[review] Monoprice 28" UHD LED CrystalPro 4K 60Hz

[Matt3o]

I finally got my first 4K. It's a Monoprice MPCP28UHD Product ID: 12156. Official webpage: http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=1130703&p_id=12156&seq=1&format=2

The great guys at Massdrop sent me one in exchange for some services I made for them and I'm now enjoying it since a couple of days.

The monitor is driven by a gorgeous Nvidia GTX970 which has absolutely no issues at running this beast together with a secondary IPS 27" display.

Aesthetics and Ergonomics

The monitor looks pretty good, with a brushed aluminum bottom bezel and a nice (almost) edge-to-edge glass. The base is solid and unobtrusive, the panel can be tilted, rotated and lowered/raised pretty easily. Technically you can also change orientation from landscape to portrait BUT the arm is not long enough and you have to first tilt the screen, then rotate it 90° and finally tilt it back. Of course rotating the screen is not something you do every day, but it's pretty annoying nonetheless.

The major issue anyway it's the "anti-glare" coating, or lack thereof. The glass is so reflective that they could have better used a mirror! Even with bright images on the background you can still see your reflection on the screen; if you don't live in a perfect environment I believe this is the worst issue of this monitor.

Connections

5 inputs: 2 display ports, 1 DVI, 2 HDMI. Unfortunately you can enjoy 4K@60hz only on displayport and at monoprice are so idiotic to include a DVI cable instead. Fortunately I have plenty of cables laying around, but remember to buy a displayport cable if you don't have it yet. I really don't understand why they provide a DVI cable on a 4K monitor...

Very nice the Picture in Picture feature. You have plenty of options here and the gargantuan screen resolution lets you enjoy potentially full screen not-downscaled pictures! Say you have an xbox and a PS4 both set at 1080p... well you can see both on screen at native resolution. Pretty neat.

The screen also has a line in jack for the 2w per channel speakers but no USB hub. Personally I'm not a huge fan of usb hubs on anything that is not an -well- USB hub but I understand that many like to have additional USB ports on the monitor.

Image quality

This is a TN panel, with all the limits of TN panels. Color uniformity is impressively good, I see no halos and colors are uniform all over the huge screen. Also very good backlight distribution, no clouds whatsoever. The LEDs backlight makes an incredibly good job here.

The panel itself is very good. Also horizontal viewing angle is pretty generous, while vertical angle not so much. If you place the monitor in portrait mode you can clearly see color artifacts on the sides if the monitor is not straight in front of you.

Panel calibration is really basic. You have some nice options (such as gamma and color temperature) but it's clear that this is an entry level not-for-graphics monitor. Contrast and brightness calibration are both poor in my opinion. Color accuracy is decent... for a TN. You cannot lower the brightness that much and contrast regulation is almost useless. I haven't tried thoroughly but I wasn't able to calibrate the monitor as much as I could with my 27" IPS.

The bottom line is: it's a nice monitor at a fine price for the hey-look-I-have-a-4K-monitor-just-for-the-sake-of-it kind of guy, but looking at my 1440 IPS side by side with this 4K TN... I would choose the IPS 100 times over!

A side note: the monitor came with some dirt (or is it a scratch?) in the back side of the glass (the part facing the LCD screen), this is incredibly annoying and denotes a pretty bad QC by monoprice.

It's not time for 4K yet

There's another problem... it's not that we are that ready for 4K yet. There are some applications that take full benefit of the added resolution. Photoshop for example is simply gorgeous at 4K! Also gaming is fantastic. When you go back to "standard" resolutions you feel like everything is washed out and blurred... but of course this comes to a price: framerate. You need a hell of a PC to run full screen, full framerate, ultra details at 4K and I bet you prefer fast frames to ultra-sharp details in an FPS.

I run the monoprice on windows 8.1 and most software are not ready for high-dpi, most notably Chrome. You can hack and fine tune various options on a per application basis and get decent results, but at the end it still feels patchy. Some games have troubles if you set a high-dpi system and most applications simply multiply by 2 the interface ending up with super blurry text. Internet Explorer is a fine exception... but I'd be damned if I use IE.

Even more problems if you are in a multi-monitor config and you mix low and high dpi screens.

Final word

It's a fine general purpose TN panel with the added benefit of being 4K 60hz, but --together with the fact that the software is not yet fully 4k-ready-- not good enough to make the jump to the high-dpi realm. Take a good IPS now and wait a couple of years for the 4K. I would go as far as saying... take 2 good TN panels instead of one 4K if you need more pixels.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'll post some pictures of the screen really glossy glass later.

[katushkin]

Hmmm. I really like the option to rotate to portrait, as I have a portrait monitor myself, but I think it looks really strange to have the option, then put a largeer bezel on the "bottom" of the screen, so when it rotates it on one side.

Sounds like you would have to fork out a pretty serious amount of money if you wanted to have an effective 4k setup with multiple screens, if your concerns about combining 4k and 1440p are anything to go by.

