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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

$1299 Seiki UHDTV 50" SE50UY04 - Bought it today

houkouonchi said:
How old are you? Any far-sightedness? The 39 inch pixel wise is barely smaller than a 27 inch 2560x1440 display. Even without correction (after laser I am like 20/30 or so without correction with .75 diopters of astigmatism) I can see stuff just fine on a 22 inch 3840x2400 display which is WAY WAY smaller than that 39 inch when your comparing the difference between that and say a 27 inch 1440p display.

Sadly my 50 inch seiki was stolen out of my house the day before thanksgiving (along with other stuff). Luckily with the sears deal I got a new one for $750 + 10% off via discover rewards.
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I'm 35. More importantly, my clients and everyone else that has seen the monitor thinks that it is essentially unreadable and wonder how I can even work off of it. Not a great verdict.

Can't argue with your math but maybe it has something to do with the larger screen size? Maybe it encourages you to push back the monitor slightly to avoid having to turn your neck.

I have a MBP Retina 15" and the pixels are obviously much smaller there but still I have no problem with small fonts there. Is Mac OS set up to make them larger somehow? Or am I just sitting closer to it...
 
Jonas, you're right about the size in relation to viewing distance. With a 27~30" display, which are typically 2560 pixels wide, they can be viewed comfortably from as little as about 2' up to about 4'. People with really darn good eyes can still see the pixel grid at 4+ feet away. I'm in that camp.

A larger screen like the SEIKI at 50" just sucks for desktop monitor use. While the pixels are similar in size, we have to sit further away from it to keep it comfortably in our field of view. So it's like sitting back 6 feet or more from one of those previously mentioned 30" displays. If we sit within normal monitor viewing distance, we have to train ourselves to look around. The 39" SEIKI is much better in that regard, we don't have to back up from it near as much, but we also have a lot more pixels crammed into a smaller space.

Let's also add to that the image processing in the SEIKI. It's not "monitor-neutral". Even with sharpness turned all the way to zero, it still plays funky tricks on sharp edges and fine details. The SEIKI monitors are OK if you want to use them for casual media viewing, gaming and other things. They're garbage for critical image work of any sort. A client isn't going to be comfortable sitting down in front of it as if it's a desktop monitor. It's been my experience that 1 out of 3 people notice the judder with 24fps playback of UHD material on the SEIKI and ask what's wrong. All things considered, the SEIKI is a piece of shit. It's only redeeming quality is it has 3840x2160 pixels to play with. Everything else about it is just a crappy third-rate attribute of a $200 50" HDTV you can buy from some no-name label at Costco or Tiger Direct or whatever. I hung my SEIKI in my basement and the kids have a few things hooked up to it. I can run REDRAY to it if needed, but predominantly I use the Samsung 55" for that. The family hates the SEIKI. They call it the "Sucky". Pixels aside, the picture looks like ass. The internal scaler mangles anything and everything. Only reason I still own it is because I needed a cheap crappy TV for that location and I missed my return window on the original purchase while waiting for REDRAY and other decent 4K sources. The picture wasn't too bad from an OPPO up converting blu-ray player… Except for the judder, anyway. So I guess I held on to it.

OSX currently does not have a good way to adjust the size of fonts and other elements. At least not for arbitrary display hardware. The 'retina' settings in your display preferences work on your MBP retina to let you change the apparent size of fonts and everything else on your screen. So you can make your screen appear to be sized as a 1080p or whatever size and then you get the benefits of the extra resolution for sharp fonts and crisp lines. Apps that support the retina features still get full access to all the pixels -- so you can have 1080p video playing full res in a smaller window on the screen. I think there's a way to enable this functionality for other displays on Mavericks and it might be a round-about sort of way or a hack of some sort. I have not really played with it myself. Gave up trying to run a 30fps UHD TV as a desktop monitor. Meh...
 
Thanks Jeff! I was able to enable the HiDPI modes by running the following command in terminal:
'sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true'

Unfortunately it only adds one mode, 1920x1080 HiDPI. It's actually quite pleasant for general reading purposes, like a monster retina screen, but now fonts are simply too large... and although apps supposedly still have the ability to access the full UHD rez, most of them don't - which negates the whole selling point of the device. A notable exception to this seems to be Resolve 10, which appears to use the full rez for the preview pane.

A 2560 HiDPI mode might have been just the right thing for this as a GUI monitor. Even then the problem, like you say, is that the general color and contrast is so shitty that I'm embarrassed to have it display anything in front of a client. I have learned to only evaluate footage on the reference monitor, but clients - not so much.
 
FYI: now on sale at Amazon for $769.98 Seiki Digital SE50UY04 50-Inch 4K UHD 120Hz LED HDTV (Cyber Monday week Sale) with free shipping and low price guarantee ... how low can they go!
 
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John Bellari said:
FYI: now on sale at Amazon for $769.98 Seiki Digital SE50UY04 50-Inch 4K UHD 120Hz LED HDTV (Cyber Monday week Sale) with free shipping and low price guarantee ... how low can they go!
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I got mine for $749 (a second one as the first one was stolen out of my house the day before thanks-giving) from sears. With sears I was able to do in-store pickup and I also received an additional 10% discover rewards bonus as well.
 
Chris McKechnie said:
I picked up the 55" seiki at Sears. Incredible deal. Eager to test. :-)
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I was not very impressed with the 55 inch. I hear it will do the 120Hz upconversion so nicer for playing 24P stuff but it won't do 1080p@120Hz and the 1080p -> 4k upscaling seemed quite a bit worse than the 50/39. It had really weird drawing issues when I tried to give it > 31Hz @4k and it seemed quite a bit thicker/bulkier/heavier compared with the 50 inch.

Granted I only was able to test for about 10 minutes. I tested it in Sears after ordering my second 50 inch seiki online when going there to do in-store pickup. I was debaiting on whether paying the $100 more for the 55 inch model. Needless to say, after my testing I went with the 50 inch version. The native 120Hz at 1080p was a very important factor for me though as I like to use the display for gaming as well.
 
Anyone using FCPX with the latest MBPr, a Thunderbolt Display along with the 50" Seiki? Having problems getting the timeline and event browser on the Thunderbolt Display while having the viewer on the Seiki. When I click show viewer in second display it sets the MBPr as my second display. Only option is to mirror all displays, which I don't want to do. Any suggestions? Running Mavericks
 
Has any one gotten the 55inch yet. I just grabbed one and not impressed at all. Can't get more than 25hz from my new mbpr. Can't seem to get it calibrated color and brightness wise either. Anyone have suggestions? If not it's going back I think
 
Ryan Hamblin said:
Has any one gotten the 55inch yet. I just grabbed one and not impressed at all. Can't get more than 25hz from my new mbpr. Can't seem to get it calibrated color and brightness wise either. Anyone have suggestions? If not it's going back I think
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My small review that I did in-store on hard-forum:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040422665&postcount=695

Another guy's review:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040418153&postcount=690

I wasn't very impressed...
 
Ryan Hamblin said:
Has any one gotten the 55inch yet. I just grabbed one and not impressed at all. Can't get more than 25hz from my new mbpr. Can't seem to get it calibrated color and brightness wise either. Anyone have suggestions? If not it's going back I think
Click to expand...

i had the 55". Hated it. Downgraded to 50". This one rocks. Plus I was having major screen defects on 2 55"s.
 
Do you think a single GPU like the GTX 670 or GTX 770 would be adequate to run via HDMI Windows at TV's native resolution with Adobe Premiere CS5 and 4k red clips?

Getting this TV!
 
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