This monitor is a BIG step up from any older 23-24" monitor in terms of sharpness and contrast. You'll very quickly notice reduced eye strain, especially when reading text and working with precise controls in software. Unfortunately through no real fault of the monitor or manufacturer, this is still an "early adopter" purchase for sure, if you're reading this when Windows 8.1 is still current. Especially if you're using this on an X99 system with the recently released grop of Nvidia GeForce GTX 900 series video cards. Their VBIOS are still fairly new and there are lots of little minor problems such as the monitor not resuming properly from sleep, or ACPI states (various sleep / suspend / hibernate levels) bouncing right back to power-on if you turn off the power switch to the monitor.
Also -- perhaps the fault of current video drivers, I can't be sure -- from time to time the computer and video card will incorrectly interpret this monitor and you'll have to force a restart of the display by changing resolution and back again, or any other manual control step that forces the video driver to recheck itself or restart. Underlying this is a basic hardware fact you need to know before purchasing this monitor: that internally it is really a pair of 1920 x 2160 panels side by side. When something goes wrong and your driver messes up, suddenly it's as if the right-side one of those panels lost a couple of inches of virtual desktop on its left edge. In other words, a vertical stripe of workspace right in the middle of the monitor sort of tucks away and everything to the right of it scoots left. So you're missing some of your pixels. It's not a total deal-breaker because your video system will always re-do itself correctly when you prompt it to -- and more importantly, this only happens at most once per boot, and never happens over again during a complete run of the computer from boot to shutdown.
You can also reduce your impression of the severity of this issue by the fact that I'm overclocking my CPU and the video card may be behaving with a little more difficulty due to that, at least until NVidia's drivers get more mature over the next few months.
The overall quality of the monitor is quite excellent: no dead pixels (though it would be very very difficult to find them if there were individual ones, they are truly tiny) and great controls. I own and use a Datacolor Spyder4 color calibrator and it does a fine job with this monitor.
Another thing you absolutely MUST realize before buying this monitor: it's one of the smallest 4K monitors thus its DPI (dots per inch) is one of the highest except for Apple's sharpest displays. If you're a Windows user, Windows 8 and 8.1 are *not* mature yet in how they handle high-DPI displays. Sure they know how to scale your desktop, but Windows does a terrible job of communicating with various programs so that the program knows what size and how dense of a display it's on. For just one major example, Photoshop requires some work-arounds to use at all on this monitor because Photoshop was programmed to assume the old standard DPI of 96 to 120 and it doesn't do the greatest job of working with Windows to accommodate any higher DPI display. So while Photoshop is drop-dead beautiful on this monitor, unfortunately the menu text and tools are absolutely tiny. Recently Adobe added a sort of an emergency experimental setting under Preferences > Experimental that doubles the size of all Photoshop user interface elements so that you can at least use it. But you have no control over that UI scaling, just a choice of either exactly 200% scaling or nothing. And then when you choose to move some of your tools off of this monitor onto another -- a pretty standard workflow for most photo and graphics people -- they end up being HUGE, taking up your entire other monitor and with very very large type.
Oddly enough, Adobe Lightroom CC does not have the problem that Photoshop does. Different programming team. Adobe refuses to talk about the difference... it absolutely flat-out refuses and will ban you from their forums if you press the point.
Many programs seem to work across multi-monitor desktops that include this monitor, but many other programs don't. It's way more than half that don't. When a program doesn't, it will end up either tiny or huge depending on which monitor you put it on.
I'd still rather have this item as my main display than return it and live with lower DPI all over again. My eye health has literally improved by a very noticeable amount since this became my main monitor, thanks to the sharpness. My eyes had previously forgotten over the years what sharpness and clarity truly were, so they got lazy. Now that they're able to actually work all day on images that are nearly as sharp as real life, my eyes have re-learned to insist on sharpness, i.e. to do their job and focus fully.
| Standing screen display size | 23.8 Inches |
|---|---|
| Max Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
