration on
trying to save $500 on something ordered from far away just is not worth it to
me, especially not if it were to break at some point during what would
normally be the warranty period. I guess at your price point you could simply
order yet another one as a spare :)

I have the same attitude towards cars (even though I'm perfectly capable of
fixing just about anything), food and a few other items. In some ways this is
a tremendous luxury and I am well aware of that.

~~~
jacques_chester
I hear you. There's a lot of things I don't bother to comparison shop for
these days. I'm in that place where I can order them from Dell and pay the
300% markup.

I just felt that earning effectively $1600/hr in terms of time spent selecting
a weird Korean monitor was an effective ROI.

When I'm billing that much I guess I'll feel differently :)

------
Aardwolf
Awesome progress! Now also do it witha 24" monitor please, 31" is a bit on the
big side for my desk setup at home.

------
MonkoftheFunk
Maybe this will trickle down to the oculus? We just got one and Ya the only
things missing is pixel density.

------
rbanffy
> Inputs/outputs DisplayPort, 2x HDMI (optional), RS-232C, 3.5mm audio-in,
> 3.5mm audio-out

RS-232C?! Cool!

~~~
cletus
RS-232 is basically required for any serious display. Why? Integration into
videoconferencing and other systems with Krestron and other units. This
channel is used for switching them on and off, changing the mode and input,
etc.

------
sebnukem2
Finally!!! I've read the article multiple times and no price? Did I miss it?

------
skizm
8 ms response time... not ideal for PC gaming I don't think.

------
Dirlewanger
Refresh rate is probably 30Hz I'm guessing. If so...ick.

~~~
trimbo
Specs on page say 8ms response time.

~~~
tr4656
That's not relevant to what he's saying.

------
lingben
so is this IPS or TN?

~~~
wmf
IGZO

~~~
lingben
oh, so it isn't even TFT technology?

~~~
deno
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/13/sharp_begins_product...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/13/sharp_begins_production_of_igzo_retina_display_tech/)

~~~
lingben
neat, I didn't know about this, thank you!

------
ttrreeww
Why can't they make a 21 inch 4k monitor...

