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Archive 2014 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale

  
 
skibum5
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Wow, the resolution (3840x2160) does make photos look different compared to old 1920x1200 monitors. Everything seems a bit more film-like/slide-like somehow, a bit less digital looking, smoother, more natural, like a giant magnified slide table or something almost.

It's quite nice for nature photography since when you have tons of trees you can better make out all the little leaves and bark textures and twigs and such and they don't all blob together as much and even distant wooded panoramas manage to maintain some true leaf and branch detail now so they look more like photos or you are there than a digital blobbing. It also helps quite a lot for this one shot I have of a giant cliff boulder hillside covered in tiny ferns. At full UHD you can finally make out all the little ferns details enough that the image finally works out OK on screen. Fine feather detail in birds, little details in rocky surfaces and lichen covered rocks and so on....

People shots, wow, sometimes it feels like you are right there in the room with them.

Text is much, much more like real printed text in look.

Colors seem to be pretty rich and in the same ballpark as my old NEC PA241W in that regard.
I'm not sure if the color-engine is quite as linear and precise, but it seems to be fairly close in native gamut mode for each monitor.

In sRGB emulation the NEC PA is simply perfect with the ultra-linear calibration and 14 bit 3D LUT, the Dell isn't bad but it's not like you get the 100% flat saturation tracking curves and such of the PA, not too bad though and about what a decentish regular gamut monitor without a fancy 3D LUT would give you and probably a bit better overall than a regular gamut monitor with no internal LUT at all I'd say as those usually have a fair amount of noticeable banding after calibration due to having to calibrate within the 8 bits themselves.

The AG coating doesn't have the sparkle effect and isn't quite so ponderous as on the older IPS AG-coated monitors like the NEC PA241W. I like the new AG coating better for sure.

One possibly terrible thing is that is gives only two calibration slots and, at first glance at least, it seems like there isn't a way to save a calibration and then instantly load it to swap from this to that to that as you can with the NEC PA. I have a horrible feeling that if you need more than 2 you might need to constantly do the entire calibration process again and it takes a LONG time even for the matrix based calibration for some reason. I like to calibrate to native gamut and three different backlight settings and the same for sRGB with sRGB TRC and the same for sRGB with gamma 2.2 which would need nine slots. OK, I get by reasonably well with just two brightness levels for each but that still needs six and I guess I could forget the sRGB with sRGB TRC and just stick to firefox always for web image viewing, fine enough, but that still leaves me needing four slots and there are only two. I hope there is a way around this. I didn't dig too deep yet. If not, I really hope there is a way they could update the software to be able to write calibration to a file and then load it into the screen and that it is not hardware locked and only able to be written directly into the screen during calibration. I might be stuck with just a single backligt choice for wide gamut mode and sRGB mode . This might be the only major downside for those not gaming.

I didn't test out gaming yet. A bit fearful there won't be a way to get the GPU to scale 1920x1080 games by 2x. Hopefully it will work.

For TV/movies/videos my CPU/GPU seem to be powerful enough to drive even blu-ray to upscaled UHD so in that regard there is probably no scaling issue, at least not for me.

A few times each half of the screen started rendering at a fraction of a second delay making for bad tearing being the two sides, simply powering off and then on again seems to always fix it. I think it's only happened when messing around changing from calibration to pre-built and other modes a lot, not quite sure what triggers it. The fix seems to be easy enough though for the few times it happened.

Windows scaling is a bit weird. It scales up the icons OK on the desktop and renders the icon text at twice the res in each direction so it's really smooth looking and the proper size and the same for Wordpad and other such programs (although in a few cases some text in some places like message headers in Windows Live Mail is slightly clipped at the top). The borders for Windows folders seem to become a bit larger than necessary, a little strange, but whatever.

Firefox and IE can also be set to scale up text so text on web pages an all appear to physically be the same size on the UHD screen as it was on the old 1920x1080 screen only now it's much crisper and realistic looking since each letter is made out of 4x as many pixels. As for images on webpages, Firefox and IE seem to automatically scale all images by 2x so they appear the same size as they did on the old screen and not like tiny postage stamps (OTOH they don't use simple 1->4 scaling but some sort of interpolation of sorts so the images are maybe a trace less hard-blocked crisp). Not sure yet but Chrome might just interpolate the entire rendering area up including text and screen drawn elements so it doesn't seem to make use of the extra res for anything other interpolation sp it seems to do the worst job of the various browsers.

