Dell Previews 27-inch ‘5K’ UltraSharp Monitor: 5120x2880

75 Comments

View All Comments

• efficacyman - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

  Finally some innovation in desktop displays. I would also like to see a 21:9 1600p monitor come out now that we are finally doing high dpi monitors. Preferrably a lightboost 144hz 21:9 for optimum gaming with only one display.

• meacupla - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

  to nit pick, those aren't 'innovations', but rather 'evolution'

• ABR - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

  So in the early 1990's the NeXTStation Color came out with a "Megapixel Display". A typical configuration ran at 25 MHz, had 16 MB memory, and maybe 500 MB disk. Nowadays a PC "workstation" will run 3-4 GHz with more IPC and multicore, call that a 1000x improvement, with a TB or two of disk (2000x), and anywhere from 16 gig on up of main memory -- another 1000x. But this monitor has what, _fifteen_ times the pixels of that NeXTStation, and we're nominating it for extreme sports categories! Interesting times indeed... (And BTW you could play Doom on that NeXT, so don't say its video card had to do anything less.)

• MikeMurphy - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

  Ironically you can thank the same person running NeXT at the time for the recent spike in resolutions - Steve Jobs via Apple.

• frostyfiredude - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

  Maybe for marketing by raising awareness, but not from a technical standpoint. Both Android and Windows devices had HiDPI options prior to iOS and OSX respectively.

• BGQ-qbf-tqf-n6n - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link

  That's a negative on the Windows. Mac OS X frameworks were far more high-DPI aware 2003-2008 while Windows XP was still struggling to display non-96 PPI. Apple's vector-based UI model was incredibly forward-looking for the time, although the Retina/2X model came later.
  
  Only with Vista/DWM/WPF did Microsoft finally start to catch up (still didn't close the gap until 2012/Windows 8 new-HiDPI support, really).

• rajeshk4u - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

  I am running my 4K on Windows XP. I have no idea what you people have said....

• coolhardware - Sunday, September 7, 2014 - link

  Here is the NeXTStation Megapixel Display vs the Dell 5K: http://pixensity.com/list/desktop/
  
  But does anybody know the actual diagonal screen size of the NeXT? (was it really 17 inchces?)

• pixelstuff - Friday, September 5, 2014 - link

  For monitors like this the OS needs to become aware of the screen size and then apps need to be developed in inches or centimeters so if a button should be 1/2 inch or 1/4 inch the OS can automatically draw it the same size regardless of the PPI in various screens.
  
  The OS would probably need some kind of average viewing distance knowledge as well so it can cope with TVs, desktop monitors, and tablets. As well as a way to automatically or quickly switch between those distances once phones and tablets become the universal computing device that you plug into any screen.
  
  When is this going to happen?

• DanNeely - Saturday, September 6, 2014 - link

  when enough of them are sold to convince developers to start updating them. win32 is too old and doing DPI aware software in it's a pain; but WPF (the new UI framework launched with .net 3.5 in 2008) and it's decendent in win8 both are designed to play nicely with varying DPI levels. It just requires convincing the PHBs and bean counters to spend the time and money needed to rewrite the UI from scratch.