Great review though, look forward to seeing how bad the screen glare is.

[Matt3o]

Hmmm. I really like the option to rotate to portrait, as I have a portrait monitor myself, but I think it looks really strange to have the option, then put a largeer bezel on the "bottom" of the screen, so when it rotates it on one side

honestly the screen is so wide that the portrait mode is a bit uncomfortable anyway, to that add the bad vertical viewing angle and the bottom bezel and you can safely say that the monitor is not portrait-friendly.

[Matt3o]

This is the turned off monoprice. The bad camera phone enhanced the mirror effect but it's actually pretty bad.

Me in my saturday morning outfit. You can see a Model M over there in a corner.


Turning the monitor on is not much better



And bright background doesn't help. Shaka folks!

[tp4tissue]

I've been saying this all along..

We're totally not ready for 4k..

texture res, gpu power, app support...

[tbc]

it's really this simple.

if you don't have at least 20/20 vision or will wear glasses, don't bother with 4k.  scaling simply doesn't work.  speaking for windows.

4k is mostly for work with HUGE benefits.

4k gaming is largely a wash leaning towards the bad side.


just as a note:

photography is simply AMAZING at 4k.  an image scaled to 1080p might look good then but not when at 100%.  an image looking good at 4k WILL look good at 100%.  a 4k monitor lets you quickly reveal flaws without needing to take an extra step to set the scale to 100%; it's a very nuce timesaver whe you're doing tethered shooting or reviewing a whole roll of shots.

[jacobolus]

From the brief bits I’ve tried, I’d say Windows and Linux need at least another year or two to really work well with 4k+ screens: some applications work okay, but others have their UIs break in various unexpected ways.

On the Mac though, it’s great! (Especially on the “5k” iMac, but also on other Macs using third-party 4k displays; I’d especially recommend Dell’s UP2414Q.) The pixel-doubling for apps originally designed for ~100 DPI displays works well enough, and apps that are designed for the ~200 DPI “retina” displays look fantastic.

For photographers, designers, etc., it’s a game changer. But even just for looking at a terminal or text editor or web browser, it’s incredibly nice.

[Matt3o]

From the brief bits I’ve tried, I’d say Windows and Linux need at least another year or two to really work well with 4k+ screens: some applications work okay, but others have their UIs break in various unexpected ways.

actually it works better on linux than windows (if you can install distros like Arch (with latest versions installed).

also, Apple's 5K is a hack at the moment. Not yet supported by displayport they put an additional chip to drive it (by ATI I presume, since it makes no sense the choice of an ATI card at this time). I would honestly wait the next revision for the 5K iMac when the DP standard will be rectified.

[Sniping]

32" IPS 4K monitors have been as low as $700 already, so that might be a pretty good options for those who have a bit more money to spend.

[jacobolus]

Apple's 5K is a hack at the moment. Not yet supported by displayport they put an additional chip to drive it (by ATI I presume, since it makes no sense the choice of an ATI card at this time). I would honestly wait the next revision for the 5K iMac when the DP standard will be rectified.

I don’t think it’s fair to call Apple’s implementation a “hack” really (or at least not in a negative way); the internal bus used to schlep pixels from the graphics card to the display’s chips and then on to the physical pixels is an implementation detail. For an all-in-one computer, it doesn’t really matter too much what the bus is, from a user perspective, as long as it works.

I’m not sure what Linux support is like on the 5k iMac, or whether that would be affected by the display bus used internally – if that’s a priority then maybe hold back – but with OS X, it’s been working pretty much flawlessly, and the display is absolutely gorgeous. Anyone who cares about their computer display quality (e.g. Photographers, designers, illustrators, video editors, &c., or even anyone who wants to read sharp text) and has the money to spend is going to love the new iMac. I doubt there will be a new version for quite some time.

[tp4tissue]

32" IPS 4K monitors have been as low as $700 already, so that might be a pretty good options for those who have a bit more money to spend.

Spend more money to DO WHAT ?

[Matt3o]

I don’t think it’s fair to call Apple’s implementation a “hack” really (or at least not in a negative way);

there's no negative way for "hack"

it’s been working pretty much flawlessly

I've actually heard about quite some issues, especially regarding lagginess and slow downs (understandably),

[Hak Foo]

I don't see the appeal of using a 4k/5k resolution panel with pixel doubling.

With pixel doubling, I'm spending a fortune for a screen that provides NO ADDITIONAL USABLE SPACE than a 1080p panel.  It just looks nicer.

If the jaggedness of text offends me, I can push the monitor slightly back and let nearsightedness handle it for me.

[jacobolus]

With pixel doubling, I'm spending a fortune for a screen that provides NO ADDITIONAL USABLE SPACE than a 1080p panel.  It just looks nicer.