One annoying thing is that Adobe Reader and Irfanview, as Chrome, seem to make full use of the extra res for display IF you set windows to 100% mode, but if you set Windows to 200% mode so everything isn't horribly small, then they seem to use the render to 1920x1080 and then interpolate up 2x in each direction thing so Irfanview doesn't let you view images in 4k glory when you use the 200% mode that makes Windows liveable at 4k and Adobe Reader for PDF does the same unfortunate thing it seems. So you have to log off and toggle back to 100% when using ifranview which is rather cumbersome to say the least. I hope they update irfanview to decide to NOT use the 2x interpolation flag Windows sends it for the image rendering. Or maybe it's time for me to finally write my own image viewer (irfanview has this annoyance with UHD, fastpicviewer seems to handle tone curve mapping differently than Photoshop/Firefox/Irfanview/etc., fastone seems to fail at CMS in some important scenarios, etc.).

I'm sure as I try out more programs there will be some that will have the UI become a mess to unusable at 2x scaling.

FastPicViewer works fine no matter what Windows scaling is set to (although I still feel it does something a bit odd with how it's CMS handles tone mapping, it seems to add a bit of contrast and make darks too dark compared to any other color-managed software).

Photoshop handles the images fine no matter what windows scaling is set to and the menu and pop up text are rendered large and crip, almost too large at times, but the control icons and everything is super small, have to lean close at times, but to me it's worth that little struggle. A shame Photoshop Windows didn't get the UHD UI update that the MAC version did before they went cloud, oh well, I'll lean close rather than go cloud (not that cloud Windows has fixed this yet anyway).

Booting up to the old NEC 1920x1200 screen man the desktop looks so ancient, lo-res and grainy and weird after a day on the new UHD screen!

I don't seem to notice any horrible over drive issues like some Dells had back when I last tried a Dell (circa 2006ish). No dead pixels that I can see. Screen uniformity without the compensation being used appears to vary across the screen from 81cd/m^2 down to 68cd/m^2 and color temp from like 6600K to 6100K (going roughly by memory from 5x5 grid of measurements) so I guess it can hit as much as 20% off, apparently even the new NEC PA242W some copies are hitting 20% luminance variance with the compensator off so I guess that is how it goes with the new LED lit screens in some cases. I didn't measure the Dell after compensation yet. It probably helps a fair bit although I suspect not quite as much as with the NEC. Not really sure yet though. Oddly the screen measurement paper that came with the screen listed almost no variance it had it at 100% in all but one block and that was at 99%. Maybe that was measured in the precalibrated mode with full compensation?

They don't use the special polarizers in IPS screens anymore unfortunately, not since the series before even the older PA241W at least so you get the typical white wash on black at any off angle at all. The Dell may be even a bit worse in this regard than the NEC PA241W especially at the bottom two corners.

The NEC in native gamut mode and with strong uniformity compensation applied hit about 580:1 CR (up to around 700:1 in sRGB gamma 2.2) (higher CR if you turn compensation off in both cases). The Dell with the compensation running (I didn't yet measure to see how strong it is) seems to hit about 700:1 in native gamut mode. But I didn't compare compensation carefully yet so it might not be a fair comparison, maybe the NEC does better in which case it wouldn't be fair to say the Dell hits better CR with compensation on.

I do wish it was 16:10 instead of 16:9, since physically, all images other than very wide ones clearly look smaller on it (even if more detailed) and the extra vertical real-estate can be nicer at times for computer work.

Anyway it's probably not quite as fancy a screen as the NEC PA series, which really do everything completely perfectly from what I've seen pretty much, but it's not bad at all either, and the UHD is pretty amazing, so amazing that I think I will keep the Dell and sell my PA241W. The 2 calibration slots thing will be a mess though.

Didn't try to hook my MAC Mini up yet, that has me a bit worried to say the least, need that to code iphone/pad apps and hopefully won't need to buy a second cheapo little screen and still a bit worried abotu driving games.

I still hold that the monitor is one the single most important pieces of photography equipment, maybe almost the most these days. It's not all about the camera body and lenses. And especially with UHD screen where you can basically see an 8MP all at once on the screen I think ever more so since being honest people only get to ever see a small fraction of the shots they take printed out.


Edited on Feb 27, 2014 at 05:42 PM · View previous versions



Feb 27, 2014 at 03:39 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


The text on the web really does look wonderfully smooth and natural now.



Feb 27, 2014 at 04:17 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Yeah it really is awesome. Images just look to real now and not like you are looking at something digital on a computer.



Feb 27, 2014 at 04:20 PM
graeme
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Nice. Thanks for the review.

I have a Dell m3800 with the QHD+ display and I'm running Windows 8.1 (which actually works well with the touch screen) and I'm being driven nuts by the way Windows handles the two different resolutions (everything that is sharp on the m3800 appears same size and fuzzy on the UltraSharp 24 monitor), so thinking of getting one of these.

