If you do CAD work, or PCB work, or anything where you pore over huge drawings, get one of these:



Immediately.

It's a Philips BDM4065UC. The thing is huge, very pretty, and absolutely exactly what I've been looking for for years.

3840 x 2160 on a 40 inch screen, 60Hz via display port from an ATI 7870 card, and a very nice picture indeed with remarkably high contrast. I need to colour balance it and the two Dell 2407 monitors to either side, but overall I'm blown away by how well it works.

To give some perspective, the piece of paper on the lower left side is A4. The monitor has almost exactly the same area as A1, although a slightly different aspect ratio.

It replaces the six Dell 2407s I've been using for some years, with one panel that's more or less the equivalent of four of them. The total power bill reduction from replacing four of them and the three HD3850 cards that were driving them with this monster will probably pay for it in a couple of years!

Not to mention I get a suprisingly large amount of desk space back as well.

And 4K video is just stunning on it, even from Youtube.

Mind you, 1080p looks rather crude, and 720p is just crap... Or very very small.

So yes, very pleased indeed. I just needed to share that

pca

Gorgeous setup, and it looks very productive too.

I'm really happy to see the rise of higher DPI screens. At work, we have 2 of the 5120 x 2880 iMac screens (27 inch), and they are just jaw dropping. It's a good thing they come with some good stock wallpapers that show it off, as most games can't take advantage of it. Too many are still 32 bit, and they run into lots of out of memory errors trying to deal with that resolution at a good texture quality. Crazy to see how far things have come from the era of 320 x 240 Doom being seen as high end.

Wow!

Cheers

Cris

Where did you get it? I've been eyeing those up for a little while, but Amazon are always out of stock.

Peter

Amazon, actually

They had fifteen in stock late in the week. They were all gone by saturday morning.

I was going to go with Cherrywood who told me they would have fifteen as well around the middle of the month, then a couple of hundred or so a month later, but since they popped up on Amazon for nearly the same price I wanted it now, dammit!

It's not Gratification if it's not Instant®



pca

So I'm seriously interested in getting myself one of these. Thanks (sarcastically). Probably quite overkill for me

Patrick: can you tell me if in the PBP mode you can run it as two separate 1920x2160 displays? The manual shows PBP (PBP 2Win) looking more like two side by side 1920x1080 displays with 3840x540 blank sections above and below. There is a mode using 4 inputs (i.e. four 1920x1080) as well (PBP 4Win) but that would require 4 display outputs. I have not found much detail in any of the reviews - only the manual but it's a bit vague (http://download.p4c.philips.com/files/b/bdm4065uc_75/bdm4065uc_75_dfu_aen.pdf page 10)

Reason I ask is the my current laptop doesn't support higher than 2560x1600. USB-UHD adapters only go up to 30Hz at UHD resolutions. I found an Amazon comment where someone was running two USB adapters at 50Hz each on a different display (maybe 60Hz is possible with this panel). i.e. the machine just sees two different monitors side by side. The only real issue I see with it is that maximising a window would maximise to half the screen size. That actually might be somewhat useful and then with the inbuilt Windows snaps to left and right halves of the display i.e. there'd be 4 of them then. There's probably some way to maximise across multi monitor setups too if I really want.

I'm aware of the bandwidth issues but I'm happy enough with that for now. I'm mainly doing coding but I'm concerned about 30Hz refresh rates for mouse pointers, cursors etc. Maybe I shouldn't be. It's a big investment though and if I buy and find 30Hz is a deal breaker and this idea doesn't work, then I'm up for another $1-2k+ for new machine (nothing that I like right now).

Thanks
Christian

I had a play with this, and unfortunately you seem to be right. It scales the two inputs to be half the width of the screen AND half the height, centred on the middle line of the panel. Not exactly ideal. I even tried creating a custom 1920x2160 mode to see if it would force it to be the full height, but it scaled that as well!

Regarding the 30 Hz issue, I'm not sure it would make a huge amount of difference for desktop operations. You can certainly see it, I've set it to that as I type this, and there is a very small but perceptible lag in character input and mouse operations, however I suspect you'd get used to it fairly fast.

In an application where low latency was important, of course, it would become difficult, but for programming and the like it probably wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me. But that said I'm glad I can get 60Hz

pca

Thanks very much for doing that Patrick.

Not a deal breaker I guess. If I had four of the display adapters I could just run the 4 way display with the advantage that 60Hz should then be no problem at all.

I might buy 1 UHD 30Hz adapter and see how that looks.

If the 30Hz is really a problem, I already have one 1920x1080 adapter, so I'll just buy a couple more. The non UHD ones are pretty cheap. Well even the UHD ones aren't that expensive.

Edit: my machine does already have DP and HDMI dual outputs so only one extra adapter is truly needed. I presume MHL-HDMI takes a regular HDMI input (Edit 2: yes it should be fine with HDMI on that input)

Christian

Digging up an ancient thread... I got one of these a month ago and have been using it daily since then. I love it. It's huge. It's beautiful. But, two caveats.

1) OS X 10.9 can't wake it up properly from sleep. OS X 10.11 works better but is still sometimes wonky about wakeup.

2) I used an Xrite Colormunki calibrator so the screen would run at the standard(-ish) D65 whitepoint, and thus have colors that look like they're "supposed" to look. The native whitepoint is way, way more blue than this, so after calibration, the brightness dropped. A lot. If you've got light text on a dark background, you'll be annoyed at the reflections of your desk, or of whatever is behind you. (This contrasts with the Apple 27" Thunderbolt display, which puts out such a torrent of bright light that it can overpower anything.)

Did you see Patrick's thread about the bad DisplayPort cables? Maybe that reminded you to post.

Edit: I see you did

Now apparently discontinued (boo) in favour of a 43in version of the same thing with HDMI2.0 at about the same price (yay).

Peter

Happy with my old model one after 6 months odd. Running it at 30Hz is really not such a problem for coding, office work etc. Video even plays well enough for the most part.

Running off Intel HD 3000 (i7 2640M) works OK. Occasionally you see it struggle with all the pixels but on Windows 7 and now 10 it's perfectly usable.

Use a decent DisplayPort cable. I found one reasonable looking quality one gave a number of issues when hot plugging. Reverting to a Philips supplied one and the problem went away. I have a new XPS13 that can do UHD at 60Hz via USB-C and that occasionally blanks out - could be the USB-C adapter but it was a pricey one so hopefully not.

No issues with "burn in" like one of those Amazon reviews complains about on the new model.