Wednesday, January 21

Geek

Samsung U28D590D Review

TL;DR: Oh my God, it's full of stars.

Tech Specs

Resolution: 3840x2160
Input: 1 x DisplayPort 1.2, 2 x HDMI 1.4
Output: 1/8" audio jack
Power: External power brick

The Samsung U28D590D is a 1.5th generation 4K monitor.  Early 4K screens were targeted squarely at the professional market, with prices upwards of $3000.  Second generation 4K screens, showing up now, are priced under $1000, still use high-quality IPS panels, but forego some high-end features like colour calibration.

The U28 sits below those, as a high-end consumer model, for consuming rather than producing high-resolution content.  And it's priced appropriately; I paid A$499 for mine on sale; regular online prices range upwards from $549 to $699.

Out of the box it takes a few minutes to attache the stand (you'll need a large-bladed screwdriver, either plus or minus) and get it plugged in. The default settings are retina-searingly bright; I have the brightness and contrast turned down to 60 currently and it's still on the bright side.

This is a subjective review; I have no measurement equipment.  But there are no static colour or brightness inconsistencies significant enough to notice (and there were on my old Dell U2711, a professional monitor), and no visible dead or stuck pixels (though at 4K they might not be easy to find).

Colours are vibrant and text is very sharp.  It's not quite perfect - I'm judging it against my 2560x1600 Nexus 10 - but it's very good indeed.

The stand isn't as solid as it could be, particularly compared to the Dell, which is rock steady.  I'd feel comfortable leaning on the Dell if I needed to climb on the desk to change the light bulb (and have); I'd never do that with this monitor.

This is a TN panel, so there is going to be some colour shift if you view it from an angle.  Good news is that the horizontal viewing angle is as good as any monitor I've seen, including expensive IPS screens.  Bad news is that if you stand up and look down at a 45 degree angle, white turns to blue-grey and other colours take on a distinct blue shift.

Both my desktop with its Radeon 7950 and my notebook with its Intel integrated graphics (Haswell CPU) recognised the monitor immediately and worked flawlessly over HDMI, albeit at 30Hz.    What didn't work so well was connecting my 7950 over DisplayPort.

On one of the two mini-DisplayPort outputs on the card, the display shows graphical glitches on random horizontal bands every 10-30 seconds.  On the other port, the whole screen goes black and then restores itself every 20-60 seconds.

Adjusting the resolution to 2560x1440 stops the problem, but that doesn't look particularly great.  On the HDMI port at 30Hz, the display is rock solid.  I suspect this is an issue with my DisplayPort cable - my card has mini-DP, and the included cable is full-size, so I picked up a mini-DP to DP cable from the corner computer store.  I suspect it might be an older cable only rated for DP 1.1, and so not able to reliably carry the 4K@60Hz signal.  I'll order another cable online and test that again.

Right now I'm running quite happily at 30Hz; you can notice the difference, but for work, watching movies, and light gaming it's not a really problem.

The remaining question is Windows 8's scaling.  It's a bit of a mixed bag.  I'm having more luck (for some reason) on my desktop than on my notebook (a 1080p 13.3" screen, so basically the same DPI as this).  I'll report back on that aspect in a few days.

The on-screen display is driven by a little joystick on the back of the monitor; you can easily reach it from the front - it's just behind the lower right corner.  It works quite well, and has all the usual amenities.  I haven't yet tried features like picture-in-picture or picture-by-picture, but I have little use for them anyway.

Overall, it's a good monitor for its target audience, and at this price, a good buy.  The big selling point is not this monitor in particular but 4K and high-resolution displays generally. : It's like washing the mud off your screen; everything is suddenly so clear.  I'd find it hard to go back, and I've only had it a day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:08 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 726 words, total size 5 kb.

1 It's too bad that Windows and Mac OS GUIs didn't embrace scalable graphics until so late, which surely was a major reason that higher resolution displays failed to catch on until recently. I recall a few ~300 dpi grayscale CRTs back in the mid 80s, but likely cost, widespread color, and software problems prevented any significant adoption.

Posted by: Kayle at Friday, January 23 2015 07:05 AM (W8clb)

2 Yes, there were always a few high-res displays, for medical imaging and engineering and similar uses.  The IBM T220 was a 4K LCD back in 2002 - but it cost the best part of $20,000.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 23 2015 03:55 PM (2yngH)

3 The Tektronix 4014 was 4K*3K in 1974. (I worked on it as my first job out of college.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 24 2015 12:26 AM (+rSRq)

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