$1299 Seiki UHDTV 50" SE50UY04 - Bought it today

[Les Dittert]

I am puzzled.

Why are you guys relying on set top box players for the most part?
This is a Red camera forum after all, so you should have terrabytes of 4K footage to play with.
Someone please help me understand!

 

[Sergio Perez]

Does not work with the HDMI output from the decklink 4k extreme, but can't get a signal from the decklink on the Sony 55" 4k LCD or the sony VPL-1000 4k projector either, signal out of range/not supported. BM says they only tested it with the NEC monitor, my guess is they are not using reduced blanking and the NEC maybe more forgiving then the Sony/Seiki consumer devices.

Thanks Christopher. Glad I didn't went for this card... Any other solution where I could feed this 4K monitor a Quicktime prores 4K file from my Retina with Thunderbolt? That's what I plan to do right now as a 4K "Display" solution...

 

[Bill Sepaniak]

I am puzzled.

Why are you guys relying on set top box players for the most part?
This is a Red camera forum after all, so you should have terrabytes of 4K footage to play with.
Someone please help me understand!

I do have terabytes of footage ... R3D's and DPX's. I have a relatively fast raid: 2 G-Tech G-Speed Es Pro's with 16 terabytes of storage coupled to an ATTO R680. Unfortunately, I only have a Kona 3 and a GTX285 in my box, and since they don't output 4K, I really can't see what 4K is supposed to look like on the Seiki, unless I do an up-scale from 2K. The only thing that I have to do an up-scale with is the OPPO. It should be a different story when I get my Kona 3G and Hi-5 4K. Until then ... and until RED releases the RedRay, not a whole hell of a lot of choices. I am sure that you can use a GTX 680 or 690 or a Titan and rock-n-roll on the Seiki, but I am not sure you can use those cards for a monitor-out solution in apps. like Nuke, Fusion or Scratch.

_____________________________
Scarlet X # 1859 “Bettie Page”
“… preparing to ‘whip’ the competition …”

Zeiss Lenses:

CY 21/2.8
ZF 28/2.0
CY 35-70/3.4
CY 50/1.4
ZF100/2.0

Nikon Lenses:
G 14-24/2.8
G 24-70/2.8
D 80-200/2.8

Tokina Lenses:

11-16/2.8

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I am puzzled.

Why are you guys relying on set top box players for the most part?
This is a Red camera forum after all, so you should have terrabytes of 4K footage to play with.
Someone please help me understand!

Ummm... What is there to understand? We're exploring various aspects of the display. So far, the thing runs without a hitch when connected to a fast system with a capable GPU and/or Rocket or other card with the proper adapter (if needed).

Quad SDI from the Rocket thru an AJA Hi5 4K into the HDMI input of the SEIKI works great. It seems people are not having much luck with the DeckLink 4K. I could not get HDMI from the Kona 3G to play at all.

The screen is pretty nice when connected to my Z820 w/ GTX Titan. All pixels accounted for. My testing has hit a snag since the TV just got promoted to primary home TV use at my place -- our 70" DLP from '06 or somewhere about there just croaked and I'm holding out until I can get a 70~75" UHD/4K to replace it. There are a few coming later this year that fit the bill. Got my eye on the 70" UHD Vizio. The 75" Samsung seems to be the one I want, but pricing speculation from CES says it will be $12K. That isn't happening....


Biggest problem is there's not much we can do to feed this display right now. Upconverted Blu-Ray is it in the consumer AV market for the moment. Until we get REDRAY. If you have a big enough desk, you can use it as a monitor. Albeit, it's stuck at 30Hz or less for full resolution. Anything less than full resolution is a waste of time.


@Bill and those following the sync issue. I've noticed I get it on HDMI 3 input on the SEIKI, regardless of which cable I use. No sign of it at all via the HDMI 1 input. When I first swapped cables earlier, I connected the other cable to #1 and then to the OPPO, leaving the blue cable on #3. I've since flipped back and forth, swapped cables in and out. HDMI 1 is not giving me any noticeable drop-outs. HDMI 3 does, no matter which cable I use. So as of right now, it looks like my SEIKI has the issue. More testing tomorrow and this weekend. Starting to feel relieved that I've held onto the box. I'm seriously excited about this display. Overall it has a very nice picture, especially for the price and good resolution. OTOH, it's a complete piece of shit from the perspective of build quality and quality control. My feelings are mixed at the moment. Going to try all inputs tomorrow with the OPPO again and with the Z820 / Titan setup.

