State of 4K monitors for photo editing

[WombatHorror]

This is indeed a problem. I provided screencaps which give an idea of the limitations.

The main issue I have with browsers are small JPEGs which are too small to begin with, as they are quarter the size most people are used to (using a 1080p monitor) or even smaller. Hopefully there will be a pixel-doubling/quadrupling feature in Firefox soon.

That's weird because with 200% set in Windows and HiDPI set on my MAC I don't get Firefox or IE showing images at 1/4 the physical size they were on my 1920x1080 monitor. They are simply being interpolated up to take up the same size as always. How do you have things set??

Also, some websites render poorly with large fonts. LL is good, but BBC News isn't, for example.

Hmm BBC News looks 100% fine in Firefox to me. Did you try to set Firefox to using larger fonts? Because you should leave the Firefox font settings alone and use the 200% setting in Windows instead (or the HiDPI setting on MAC).

[WombatHorror]

Saying that a display/link is running at 60Hz is equivalent to saying that it is running at 60 fps.I believe that other 4k monitors supports only 30Hz/fps.

I do believe that 4k is the future.

-h

I think most of the UHD monitors support 60Hz other than for the new batch of really cheap 28" ones which are pretty bare bones and seem to have small gamuts and 30Hz max and so on. I'm not sure about HDTV, maybe they are all 30Hz locked? I'm sure the cheap ones most likely?

[feppe]

Saying that a display/link is running at 60Hz is equivalent to saying that it is running at 60 fps.I believe that other 4k monitors supports only 30Hz/fps.

No, refresh rate is different than fps, although I can see why one would think they are equivalent.

You can have 30fps on a 60Hz screen - the screen would just show each frame twice. Or on a 120Hz screen the same frame would be shown four times.

[feppe]

That's weird because with 200% set in Windows and HiDPI set on my MAC I don't get Firefox or IE showing images at 1/4 the physical size they were on my 1920x1080 monitor. They are simply being interpolated up to take up the same size as always. How do you have things set??

Hmm BBC News looks 100% fine in Firefox to me. Did you try to set Firefox to using larger fonts? Because you should leave the Firefox font settings alone and use the 200% setting in Windows instead (or the HiDPI setting on MAC).

I use Windows only for Lightroom and Photoshop. On Linux I've set OS fonts to 160%, and FF fonts to size 30. OS font setting doesn't impact browsers on Linux. I believe the reason BBC and some other sites don't render properly is because their design just doesn't work with large font sizes - no matter what your monitor is.

I haven't checked or compared, but I doubt there's any pixel quadrupling going on in FF or Chromium. I would be very surprised to hear that such a feature is present on any OS on any browser.

edit: I'll be damned. Went to Windows, and Chrome indeed does scale images along with fonts! On Linux there's no scaling of images going on, at least not by default. Warrants further investigation.

[WombatHorror]

I use Windows only for Lightroom and Photoshop. On Linux I've set OS fonts to 160%, and FF fonts to size 30. OS font setting doesn't impact browsers on Linux. I believe the reason BBC and some other sites don't render properly is because their design just doesn't work with large font sizes - no matter what your monitor is.

I haven't checked or compared, but I doubt there's any pixel quadrupling going on in FF or Chromium. I would be very surprised to hear that such a feature is present on any OS on any browser.

There is. I'm running Firefox in such a way as I type right now. I have Windows set to 200% scaling. ALL images and text appear in my Firefox browser the same physical size on my UDH 24" monitor as they had on my 24" HD monitor. If an image was 14" across on the HD 24" monitor it is still 14" across on my UHD 24" monitor. On the UHD it got interpolated 2x in each direction (although that does give it maybe a trace less digitally crisp look compared to the HD monitor). The text doesn't get interpolated but is simply all rendered with 4x as many pixels per character so it looks awesome, 100% crisp and like in a book and the page layout still looks just perfect and just as on HD monitors.

And I see the same thing when I use HiDPI mode on MAC with Firefox.

And the same when I use IE in Windows.

Now when it comes to Chrome you are correct. Chrome on Windows either renders everything super small if you are in Windows 100% scaling or, if you are in Windows 200% scaling, it renders it's window to 1920x1080 and that entire window is interpolated 2x in each direction so the text doesn't gain detail and becomes a trace less crisp looking due to the cheap and sloppy interpolation scaling. So Chrome isn't the best for UHD. You get everything the same physical size with it as before, but the text doesn't gain any resolution.