Needless to say my MacBook Pro/Retina and OSX handles the different screen resolutions fine.




Feb 27, 2014 at 06:22 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


graeme wrote:
Nice. Thanks for the review.

I have a Dell m3800 with the QHD+ display and I'm running Windows 8.1 (which actually works well with the touch screen) and I'm being driven nuts by the way Windows handles the two different resolutions (everything that is sharp on the m3800 appears same size and fuzzy on the UltraSharp 24 monitor), so thinking of getting one of these.

Needless to say my MacBook Pro/Retina and OSX handles the different screen resolutions fine.



thanks

yeah, I'm really loving it. UHD is just great!

And the talk about how you need a 90" screen at least is just garbage. It makes so much difference even on just a 24" monitor! It's beyond trivial to see the difference. (as I'm sure you already know having the m3800)




Feb 27, 2014 at 11:57 PM
BluesWest
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


I still hold that the monitor is one the single most important pieces of photography equipment

Well, without the camera or lens, there would be no images at all!

I agree that without a good monitor it is very difficult to evaluate a photo's IQ. But the composition and overall aesthetics can still be evaluated on even a mediocre monitor.

John



Feb 28, 2014 at 02:08 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


BluesWest wrote:
Well, without the camera or lens, there would be no images at all!

I agree that without a good monitor it is very difficult to evaluate a photo's IQ. But the composition and overall aesthetics can still be evaluated on even a mediocre monitor.

John


True.

I'm just saying that the monitor often seems to be the forgotten element, anything to actually view photos. It's easy to overlook. It's an expensive hobby and fair enough many might not have much left after reaching for the body and a few lenses but at times you will even see people with like $25,000 in lenses and bodies and then using a standard gamut 1024x768 monitor poorly, if calibrated at all or asking what monitor to get and say they have allocated $150 for the monitor+calibration probe (while having put like 10k-30k into lenses). But even a cheap lens can look great at 2MP or less display (providing the shooting circumstance didn't require something special like ultra fast AF or what not). I wonder if it makes sense to put the monitor so far down the priority chain as seems so easy and natural to do. Post larger than 800x600 or in wide gamut and in quite a few forums your head will get bitten off.





Feb 28, 2014 at 02:36 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Whatever the case, wow, I'm really loving this. Man, just checking out some 4k video footage that people have posted.


Feb 28, 2014 at 04:37 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


OMG, oh wow, holy smokes, well done 4k video is simply unreal, holy cow!! wow!

The 1080p is already more than eye can see and just a marketing scam being pushed on people crowd is so beyond clueless.



Feb 28, 2014 at 04:49 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


The uniformity compensator appears to work quite well being able to bring luminance % off by region from like 5-20% differences down to just 0-2% (most blocks of the grid to 0-1%).

For white balance uniformity it takes it from like peak low to high WB differences of like 400 down to like 100 with avg differences closer to like maybe 40.

So the feature really does work. You program it with an i1 Display Pro probe. (perhaps you can also turn on default pre-programmed for pre-programmed modes? not sure yet)

So you can get like 700:1 CR in native gamut mode with compensation on vs like 580:1 for the NEC PA241W.

With compensation off in pre-programmed sRGB mode with sRGB TRC it does 900:1 CR.



Feb 28, 2014 at 08:34 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


You can sort of get around the two calibration slots issue by calibrating a dark and bright condition wide gamut slot and then using the pre-calibrated sRGB mode with an external gamma 2.2 applied when needed loaded into the graphics card LUT since the pre-called sRGB mode uses sRGB TRC, which is perfect for web and sRGB images and desktop but not quite perfect for movies/tv/videos). Not ideal but fairly OK since the pre-cal sRGB mode is pretty decent.



Feb 28, 2014 at 09:22 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


I also put up the initial review here, in perhaps a bit more organized and coherent fashion:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=87704.msg714615#msg714615



Mar 01, 2014 at 04:06 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Here are my MAC findings, in short, I actually got my non-retina MAC Mini to actually drive it well at UHD! but it took some hacking and some scares along the way:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1277436



Mar 01, 2014 at 06:37 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


It's also using a fancy DC method for the LEDs so no PWM flicker.


Apr 03, 2014 at 02:47 AM
skibum5
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


I quickly tried it under Vista 32bit and XP 32bit.

Under Vista Nvidia preferences had trouble getting it to change resolutions, but the Windows and Dell control panel had no problem at all and once you lock it in with either of those it's good.

