4k tv / monitors

[Michael Butash]

More desktop really, some ergonomics. I moved from 6x old 24" 1080p 
displays that my neck would hurt having to look down constantly for 
them, and find my neck doesn't hurt now that I tend to work level set 
with my head with the 3x 48's.  I didn't want to craft some sort of 
riser for all 6 displays, and began working on the notion of going with 
a big screen tv (or 3).  They also put out less heat (I think) than my 
old flock of displays.

Mine were 24", so I went roughly double to 48" with mine as I wanted 
more height ala a double row of displays.  I almost wish I'd gone 55", 
but might have been too big as the next step up.

Don't do 30hz displays, general reading tends to indicated it's not good 
to use, but I did use 30hz for a day or so before figuring out how to 
trick my displays into 60hz mode.  It wasn't terrible, but noticeable.

Mine are samsung ju6700's, and got them for $630ea, the new ku models 
are coming out for 2016, so 2015's are blowing out.  Buying nice 32" 4k 
curved displays was generally more, only to get a displayport input on 
them and power management.

Note as Brian said too, some WM's are having issues with use of a TV, as 
they do not "sleep", they're either on or off, and when off, no longer 
look connected like a monitor would.  This freaks out the WM's, 
especially KDE, and to some extent the video card too.  I'm using an old 
7900 amd card that handles it and gaming mostly just fine, so don't 
believe the hype you need a nvidia gtx 960 or higher.

They also aren't terribly friendly to figure out a good method of 
on/off.  My tv's are all networked, so I thought to use the remote 
control api on a network socket to turn it on and off via a script, but 
seems once off, their little arm soc that runs the tv suspends and goes 
offline to wake it up the same.  Only a hardware event like IR or push 
button wakes it up.  I found that pretty dumb, not sure how common that 
is among tv vendors, but something to watch for.

Another fun thing - most video cards don't have hdmi2.0, and if they do, 
generally only one.  Most cases you're not sick to want/need 3x of them, 
so one might suffice, but otherwise you'll want to look at adapters like 
these to use displayport 1.2 to hdmi 2.0 I'm using:

http://www.club-3d.com/index.php/products/reader.en/product/displayport-12-to-hdmi-20-uhd-active-adapter.html

-mb


On 06/19/2016 08:04 AM, Keith Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After a little research it looks like the benefit of a 4k TV or 
> monitor is resolution.  I assume that means a single 40+ inch TV or 
> monitor configured at a high resolution so I can pack tons of stuff on 
> one monitor.
>
> Any other benefits?
>