Overview and Specs
In the past year, TechRadar Pro has reviewed several IPS 4K panel monitors (including the fabulous Asus PB287Q and the BenQ BL2710PT ) aimed at professional graphic artists and photographers. Most of these monitors are priced at $1000 (£600 or AU$1,075). These mid-priced monitors are often missing hardware calibration or full Adobe RGB support. If these features are necessary for your display, you'll likely pay significantly more money.
In comes the Samsung UD970 ($1,999.99, £1,200 or AU$2,150). This 31.5-inch 4K UHD desktop monitor is Samsung's top-of-the-line for home and small office use. It supports 4K 3840x2160 resolution and - unlike previously reviewed display units - comes with all the works.
What is UHD?
Ultra-high-definition (also known as Ultra High-Def, UltraHD or UHD) is the latest whiz-bang digital video format that all your graphic artist and visual designer friends will soon be lusting after, especially if you know a few with deep pockets (I don't).
UHDTV has two defined resolutions:
- 4K UHD (2160p), which is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall (8.29 megapixels),
- 8K UHD (4320p) is 7680 pixels wide by 4320 pixels tall (33.18 megapixels), which is sixteen times as many pixels as the current 1080p HD screen you probably watch your favorite sports teams on now.
When choosing a flat screen LCD monitor you need to pay attention to what panel type it uses: either twisted nematic (TN), In-Plane switching (IPS) or Vertical Alignment (VA). Each panel type has its pros and cons, depending on what you plan to use your monitor for. TN-panel monitors are generally more responsive for first-person shooter games while those with IPS panels are usually better at reproducing colors for photography and design. VA panels generally offer better blacks and contrast than either TN or IPS panels, which makes them good for writers or people where contrast is an important factor. Photographers and graphic designers (unless you're working in the film noir genre) should stick to IPS monitors.
First things first
The UD970 has a simple and elegant design, with a large matte-finish screen surrounded by a thin bezel. Glossy flat-panel LCDs screens, such as the laptop display you're probably reading this review on, may look better when they're powered off but they're also more susceptible to glare, reflected light from windows and light bulbs. And glossy screens tend to show fingerprints and smudges more readily, which can be a problem if you're a habitual screen-pointer like me.
The thin mounting stand was adjustable in a range of different directions, which made it fairly easy to put the monitor in portrait or landscape mode. That capability, coupled with the fact that Samsung also provides Picture By Picture (PBP) support for up to four input sources at once, had me imagining using the UD970 in all sorts of cool multitasking scenarios, such as multiple work and play Google Hangout or Skype sessions with friends, family and co-workers in my own homegrown version of a Hollywood Squares tic-tac-toe game show. The reality for me, as you'll see later, was more Hoboken than Hollywood, since I ran into numerous configuration and installation hassles getting the PBP feature to work.
Equipment used
I connected the UD970 to a MSI GT72 Dominator, a high-end gaming laptop with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M graphics card inside. My initial impression was that the color reproduction on the display was stunning, with high levels of color accuracy, picture quality and clarity. The fancy colors I was seeing are due to Samsung's factory calibration and some impressive color specs: its 10-bit color depth is capable of displaying more than one billion colors, 100% of the sRGB color spectrum and 99.5% of Adobe RGB. If you don't care for any of the eight factory calibration settings, there are three user-programmable modes you can play around with.
I especially liked the UD970's narrow bezel that allows the screen to come all the way out to the frame for better viewing, similar to the way an infinity pool gives you more real estate for swimming.
Gaming
As I mentioned, one of the selling points of the UD970 is PBP support for up to four input sources at once. One of those input sources might very well be for a PC game and, not being a gamer myself, I asked Wes Fenlon, the Hardware Editor for our sister site PC Gamer to deliver a more professional opinion about the display's gaming suitability. Wes put down the broadsword he was carrying around the office long enough to explain that the most important requirement for gaming is response time. For monitors, he said, there are two components. One is the pixel response time or how fast the pixel can go from on to off and change colors. Slower than 10 milliseconds response time and you'll start to see some kind of ghosting when things on your screen are moving really quickly. "There's also input lag," Wes said, "which is basically how long it takes a command to appear on the screen when you move your mouse."
