Mr Eberle, thanks very much for testing this monitor so thoroughly and writing up an excellent report. I've been a happy professional user of the 9.2 megapixel, 27 inch Viewsonic VP2290b monitor, a derivative of the IBM T221, since 2003 (over a decade now!) and can confirm many of your observations about using monitors of this class with an operating system (Windows XP) not really designed for them. When the desktop pops up on the screen at that resolution, all of the text and icons are really, really tiny - so small in fact that using a mouse to select them becomes a precise and painful maneuver. I can also confirm that up-scaling the icons and text through the operating system produces unsatisfactory blurring of desktop items. Applications also suffer from the tiny icons, buttons, tabs, thin lines, dots, and so on.The VP2290b topped out at a 41 Hz refresh rate, requiring an expensive Matrox HR256 graphics card on a PCI-X bus to get even that refresh rate. At that rate, the cursor stopped strobing when you moved it, so at least it was usable. Lower-end graphics cards would refresh the display at 30 Hz or even 12 Hz (!), the strobing cursor was intolerable, and selecting the tiny icons became impossible. However, the screen lag was so long that these long refresh rates did not appear to flicker. With such long persistence and with a computer struggling to push out 9 megapixels, games were impossible to run.Because of the above issues, I resorted to using the VP2290b at half resolution (1920 x 1200) for most windows applications. This sped up everything reasonably for applications that did not need the high resolution. For high-detail applications, like reading schematic diagrams, data sheets in PDF documents, technical photographs, and so on, switching over to 3840 x 2400 produced really amazing results, as you said in your article. Very fine details emerge, photos look amazing, no need to zoom and pan. The paperless office was in reach with a 200 ppi density. Even at half resolution (1920x1200), the screen had an advantage over monitors that ran natively at that resolution. The subpixel density of the VP2290b was still twice that of normal monitors. Your eyes didn't see the black lines dividing each subpixel, so that your focus would be on the image pixels, not the lines. A lot less eyestrain. It's too bad that running the darned thing is so hard!I am very glad to see that this generation of high-resolution monitors (such as the one you reviewed) can run at 60 Hz, and that there are graphics cards that can drive them at that rate without breaking too much of a sweat. It seems, though, that getting the CPUs, drives, hardware, operating system, and applications softwae to keep up with these things is still a challenge. I would think that fonts, icons, graphics lines, and such could be designed with scalability in mind, instead of designing them with fixed pixel grids. It will take a lot of effort on the part of Microsoft (for Windows) and others to truly allow these kinds of monitors to be accepted into the mainstream. Until then, I fear that they will continue to be of interest mostly to professionals willing to put up with their eccentricities for the sake of high resolution.- James W -
Guy with deep pockets who wants the best of everything --> get this ASUS monitor here and that Sony 4k TV, they look better than any of the other 4K stuff
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