Even though it's supposed to be a really awesome new IPS panel, that pricing is obscene. Once TFTCentral or Prad.de get their hands one one and test it we'll see if it's worth it I guess. Too bad Asus has horrible customer service. Hopefully LG releases theirs soon as, I've found their CS to be awesome.
The ASUS monitor is not IPS its Sharps IGZO.
Also this if from a review on newegg:
"This is a complete rebadge of the Sharp PK-N321. If you look at the manual you will see that this monitor suffers the same limitations at 4K that the Sharp does.
The mail limitation is that you can't run this monitor at 4K@60Hz over a single cable without using MST (multi streaming technology). MST is a display port feature that lets you stream several simultaneous discrete video streams over a single display port cable. The feature was intended to let you daisy chain multiple monitors together via Display port.
In order to get 4K@60Hz you need to enable MST mode to this display. This means that the display will present itself to Windows as TWO separate physical monitors. This means that you will get two desktops and that you will not be able to use applications full screen.
To get around the above limitation you need to use driver hacks like ATI Eyefinity. The ATI solution works OK on this monitor but Nvidia's Surround feature only supports 3 monitors currently. They don't support 2 monitors so If you want to game on this monitor and you have Nvidia you are out of luck."
ASUS did respond to this saying that Nvidia and Intel (Haswell) both support this DisplayPort mode properly also. I know Nvidia has their surround but I dont think Intel has something like that but I havnt looked at Haswell.
And how does one consume 4k content?
-4k TV? No.
-4k blurays? No.
-4k gaming? Not really.
Sounds awesome!
....if only they were reasonably priced...
For TV there isnt 4K and wont be for a long time we finally just got all digital at least over the air in the US. The cable companies werent forced to switch so there still a fair bit of people with analogue TVs. In Japan though they do have higher than 1080p TV on at least a major provider but its by no means all of the channels or even anything even close to that.
Bluray's couldnt be 4K its impossible. Also the adoption rate of BD in the US is tiny as most people would rather have much lower quality but more accessibility possibly at the cost of owning the content. Many people still watch brand new movies via DVD on their hug HDTVs.
You should be able to play most games at 4K. Though, I wouldnt know how good of a framerate you would be getting as that is 100% based on your system specs.
There isnt really 4k content outside of the cinema yet unless you create it yourself which you can do. The other problem is that even though H.264 can do 4K it is NOT optimized for it. Thats why new video codec's are being developed currently. H.265/HEVC has been available for a while and is significantly better, especially compression wise, than H.264. The problem is that the code isnt optimized to it takes way way to long to encode currently. The other thing to keep in mind is that many devices now can only decode 1080p H.264 efficiently due to hardware decoders, none of which properly support 4K.
Also I think the price is reasonable especially for the first consumer available monitor, especially because one of the better 30in 2560x1600 monitors is still $1500.
http://goo.gl/wKLMCNothing currently supports 4K.
Newer console won't support 4K (Do not be fooled, they said 4K video support but newer consoles only have HDMI interfaces... and you know HDMI max resolution output is 1080p...)
Therefor 4K is pretty useless as of today except if you have very specific applications OR if you want to watch 4 1080p videos on your monitor.
If you want the sweetest you can currently have, buy yourself a good 1440p monitor (Asus PB278Q for exemple, about 600$ or get an iMac they have 1440p only) and enjoy very smooth video playback with the little that currently supports it. Be sure to check if your graphic card has either a DisplayPort (Mini or standard) or a Dual-Link DVI, else 1440p isn't support (means NO VGA and NO HDMI)
Upcomming games will support 1440p but you will require one hell of a GPU to run that kind of resolution smoothly with nice graphics.
There are plenty of things now that support 4K. Is it widespread, no. Is it massively available, no. Will it be adopted massively anytime soon, no.
The newest HDMI interface does support 4K and since thats hardware based and they say itll support 4K video it will have to have it because the port/interface itself is not software upgradable.
HDMI does support 1440p and VGA gets close at 2048x1536 but using VGA on a digital monitor should be allowed. Also current games support 1440p they have for a while even console ports should support it fine since its a 16:9 resolution.
both consoles said 4k support at e3
But for games? Seems like they're struggling to run 60fps at 1080, 4k doesn't seem realistic, at least not for the AAA games that sell consoles.
Current consoles X360 and PS3 run their games at 720p@30fps or 1080p@30fps and according to a few articles (like this one
http://goo.gl/DaFJ0 ) that I have read, 1080p@30fps will still be the target for X1 and PS4.
The one thing some of you forget is that just because something has a port capable of 4K doesnt mean the device can handle that resolution. I know all Kepler cards can do 4K even though in the specs they say they cant, it was a driver restriction at launch. I think fermi might be in the same boat but I havnt really looked into it. In the case of the ASUS i think the way that it runs was done on purpose for better compatibility as its not recognized as a single 4K display at least according to that one review.