[Speculation]4K becoming semi-affordable?

[Deleted]

Given that CES is on this week, there have been a number of surprise announcements regarding monitors, like the ASUS 4k monitor costing $800, or Lenovo's Think monitors/AIO chassis, with the monitor costing $800.

Does this considerable price-drop mean that the monitors are becoming more affordable in response to the market, or that people think that 4K gaming resolutions will be intended to be the norm, given that the lowest-end 4K TV cost multiple thousands of dollars?

[Shinzai]

I noted a while back that Seiki Digital is actually making 4K TVs that are getting good ratings for low prices.

Their 39" model is $699. http://www.seiki.com/products/seiki4kUltraHD/

Companies like this force market shifts and reactions and will help to drive prices down. I suggested that 4K would bottom out in the next two years price wise and I still believe that.

[Deleted]

Lenovo are releasing a 28 inch 4k monitor at 799$ ThinkVision Pro2840m, Dell´s is still 1399$

Sharp just demoed their 85 inch 8k TV 7680x4320 or 16 times fullHD.. Has 3D with no use of glasses

[Cyanotical]

the problem is that these "affordable" 4k panels are coming with a cheaper controller that uses multi-stream displayport, multistream causes problems as noted in this review from newegg for Dell's 32" 4k:

Pros: Good physical design. Good color quality.

Cons: Simply does not work reliably at native resolution with 60 Hz refresh due to the fundamentally flawed DisplayPort 1.2 MST (multi-stream) technology which causes this monitor to act as two displays in 60 Hz mode.

One significant challenge with troubleshooting this monitor, is that there is no way to tell whether the problems are caused by the monitor or the video card, since nVidia is the only vendor who supports 4K @ 60 Hz at the moment.

To change from single-stream (30 Hz) mode to multi-stream (60 Hz) mode, you need to go into the monitor's OSD and enable "DisplayPort 1.2".

Dell's OSD menu doesn't work if you don't have a signal on the screen. If there is no displayable signal, the only thing you can do is select an input. If you hit a "permanent disconnect" (more on that later) the monitor can't display a signal, so you can't go into the menu and disable DisplayPort 1.2 to start over. You have to plug in some other device via HDMI to get a signal, but that isn't as easy as it sounds. The device can't be a computer that supports 4K resolution, and the device can't freak out if it sees an EDID that includes 4K resolution (e.g. my Ouya game box didn't work, I had to grab a Blu-ray player). Then once you get the signal going over HDMI, you still can't disable DisplayPort 1.2 because that option isn't available if the current connection is HDMI. You have to reset to factory settings, losing any customization you may have performed.

Once you get the UP3214Q displaying native resolution at 60 Hz (which takes some fiddling and luck), the state of the monitor is quite "fragile", in that there are lots of things that have a chance of causing what I call a "permanent disconnect" resulting in no display. Things that have a percentage chance of causing a permanent disconnect include a resolution switch (e.g. running a game at non-native resolution) or plugging/unplugging a second monitor or HDMI audio device.

Speaking of HDMI audio, it will not work with this monitor connected, even if the HDMI audio device is connected to a completely separate video card. This looks like an nVidia bug.

Another common failure mode is that half of the screen goes away (always the left half, which is especially annoying). Most of the time the mouse cursor becomes invisible.

With DisplayPort 1.2/MST enabled, when you reboot the system you won't see anything on screen until Windows loads. Aside from the obvious need to change BIOS settings, this can cause some serious problems if your boot gets interrupted by an error that you don't see, such as Windows complaining that it didn't shut down properly. In that case you'll end up in safe mode with no native graphics driver so guess what, no display!

The final nail in this monitor's coffin is that it doesn't support scaling in MST mode and nVidia's GPU scaling doesn't work, so you have to run at native resolution or not at all.

Other Thoughts: As you're probably aware, this is a MST (multi stream) monitor, like all other current 4K monitors. Although DisplayPort 1.2 can theoretically support 3840x2160 @ 60 Hz, for reasons that are unclear even to those who read the DP specification, there are no current implementations that use a single stream at this resolution. Every current 4K monitor, when put into 60 Hz mode, enumerates itself as two separate displays, a left and right, each with 1920x2160 resolution ("monitor" denoting 60 Hz capability, vs. "TV" which only supports 30 Hz). Perhaps this is because no silicon vendor offers a receiver chip with sufficient bandwidth -- rather than introducing such a product now, they are probably waiting for DisplayPort 1.3 due Q2 2014.

A side issue is software readiness for 4K. Windows 8.1 itself deals with 4K adequately (although you have to mess with app properties to change scaling options for certain apps or you'll get really fuzzy text) but other software is more problematic. Games have two common problems: lack of resolution support, and lack of scalable UI. Titles like Marvel Heroes don't support 3840x2160 and can't be forced via their configuration file to work at native resolution. For those titles that do support 4K, lack of scalable UI support can still make them borderline unplayable. World of Tanks, for example, supports 4K but everything is extremely tiny, including the minimap and text.

Cabling is another challenge. I simply don't know if there is a cable you can buy that will work with this monitor. The only cables that worked for me -- "worked" within the context of the issues discussed below -- were the Dell-bundled DP-to-mini-DP cables that came with the monitors. I tried 3 other cables that didn't work at all: Accel UltraAV DisplayPort 1.2 DP-to-DP; Accel UltraAV DisplayPort 1.2 DP-to-mini-DP; and the DP-to-DP cables that came with my SIIG DisplayPort KVM (the KVM didn't work either except at 30 Hz). So, I did all of my testing with the bundled cables. Accel UltraAV cables seem to be the reference cable, so if they don't work, I really don't know what will.

At this time I can only recommend this monitor if you intend to stick with 30 Hz operation. Just about the only uses for a 30 Hz-only 4K monitor are 4K film production, or graphic arts/photo editing. Even in these limited uses, you'd have to be able to put up with a slow and flickery mouse cursor and UI elements.

Trying to use the UP3214Q as a general-purpose monitor is just too painful due to the fragility of the configuration and the limitations of MST mode.

these issues are compounded when using SLI or Crossfire (pretty much required to game at 4k currently) so much so that sweclockers has dropped 4k SLI/Xfire reviews and tests for the time being


TL; DR we will need to wait for 4k panels with high quality 60Hz single stream controllers to be able to use them for gaming, avoid until then

[darxide]

All technology becomes more affordable with time (or it becomes obsolete and therefore worthless, which is different) so I don't really see why this has to be [Speculation].