Today I received my new U28D590 UHD (4k) monitor and decided that I'd leave a review for people to easily find who are on the wall about ordering this monitor. Pictures will follow later, for now however only text based review with 'borrowed' pictures.
In case you've stumbled on this review by accident or been living under a rock the Samsung U28D590 packs a 3840x2160 resolution which runs at 60hz, the low price is due to the high quality TN panel.
Here is my experience...
After opening the box I saw that the unit didn't come with my countries power figure 8 power cable that goes from the power unit to the wall, I nipped down to the local computer store and picked one up which seems to work brilliantly. The monitor itself is super light, uses a semi glossy coating and a full gloss outer bezel with a plastic 'brushed' back, the stand was very easy to attach to the monitor.
After plugging in the included display port cable and the power cable the monitor immediately came to life, the resolution was already automatically set to 3840x2160 without me having to even restart, the refresh rate is 60hz and that is the only option visible to me. There appears to be no MST by default and it just works at any resolution without any dual screen issues (I tried every resolution available to me including 4:3 ones). Everything seems to 'just' work as it would a standard 1080p monitor. I use a GTX 780 so mileage may vary on older GPUs that may not be able to push 4k resolutions.
The first immediately apparent thing is that the text size is tiny, I can read it ok but you may wish to run the display at a lower resolution or increased DPI size if your vision is not 20/20 or better. There is an enormous amount of desktop real estate and I can see that this will be a great monitor for modelling.
The colours look exceptionally good for a TN panel, the primary red, green and blue colours have very little vertical shifting, even colours such as pink appear nice and flat with no gradient. A grey image will unfortunately reveal the tell tale sign that this is a TN panel and will exhibit a small amount of shifting. Looking at the monitor from above or below will shift the gamma about slightly as you would expect from any TN based panel. Black levels are surprisingly far better than on my u3011.
This monitor is very good at picking out small details, nuances and colour variations in images, even more so than my U3011 which really surprised me for a TN panel, there are things I am seeing in images that just weren't there on my u3011, and these images are 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 sized images blown up to the full size of the display.
Colour work is possible to an extend on this monitor, for example texture asset design if you are into game development or rendering if it does not need to be 100% colour critical, this display could even be used for starter photography if being used correctly.
The coating on the display is very mild, however a very, very small amount of grain is visible as would be expected from any diffuser coating but it is almost invisible to the eye even on a white background, it is far better than my u3011 which has terrible grain.
Games on this monitor look awesome, I can see much further and things just look a lot cleaner and smoother (due to the increased responsiveness and reduced input latency of the TN panel), moving images just look amazing and this monitor could be used to give a serious advantage in e-sports due to the increased resolution, aliasing (stair step effect) is still somewhat visible but is greatly reduced and is 'almost' acceptable.
This monitor does not 'overclock' and will go up to about 66hz before glitching out, at 65hz the image exhibits frame skipping indicating it is still outputting a 60hz image. This monitor uses 'very good' PWM flickering at at lower brightnesses than 100% however this is not visible and does not cause any ill effects to myself personally (and I am somewhat sensitive to PWM flicker).
This monitor is an absolute godsend for 3dsmax work!
If you have any questions feel free to ask away and I will add a Q&A section to this post
In case you've stumbled on this review by accident or been living under a rock the Samsung U28D590 packs a 3840x2160 resolution which runs at 60hz, the low price is due to the high quality TN panel.
Here is my experience...
After opening the box I saw that the unit didn't come with my countries power figure 8 power cable that goes from the power unit to the wall, I nipped down to the local computer store and picked one up which seems to work brilliantly. The monitor itself is super light, uses a semi glossy coating and a full gloss outer bezel with a plastic 'brushed' back, the stand was very easy to attach to the monitor.
After plugging in the included display port cable and the power cable the monitor immediately came to life, the resolution was already automatically set to 3840x2160 without me having to even restart, the refresh rate is 60hz and that is the only option visible to me. There appears to be no MST by default and it just works at any resolution without any dual screen issues (I tried every resolution available to me including 4:3 ones). Everything seems to 'just' work as it would a standard 1080p monitor. I use a GTX 780 so mileage may vary on older GPUs that may not be able to push 4k resolutions.
The first immediately apparent thing is that the text size is tiny, I can read it ok but you may wish to run the display at a lower resolution or increased DPI size if your vision is not 20/20 or better. There is an enormous amount of desktop real estate and I can see that this will be a great monitor for modelling.
The colours look exceptionally good for a TN panel, the primary red, green and blue colours have very little vertical shifting, even colours such as pink appear nice and flat with no gradient. A grey image will unfortunately reveal the tell tale sign that this is a TN panel and will exhibit a small amount of shifting. Looking at the monitor from above or below will shift the gamma about slightly as you would expect from any TN based panel. Black levels are surprisingly far better than on my u3011.
This monitor is very good at picking out small details, nuances and colour variations in images, even more so than my U3011 which really surprised me for a TN panel, there are things I am seeing in images that just weren't there on my u3011, and these images are 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 sized images blown up to the full size of the display.
Colour work is possible to an extend on this monitor, for example texture asset design if you are into game development or rendering if it does not need to be 100% colour critical, this display could even be used for starter photography if being used correctly.
The coating on the display is very mild, however a very, very small amount of grain is visible as would be expected from any diffuser coating but it is almost invisible to the eye even on a white background, it is far better than my u3011 which has terrible grain.
Games on this monitor look awesome, I can see much further and things just look a lot cleaner and smoother (due to the increased responsiveness and reduced input latency of the TN panel), moving images just look amazing and this monitor could be used to give a serious advantage in e-sports due to the increased resolution, aliasing (stair step effect) is still somewhat visible but is greatly reduced and is 'almost' acceptable.
This monitor does not 'overclock' and will go up to about 66hz before glitching out, at 65hz the image exhibits frame skipping indicating it is still outputting a 60hz image. This monitor uses 'very good' PWM flickering at at lower brightnesses than 100% however this is not visible and does not cause any ill effects to myself personally (and I am somewhat sensitive to PWM flicker).
This monitor is an absolute godsend for 3dsmax work!
If you have any questions feel free to ask away and I will add a Q&A section to this post