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Redmere is just self-powered active equalizer, allows using a thinner gauge cable. But they have them up to 60' We have one of the 50ft ones, and it works fine nvidia card to seiki @ 4k/31hz - no sync drop outs or sparklies.

I got their new "RedMere" slim high performance cable. You are right. They only go to 15' in length.

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Kona 3G hardware can not support 4k via hdmi, only quadrant monitoring. 4k output is only via sdi.

I could not get HDMI from the Kona 3G to play at all.

 

[Roger_crepatas]

@Bill and those following the sync issue. I've noticed I get it on HDMI 3 input on the SEIKI, regardless of which cable I use. No sign of it at all via the HDMI 1 input. When I first swapped cables earlier, I connected the other cable to #1 and then to the OPPO, leaving the blue cable on #3. I've since flipped back and forth, swapped cables in and out. HDMI 1 is not giving me any noticeable drop-outs. HDMI 3 does, no matter which cable I use. So as of right now, it looks like my SEIKI has the issue. More testing tomorrow and this weekend. Starting to feel relieved that I've held onto the box. I'm seriously excited about this display. Overall it has a very nice picture, especially for the price and good resolution. OTOH, it's a complete piece of shit from the perspective of build quality and quality control. My feelings are mixed at the moment. Going to try all inputs tomorrow with the OPPO again and with the Z820 / Titan setup.

Just to confirm: I have the sync issue on hdmi3. Just moved the cable to hdmi1. I hope you're right

Thanks

 

[Les Dittert]

Biggest problem is there's not much we can do to feed this display right now. Upconverted Blu-Ray is it in the consumer AV market for the moment. Until we get REDRAY. If you have a big enough desk, you can use it as a monitor. Albeit, it's stuck at 30Hz or less for full resolution. Anything less than full resolution is a waste of time.
.

Jeff, you say you have it hooked up with a Titan , but then you say you have nothing to feed it right now. Do you mean by that that you can't get commercial movies for it, and that is why you say you need a RedRay.... To feed it rental movies, etc ?

Kona,Aja, Oppo... whatever , I monitor using this 8bit max monitor with a plain old gtx Kepler card. Works with Fusion just fine. ( third dot on node ) . SDI not a benefit here.
Sure, I would love to rent 4k movies to play on it, but that isn't why I purchased two. I wanted to play my own 4k on it so I can finally see the whole picture at the same time. I don't give a hoot what a BD looks like on it. Or 1080.

Again, I am 'feeding the display right now' with my 24 fps 4k media with a cheap gamer card. Ten seconds or one hour, same playback method.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Kona 3G hardware can not support 4k via hdmi, only quadrant monitoring. 4k output is only via sdi.

Someone should tell the guys at AJA that... Some of them are under the impression that they can get 3840x2160 out via HDMI after installing the special 4K firmware.

Yes, it works great via SDI and using the Hi5 4K.


OTOH, DeckLink 4K is supposed to do this over HDMI and it seems to be broken.

 

[Elsie N]

Jeff, you say you have it hooked up with a Titan , but then you say you have nothing to feed it right now. Do you mean by that that you can't get commercial movies for it, and that is why you say you need a RedRay.... To feed it rental movies, etc ?

Kona,Aja, Oppo... whatever , I monitor using this 8bit max monitor with a plain old gtx Kepler card. Works with Fusion just fine. ( third dot on node ) . SDI not a benefit here.
Sure, I would love to rent 4k movies to play on it, but that isn't why I purchased two. I wanted to play my own 4k on it so I can finally see the whole picture at the same time. I don't give a hoot what a BD looks like on it. Or 1080.

Again, I am 'feeding the display right now' with my 24 fps 4k media with a cheap gamer card. Ten seconds or one hour, same playback method.

Thanks for confirming that. I was wondering why no one seemed to be viewing their own 4k content as well.

 

[Bill Sepaniak]

... Kona,Aja, Oppo... whatever , I monitor using this 8bit max monitor with a plain old gtx Kepler card. Works with Fusion just fine. ( third dot on node ) . SDI not a benefit here.
Sure, I would love to rent 4k movies to play on it, but that isn't why I purchased two. I wanted to play my own 4k on it so I can finally see the whole picture at the same time. I don't give a hoot what a BD looks like on it. Or 1080.