Vista seemed to have a few more occurrences where things are not aligned up quite as well once 200% scaling is on. The Vista desktop with 200% scaling also spaced the icons on it ridiculously far apart, it seems to be a bug where they accidentally scale the icons to be 2x farther apart in each direction and then apply a 2x interpolation in distance between on top of that . So it kinda spreads icons over the desktop in a bit of a wasteful, messy too far apart looking way. OTOH the log-on screen on Vista runs at UHD (on W7 the log on screen, for some odd reason seems to load as a small centered 1600x1200 no matter what, perhaps it's a sanity check feature on W7 to make sure you can access log-on buttons no matter if something weird got set to display settings?).

I didn't try too hard yet, but with Vista and W7 if you use res smaller than UHD but as large or larger than about 1600x1200 it seems to just center a tiny window on the center of the monitor. I'm not sure why no matter what I try to set in Nvidia scaling preferences it doesn't seem to scale it to fit the screen. Maybe Nvidia has the scaling broken once again in their drivers or maybe I need to do something else. I haven't looked into it too much yet.

Interesting, on XP, whatever mode you run scales to fill the display, so if you go to 1920x1080 the UHD monitor simply acts like a 1920x1080, each pixels turns to 4 with no nasty interpolation. So with XP you easily run the display as either full UHD or regular HD, no problem. I have no clue why Vista or W7 don't seem to be like, at least not with Nvidia graphics. I didn't look into how XP handles 200% scaling in UHD mode yet.



Apr 06, 2014 at 09:40 PM
11rdgr88
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


skibum5 wrote:
OMG, oh wow, holy smokes, well done 4k video is simply unreal, holy cow!! wow!

The 1080p is already more than eye can see and just a marketing scam being pushed on people crowd is so beyond clueless.


I like to get what you are having. heheh!

You're having some monster fun playing with your new toy, the only thing missing is your
moaning sound. J/k!





Apr 06, 2014 at 09:56 PM
ecidi
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


skibum5 wrote:
I quickly tried it under Vista 32bit and XP 32bit.

Under Vista Nvidia preferences had trouble getting it to change resolutions, but the Windows and Dell control panel had no problem at all and once you lock it in with either of those it's good.

Vista seemed to have a few more occurrences where things are not aligned up quite as well once 200% scaling is on. The Vista desktop with 200% scaling also spaced the icons on it ridiculously far apart, it seems to be a bug where they accidentally scale the icons to be 2x farther apart in each direction
...Show more

Yeah! but is it Mac compatible

effie



Apr 07, 2014 at 05:35 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


ecidi wrote:
Yeah! but is it Mac compatible

effie


I also use it with my Mac Mini (had to hack the mac mini OS to unlock UHD support though, not sure why Apple hides it away, guess they want to sell new hardware, the chipset in my 2012 Mac Mini is perfectly able to drive UHD, for Windows they released UHD drivers for the Intel 4000 months ago and the Mac apparently has the drivers, just the OS decided to lock it out). But so far Apple only support most UHD, maybe even all, at only 30Hz. Apparently Mavericks will be updated soon to drive UHD at 60Hz. However, Mavericks also can't be hacked to let older macs that actually do have UHD capable HW in them from driving UHD. I hope Apple allows the older machines that actually DO have UHD capable HW in them to support it in the upcoming Mavericks update (but I have a bad feeling).

Anyway it works great with Mac mini other than being stuck at 30Hz, which does make the mouse movements and such a little bit herky-jerky compared to 60Hz.





Apr 07, 2014 at 06:14 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


Man I'm just testing out a few things on my NEC PA241W HD monitor bfore I sell it. (looking into varius color-management and profiling issues and NEC vs Dell capabilities for internal calibration, etc.) and man it looks so, well, computery! All I see are pixels. It feels like I'm using a computer again. Old school memories. With the Dell it feels more like you are not using a computer but a printer page or a magazine that just happens to be able to change whatever is on the page the way a computer does.

The older AG coating difference is also quite obvious.

Looks like the NEC screen is a bit more uniform than the Dell if uniformity compensation is turned off on both, but similar when UC is turned on.



Apr 07, 2014 at 06:17 PM
skibum5
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · got the UP2414Q UHD monitor during Presidents' Day sale


I can confirm that you can go from 2 to 4 internal calibration slots using the miniDP vs DP trick.
It turns out that it gives two calibration slots for DP connection and two slots for miniDP connection, but each is a different pair.

So you can calibrate say miniDP for bright conditions and hook up using DP and then maybe at night switch over to hooking up to DP with an adapter. So you could calibrate bright sRGB and native gamut and dark conditions sRGB and native gamut. Or maybe native gamut and three different printers. Whatever the case.

I'd still much prefer the ability to load in files to get unlimited choices as with NEC, but at least now that I found a way to get to 4 slots, that helps a LOT. 2 slots was kind of a drag.



Apr 17, 2014 at 01:22 PM
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