You are quite right raysosher, it’s working great for that.
For those considering this monitor as well, I bought it and have been testing it for a month now. I’m very happy with it as a multi-purpose screen.
For photo work, it’s far beyond anything I’ve used. It’s just a far more capable screen than what I’ve had before. It calibrates way better as well. While I’d love to have the real-estate of 4k, the extra 2k gives over 1080p is so nice when editing. For me, sitting a little further back, the pixel density is perfect as well. I don’t even have to scale text, actually.
Looking at my D750 shots, comparing the screens, the difference is obvious. From what I was expecting, after reading the specs and 3rd-party reviews, I would say it holds up very well.
I have some lingering neck and upper back issues, so posture really matters for me when working on a computer. I hadn’t been working on photos very much lately, because with my 17" screen attached to my laptop I had no way to position it without causing me neck and back pain. Laptops are really terrible for this. With this screen, however, I’m just sitting back comfortably, with my head centered in the screen.
I included an in-depth review link in my original post, so you can check that out for more details on image performance from people more expert than me.
For anyone thinking to use it for gaming, for my purposes at least the pixel response time has held up. I haven’t noticed any ghosting sort of issues. I haven’t noticed any input lag issues either. And, I play some twitchy games that demand fast reflexes. I’ve tested other people’s expensive tvs and computer monitors and found them unusable because of this, but not here luckily.
I’m only looking to game at 60 fps though. If someone needed to top 100 for gaming, they wouldn’t be looking for a do-it-all monitor anyway, I would think. The lack of freesync/gsync has been an adjustment, but I’ve been handling that in other ways and it’s been ok so far. For the os compositor, be sure to sync to this monitor’s rate when using more than one. With nvidia you’re looking for vsync and to enforce the composition pipeline. Fine after that for me (Debian-family Linux).
I was worried about how 720p and 1080p signals would scale, but it has handled everything I’ve thrown at it perfectly.
It arrived with one dead (dark) pixel in a corner, but a quick massage brought it to life and I haven’t had any others die yet. The screen comes in a box substantial enough for shipping. It’s super thick because of the stand being one piece, though the screen faces out. If you open the stand-side, rather than the screen-side, you can cut back the wrap on the screen and snap the base onto it in order to lift it out. This is nice, since the bezel is small enough it’d be hard to avoid touching the screen otherwise.
The stand is sturdy. It slides up and down fairly easy (but doesn’t slip) and has a goodly amount of tilt available. However, while it does twist left and right, it takes enough pressure that it causes the base to slide on the surface I have it on. If you used something with more friction, I don’t think it would, but if that’s something you need you might want to put it on a rotating base to make it easier to spin. It does go portrait as well, which is how I’m thinking to use it once I can upgrade to a better 4k screen someday. Note, that it doesn’t click into place for portrait vs landscape, so if you have an ocd-adjacent need to have it perfectly level (as I do) it takes a little extra care, but then it stays put.
I constantly switch between inputs, but the controls on the back right work very well. A couple buttons are user selectable as well. Once you get used to it, it’s very quick to switch. If it has no signal, then you give it one, it’ll auto-select that input. If it loses signal on the active input, it’ll auto-switch to another input that has signal. I max the timeout on this and now it’s pretty convenient to control. At this point, I can use all the control buttons by feel without thinking about it.
I’ve also found the color, brightness, etc. controls sufficient to quickly reconfigure for different purposes. It has settings for 9300k, 6500k, 5500k, and 5000k color temps, which can be added to a quick button. The blue-light filter can as well, which can be nice when doing late-night non-photo things.
The picture-in-picture can be kinda interesting, effectively allowing to put to different machines on the screen at once and swap between them. You can either do a small window, with somewhat-limited adjustment, or you can split the screen in half. If you manually tell 2 computers to output half the resolution of the screen, you get a proper fit even, as opposed to when you send 2 regular landscape screens where it’ll scale them to fit. I haven’t used this too much, but it has actually come in handy a couple times. I’ve actually shared it with someone, sitting next to each other on my couch.
It only has 1 each of hdmi and display ports, but I only need the one dp for pc and I use an hdmi switch for everything else so that’s fine. Haven’t tested the audio pass-through since I use an interface. The speakers are garbage, but would suffice for notifications and light-duty up-close use when you don’t care about how they sound. I wouldn’t plan to use them for watching a movie, especially from further back. I think this will be better or worse, depending on how close you have the screen to a wall. Makes no difference for me.
Overall, I’m wildly pleased with it. I know there’s much better screens out there, but considering my budget it’s great. This wouldn’t have been possible without it being capable of handling all these different purposes, since I simply couldn’t afford more than one screen at this quality level. I’ve always lived my computer screen as my ‘tv’ for money and space reasons. Switching seamlessly from watching a tv show with my partner to studying the Filmic module in Darktable… fantastic. So, this has improved things all over. If anyone has some other question about it, I’m always happy to answer.