[feppe]

And I see the same thing when I use HiDPI mode on MAC with Firefox.

Haven't heard of HiDPI mode, but did some googling, and found out that changing the value of layout.css.devPixelsPerPx under about:config in Firefox will scale everything, including images! I set it to 1.6 to align with my OS setting, took down my fonts to a more normal 12, and now the previously ugly sites render nicely. And images are as big as I want them to be.

Thank you, this was really useful!

[WombatHorror]

Haven't heard of HiDPI mode, but did some googling, and found out that changing the value of layout.css.devPixelsPerPx under about:config in Firefox will scale everything, including images! I set it to 1.6 to align with my OS setting, took down my fonts to a more normal 12, and now the previously ugly sites render nicely. And images are as big as I want them to be.

Thank you, this was really useful!

nice

good find

[hjulenissen]

No, refresh rate is different than fps, although I can see why one would think they are equivalent.

You can have 30fps on a 60Hz screen - the screen would just show each frame twice. Or on a 120Hz screen the same frame would be shown four times.

Aktuelly, I believe that you are wrong in that it is equivalent to claim that a pc display is natively 60 fps or that it is 60 hz. Framerate conversion is used alle over the place. A nummer of fps/Hz in, another nummer out. As you say, this is done (somewhere) when showing 24fps content on a 60fps display.

It seems that it is you who is stuck with the computer gamer idea of what fps is and is not. Pc games used the freerunning framerate of the gpu as an indication on the probability of skipped frame (assuming a display driven at a constant rate)

H

[WombatHorror]

Aktuelly, I believe that you are wrong in that it is equivalent to claim that a pc display is natively 60 fps or that it is 60 hz. Framerate conversion is used alle over the place. A nummer of fps/Hz in, another nummer out. As you say, this is done (somewhere) when showing 24fps content on a 60fps display.

It seems that it is you who is stuck with the computer gamer idea of what fps is and is not. Pc games used the freerunning framerate of the gpu as an indication on the probability of skipped frame (assuming a display driven at a constant rate)

H

The display refreshed at a certain rate (maybe it is 30Hz or 50Hz or 24Hz or 120Hz or 240Hz or 60Hz or 85Hz) and certain graphics modes are sent out of the graphics card at a certain rate (maybe 24Hz or 50Hz or 60Hz or 85Hz) and those are usually all spoken of in terms of Hz. The game or whatnot can be rendered at all different sorts of fps.

[feppe]

Aktuelly, I believe that you are wrong in that it is equivalent to claim that a pc display is natively 60 fps or that it is 60 hz. Framerate conversion is used alle over the place. A nummer of fps/Hz in, another nummer out. As you say, this is done (somewhere) when showing 24fps content on a 60fps display.

It seems that it is you who is stuck with the computer gamer idea of what fps is and is not. Pc games used the freerunning framerate of the gpu as an indication on the probability of skipped frame (assuming a display driven at a constant rate)

This is off-topic, so all I'm going to say about this is that fps =! Hz. Believe me or WombatHorror, or Google it.

[feppe]

Received my stock i1Display Pro. The software that comes bundled can't do hardware calibration with the UP2414Q, and it only created an ICC profile although I had IDC and wide gamut enabled.

I used Dell's own version of i1Display, which comes with the monitor, or can be downloaded from Dell's website. With that you get ADC, which does hardware calibration. It also enables uniformity calibration, with a 3x3 or 5x5 grid. This is to mitigate any color shifts in different sections of the display.

ICC profile with the bundled software takes around five minutes. I hardware calibrated the monitor, and it took a good 20+ minutes despite the very fast puck, as it did two full passes, and some additional testing along with the uniformity calibration. You can save different calibrations as presets (eg. ARGB and sRGB) if necessary. Didn't play around with the options, yet; I just used 120cd brightness (equaled to roughly 22/100 Brightness in OSD) in ARGB, and the results look great.

[WombatHorror]

Received my stock i1Display Pro. The software that comes bundled can't do hardware calibration with the UP2414Q, and it only created an ICC profile although I had IDC and wide gamut enabled.

I used Dell's own version of i1Display, which comes with the monitor, or can be downloaded from Dell's website. With that you get ADC, which does hardware calibration. It also enables uniformity calibration, with a 3x3 or 5x5 grid. This is to mitigate any color shifts in different sections of the display.