By Fenlon's exacting standards, the UD970 8ms response time was a little slow to be used as a gaming screen by hardcore gamers who are used to a little faster "slicing and dicing." To demonstrate, he downloaded and ran a minute-long version of the game Bioshock Infinite by Irrational Games that he uses to benchmark game hardware and noted several times where the video frame rate appeared to "stutter." To my untrained eye, the game movements appeared quite fluid. I was more than a little blow away by the colorful floating world's fair imagery (circa 1912) in Bioshock Infinite, so I may not have been paying close attention to video frame rates and other such prosaic details.
Like me, Fenlon was impressed by the fact that the monitor could be rotated into portrait mode. Using the UD970 in portrait mode takes a while to get used to, but you'll likely find that portrait is superior to landscape mode for any number of web tasks. For one thing, browsing the web in portrait mode allows you to see more of a website at one time, since almost all websites are designed for up-and-down rather than left-to-right scrolling. Portrait mode also makes it easier to read and respond to lengthy email chains. You'll be surprised at the day-to-day usefulness on dividing up the display into over and under Picture By Picture windows, so that you can view photos, blueprints or videos of people, places and things in one window while typing a response in another. The clarity and color accuracy of the monitor means you're not going to miss many details, whatever orientation the UD970 is in.
The big thing with 4K displays is that there is so much data: 8.1 million pixels that you're refreshing 30 times or 60 times a second. This is too much for most computers on the market right now to handle, which I experienced firsthand when I connected my MacBook Pro laptop in an attempt to mirror my Mac screen in another PBP window. The result, even when I identified the input source as DVI rather than HDMI, was a distorted image worthy of a fun house mirror.
Button, button, who's got the button?
I selected the number of PBP windows on the UD970 display by mashing hardware buttons on the lower right-hand side, underneath icons etched on the bezel. In addition to input selection, these buttons control things like sound and brightness. I eventually figured out how to setup, size and resize the PBP windows, but I found the menu navigation using multiple buttons far from intuitive.
8K and final verdict
Waiting for 8K on the desktop is a waste of time, although LG and other manufacturers in the past three months have unveiled 8K TVs (7680x4320 pixels) boasting four times the resolution of the 4K UD970. Pixel density only matters up until a certain point because the human eye is only so precise of an instrument. You can jam pack an 8K resolution on a 27-inch monitor but people with normal 20/20 vision will not be able to detect the differences between an 8K and 4K display. This doesn't hold true for 60-inch televisions where the difference is more apparent. In the 30-inch display range, it's hard to tell the difference between 4K, 8K, and even 1080p.
Other considerations
UD970 connectivity includes one Dual Link DVI, two DisplayPort 1.2 ports, a HDMI 1.4 port, four USB 3.0 ports, a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort connector and a headphone jack.
At the moment, native 4K content is pretty limited to a few video-streaming services like Netflix and (as of this past week) Amazon Prime. There is some 4k content currently on YouTube and Vimeo, but it's limited to mostly nature documentaries and tech coverage.
You should consider viewing distance when you choose a desktop monitor. The optimal viewing distance for a 31.5-inch display like the UD970 for me is probably three to four feet, or just out of arm's length to avoid leaving fingerprints on the screen. At that distance, the image quality and viewing experience of games and other video content is a drastic improvement over HD or the Retina Display of the MacBook Pro.
We liked
If you're a graphic artist or design professional looking to get your feet wet producing 4K content, you'll like this monitor since it's factory calibrated to display out of the box the highest levels of color accuracy, picture quality and clarity. There isn't a lot of 4K content out there at the moment, and being able to proof your work in both landscape and portrait mode on a monitor like the UD970 ought to help you get a leg up on your competition.
We disliked
The kludgy button navigation makes it's difficult to configure the otherwise cool Picture-by-Picture feature. If you're a budget conscious buyer, you might want to investigate other IPS 4K panel display options.
Final verdict
The ultimate consideration, of course, is price against performance. Samsung's UD970 ain't cheap. If you're a big-time digital designer, CAD/CAM engineer, or digital video editor looking to turn your backyard opus into a Hollywood blockbuster, you might find that it's well worth the cost. If you don't have the greenbacks, you might want to choose a different Samsung model or put your Hollywood dreams on hold and wait a few years for discounted UD970 prices. As the song goes:
"If you ain't got the do re mi, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee."
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