What do you mean by “no additional usable space”? With a double-resolution panel, the text size can be bumped down substantially and the text is still crystal clear. 4x as much of a large phototograph can be seen on screen in its native resolution. Tiny details on maps and diagrams are easy to see. In practice, the extra “usable space” is very noticeable.

In my experience, once you get to 150+ ppi, without pixel doubling, any user interface designed for ~100 DPI will have user interface elements so tiny they’re difficult to effectively target (or even see), and you end up needing to peer really close at the screen (which causes eye strain and makes everything look pixely). At the 218 ppi of the new iMac display (or even higher pixel densities of the “retina” Mac laptops) the UI would be impossibly small. Pixel doubling is the magical software advance that lets us finally get past the pixel densities we’ve had since 1995.

[meztek]

32" IPS 4K monitors have been as low as $700 already, so that might be a pretty good options for those who have a bit more money to spend.

The only benefit to 4K for me is the eventual pushing down of the price of 1080p monitors.

[meztek]

One thing I forgot to mention (apologies for the double post): Good review, though apart from the mirror effect I personally find 28" a bit too big for a monitor.  My largest is 25" and I find it too large to view comfortably. 

[tp4tissue]

One thing I forgot to mention (apologies for the double post): Good review, though apart from the mirror effect I personally find 28" a bit too big for a monitor.  My largest is 25" and I find it too large to view comfortably. 

it's not that it's too large.. .you're sitting too close..

[Findecanor]

Edit: Oh, maybe I'm confused.

Scaling apps destroys subpixel text rendering with ClearType, or ClearType-ish text rendering under Linux.

BTW. Apple never did subpixel text rendering... or hinting for that matter. In other words, scaling works on Mac because everything was blurry to begin with.

[tp4tissue]

Edit: Oh, maybe I'm confused.

Scaling apps destroys subpixel text rendering with ClearType, or ClearType-ish text rendering under Linux.

BTW. Apple never did subpixel text rendering... or hinting for that matter. In other words, scaling works on Mac because everything was blurry to begin with.

For daily tasks, I run my 2560x1600 @ 1280x800..

Otherwise it's too damn hard to read as I sit at a proper distance away, 1meter

[meztek]

it's not that it's too large.. .you're sitting too close..

Show Image

Meh.  If I sit farther away it is more difficult to read small text.  I also have to reach my desk to use my mouse/kb. 

[jacobolus]

BTW. Apple never did subpixel text rendering... or hinting for that matter. In other words, scaling works on Mac because everything was blurry to begin with.

Pretty much every part of this statement is wrong.

(1)

Apple owned most of the (now expired) patents related to font hinting, and Apple invented the TrueType font format as a competitor to Adobe’s (un-hinted) PostScript Type 1 format back in the 80s because they didn’t want to pay licensing fees (the way they avoided Adobe’s patents was by using an inferior type of Bezier curve, quadratic instead of cubic), and then Apple licensed TrueType to Microsoft as part of a technology cross-licensing deal.

What is true is that Mac OS X’s type rendering system ignores many of the hints in TrueType fonts, because Apple’s engineers decided that it was worth trading off slightly blurrier text for more accurate letter shapes, since antialiasing was much more acceptable on the displays of ~2000 than it had been on the displays of the late 80s. This is a reasonable enough trade off to make, IMO. By contrast, most Windows applications didn’t do any antialiasing at all for a long time, and as a result, the text was very crisp but also very blocky looking, and when you zoomed in or out all the font metrics would change (which really sucks when you’re trying to do WYSIWYG). Windows former text rendering system also sucked huge donkey balls when it tried to render non-hinted fonts, of which there are many; this single-handedly held back lots of creative web typography for about 5–10 years.

(2)

While Microsoft’s “ClearType” font rendering system which uses subpixel anti-aliasing was first released in 1998, it wasn’t turned on by default until 2007, and is still not used in many applications.

OS X has used subpixel antialiasing by default since OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002.

[Matt3o]

of all the systems I tried the Mac is the one that supports the 4k better. Even though I had to buy a dedicated cable/adapter and it wasn't cheap!

that is of course because Apple introduced hi-dpi display a while back, but it's not that OSX is free of issues, you sometimes slip in some blurred text or graphics on the Mac too.

[XMIT]

I'd be curious to know who actually makes the panel in the Monoprice display. I have a two year old Monoprice 30" LCD with an LG panel. Off the cuff I'm guessing Samsung for this one. Only way to really find out is to disassemble the panel.

(I discovered my LG panel the hard way when I opened my 30" monitor to diagnose a "not powering on" issue. It is either a busted backlight bulb or a failing ballast. You can hear it clicking, trying, failing.)

[Matt3o]

I'm pretty sure it's samsung

[Psybin]

Good review, thanks for posting that.

I was considering getting a 4k recently, but quickly came to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it right now (for my personal use anyway). I went with a 27 IPS 1440p, waiting on it to get here.

[Bromono]

What is your IPS monitor?