Again, I am 'feeding the display right now' with my 24 fps 4k media with a cheap gamer card. Ten seconds or one hour, same playback method.

Les, you obviously have a 4K video card that works for you. Great! I don't. Nor, do I have a Red Rocket. If your card will pump out 4K, then, there are probably numerous ways to get that 4K signal to your Seiki. I am assuming that is what you are doing and it all works and looks good. What I do have is a GTX285 and an old (6 or 7 years old) Kona 3. I probably purchased the Seiki for pretty much the same reasons you did. Certainly not to watch up-scaled BD discs. However, until my new Kona stuff arrives, I thought it would be nice to see if the panel worked in 4K and what up-scaled 2K content actually looks like (not all that bad). Now, I don't know what "plain old gtx Kepler card" you have, and I don't know if you have a Red Rocket or not. However, in the event you do not have a Rocket, do me a favor: download RCX Pro 18 Alpha (if you haven't already) and let me know if your "plain old gtx Kepler card" will output to a separate monitor from RCX Pro 18? If it does ... FANTASTIC! Please share the details with us. My GTX 285 won't, but my antique Kona 3 does ... and that is very cool for someone like me who doesn't have a Rocket to monitor out of RCX Pro (which I use a lot). You may be right about Fusion (however when I click on the 3rd. dot I get "AJA preview") .

_____________________________
Scarlet X # 1859 “Bettie Page”
“… preparing to ‘whip’ the competition …”

Zeiss Lenses:

CY 21/2.8
ZF 28/2.0
CY 35-70/3.4
CY 50/1.4
ZF100/2.0

Nikon Lenses:
G 14-24/2.8
G 24-70/2.8
D 80-200/2.8

Tokina Lenses:

11-16/2.8

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff, you say you have it hooked up with a Titan , but then you say you have nothing to feed it right now. Do you mean by that that you can't get commercial movies for it, and that is why you say you need a RedRay.... To feed it rental movies, etc ?

I bought the SEIKI to play with it and hopefully use it as a client monitor or general 4K reference. It works alright as a 4K desktop monitor, if you have the room and are willing to put up with some of it's image mapping funkyness. Even with the internal sharpening or "enhancements" dialed down, it doesn't eliminate these anomalies 100%. I've had it connected to a couple PC's, mostly to the Z820 with Titan GPU. Works great. Then I moved the TV to temporarily replace the family's main TV that just died. Now the family is beating on it and it may just stay where it's at until I decide to purchase a new TV for this purpose. I'm holding out for a 70~75 inch UHD, so who knows when that will be....

So other than upconverted Blu-Ray, I have no 4K source to feed it. Unless I unhook one of my PC's from where they're nestled and lug it over to the TV. Even then, the only 4K stuff I can feed it is what I've already tested with. I have TB's and more TB's worth of R3D clips to view, most of it the same boring corporate crap and occasional TV commercials, training videos, etc.. that I work with day in and day out. I have some really nice hot air balloon footage from last summer, but honestly I'm sick of looking at it. Same with the last couple short films I've worked on -- one is in a state of perpetual limbo as the post budget fell apart. It's not my production anyway, but I do have some of the footage to look over. The other was already finished for 2K, also not my production and I only have the 2K ProRes final to look at. Hopefully as a few of my current projects wrap up I can go back to shooting and generate some more interesting stuff to look at. By then, I'll hopefully have a couple Rocket X cards and another 4K monitor or three...


If my wife takes it upon herself to buy a replacement TV now (highly likely) or if I end up with the Z820 connected to the SEIKI again here soon, I'll resume some more testing and playing, but there's nothing else to really do here that hasn't already been talked about. I've tested with the Hi5 4K out of the KONA 3G, it works and it works well. Same with the Rocket also via the Hi5 4K. Unfortunately I don't own a Hi5 4K, I borrowed that from a friend of mine last week, who had just received it, and we tested it ahead of his SEIKI arriving. Rocket X will do 4K over HDMI... I don't have one yet. REDRAY will do it as well, likewise I don't have one of those yet, either. Kona 3G needs the AJA converter, but I'm not going to buy one right now. I don't own a DeckLink 4K. I have a DeckLink HD Extreme 3D+ driving my Panny plasma for Resolve and monitoring out of Premiere. I'll upgrade to 4K monitoring when my screening room / office remodel is complete. On that note, I'll have the 55" Sony 4K here in about 2 weeks, thanks to a client who's footing the bill on that one. It's probably going to replace the 50" Panasonic plasma in my office as my general reference display and non-critical, quick-grading monitor. But my serious work is going to the new screening / coloring suite where I was planning on the REDRAY projector. Now it's looking like the 4K Sony 1000ES is what's going in there unless RED throws us a bone here soon. I need to have that room up and running in the next 60 to 80 days. Was supposed to start hanging drywall by today, but we ran into a snag, now it's going to be middle of next week. Drywall just got stocked today...