ICC profile with the bundled software takes around five minutes. I hardware calibrated the monitor, and it took a good 20+ minutes despite the very fast puck, as it did two full passes, and some additional testing along with the uniformity calibration. You can save different calibrations as presets (eg. ARGB and sRGB) if necessary. Didn't play around with the options, yet; I just used 120cd brightness (equaled to roughly 22/100 Brightness in OSD) in ARGB, and the results look great.

I just wish to heck that they gave us more than two calibration slots! That's not nearly enough! Or that they gave us the ability to save the HW calibration to a file and then load from various saved files into a slot. Like the NEC PA series only gives you a single HW calibration slow BUT it lets you load an infinite number of different saved profiles so it's so much more flexible. Considering that HW calibration of the Dell also takes very long even for matrix profiles (perhaps the Dell has only a linear 14bit LUT and not the 3D LUT of the NEC PA???) it's a pain. They really need to update some software to allow calibs to be saved to file and loaded in from file! It's the one thing that is a real pain with this monitor.

[hjulenissen]

I just wish to heck that they gave us more than two calibration slots! That's not nearly enough! Or that they gave us the ability to save the HW calibration to a file and then load from various saved files into a slot. Like the NEC PA series only gives you a single HW calibration slow BUT it lets you load an infinite number of different saved profiles so it's so much more flexible. Considering that HW calibration of the Dell also takes very long even for matrix profiles (perhaps the Dell has only a linear 14bit LUT and not the 3D LUT of the NEC PA???) it's a pain. They really need to update some software to allow calibs to be saved to file and loaded in from file! It's the one thing that is a real pain with this monitor.

It would have been really nice to be able to switch calibration/profile automatically from the OS.

Say, as a default I'd like for the display to accurately emulate an sRGB display (making websites and videos etc look fine). Whenever Lightroom is loaded, I'd like for the display to enter an accurately profiled wide-(native)-gamut mode.

-h

[Czornyj]

I just wish to heck that they gave us more than two calibration slots!

New 4k NEC EA244UHD will be available very soon - worth considering as a Dell alternative. All latest EA2x4WMi models support had been silently added in excellent Spectraview II, so you can create as many calibration as you wish.

EA244UHD is build on PA series DNA, so it has 14(16)bit 3DLUT + DUC driven AH-IPS GBr LED panel with 23kHz PWM. The only drawback will be lack of Multiprofiler support, and I suppose that they won't be individually factory calibrated.

[Alan Klein]

What it's the purpose of the NEC Profiler when I have Spectraview II and a NEC monitor? 

[digitaldog]

What it's the purpose of the NEC Profiler when I have Spectraview II and a NEC monitor? 

Can calibrate (within reason with fixed settings) without having to use a measuring instrument. Supports PIP if that's your thing as well as some 'soft proofing' which might be interesting if you're not using app's that provide that functionality. IF you have an instrument, might want to just stick with SpectraView software.

[Alan Klein]

I have the measuring instrument that  came with Spectraview so I'm ok with calibrating the monitor. Does Lightroom jab soft proofing and can you explain what it is in simple terms?

[digitaldog]

Does Lightroom jab soft proofing and can you explain what it is in simple terms?

What?

LR has soft proofing if that's what you're asking.

[WombatHorror]

New 4k NEC EA244UHD will be available very soon - worth considering as a Dell alternative. All latest EA2x4WMi models support had been silently added in excellent Spectraview II, so you can create as many calibration as you wish.

EA244UHD is build on PA series DNA, so it has 14(16)bit 3DLUT + DUC driven AH-IPS GBr LED panel with 23kHz PWM. The only drawback will be lack of Multiprofiler support, and I suppose that they won't be individually factory calibrated.

Hmm they've really added internal 14bit 3D LUT to the EA series now? And SVII support? How is it not PA series then? Is it missing the uniformity compensator then I guess and that is the difference? Are EA series still all regular gamut only, maybe it lacks wide gamut?

I wrote it off since I didn't think it would have internal calibration (or uniformity control) and didn't think it would be wide gamut. I guess I was wrong about the fancy color engine control and calibration hmm. Am I wrong about the wide gamut too?

EDIT: Hmm it IS wide gamut too.

Hmm so the only thing it lacks then is the uniformity compensation? Or does it even have that too? If so why didn't they just call it the PA244UHD?

[Alan Klein]

What?

LR has soft proofing if that's what you're asking.

jab=have

My Swype-ing on my cellphone isn't as good as it should be!