 

[Les Dittert]

Bill,
On RCX version 17, the second screen as UHD works as expected. As it should, it is just a second PC display, just has a few more pixels.
I have no Rocket card, I have no use for one in my special post image processing. The card I am currently using is a gtx670. I do have judder in playback sometimes, and tracing that down is challenging. This is why I was hoping more people would be chiming in with their playback experiences of long format material ( more than a Ram buffer full ) .

What does the Kona card expected to do? Is it cost effective ? I know some of these cards are needed for output to tape, but I stay away from tape these days.

Viewing true 4K on this UHD monitor is amazing. Bringing up 4K on it should produce a definite 'WOW factor' to anyone seeing it. If it doesn't you have soft footage.
A Red user not having a UHD monitor like this is a 4K sin. The Seiki is very affordable.
Like in the old days, only watching your 35mm prints on the 6" screen of a Moviola !

Les, you obviously have a 4K video card that works for you. Great! I don't. Nor, do I have a Red Rocket. If your card will pump out 4K, then, there are probably numerous ways to get that 4K signal to your Seiki. I am assuming that is what you are doing and it all works and looks good. What I do have is a GTX285 and an old (6 or 7 years old) Kona 3. I probably purchased the Seiki for pretty much the same reasons you did. Certainly not to watch up-scaled BD discs. However, until my new Kona stuff arrives, I thought it would be nice to see if the panel worked in 4K and what up-scaled 2K content actually looks like (not all that bad). Now, I don't know what "plain old gtx Kepler card" you have, and I don't know if you have a Red Rocket or not. However, in the event you do not have a Rocket, do me a favor: download RCX Pro 18 Alpha (if you haven't already) and let me know if your "plain old gtx Kepler card" will output to a separate monitor from RCX Pro 18? If it does ... FANTASTIC! Please share the details with us. My GTX 285 won't, but my antique Kona 3 does ... and that is very cool for someone like me who doesn't have a Rocket to monitor out of RCX Pro (which I use a lot). You may be right about Fusion (however when I click on the 3rd. dot I get "AJA preview") .

_____________________________
Scarlet X # 1859 “Bettie Page”
“… preparing to ‘whip’ the competition …”

Zeiss Lenses:

CY 21/2.8
ZF 28/2.0
CY 35-70/3.4
CY 50/1.4
ZF100/2.0

Nikon Lenses:
G 14-24/2.8
G 24-70/2.8
D 80-200/2.8

Tokina Lenses:

11-16/2.8

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Is the Hi5-4K like the Hi5-3G, Can you switch the hdmi output between 422YCbCr,444YCbCr,444RGB ? and between 24/30/36 bit color? (using the miniconfig software)

Does the Seiki loose sync in any of the modes?

The BM SDI to HDMI 4k converter also does not work with the Seiki or the Sony.

Looking like the Hi5 is the only thing that works, but its not shipping yet.

Maybe KiProQuad, it can output 4k hdmi from sdi inputs.

Yes, it works great via SDI and using the Hi5 4K.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, not having a 4K monitor when we're all shooting 4K+ cameras is a sin indeed! Unfortunately, feeding the display is still a challenge for any purpose other than just playback. I was getting stuttering and judder on playback to the monitor as well. Also seeing that with blu-ray output. Seems to me this is internal to the SEIKI.

On a faster system, like the couple Xeon E5 systems I was testing with, I can play back 3840x2160 ProRes just fine. It looked pretty darn good and performed well enough. Playing back R3D at that resolution is a different matter -- definitely needs a Rocket or the ability to pre-cache in RAM before you hit play. 5KFF footage from EPIC can't quite do real-time all the time on the Rocket, depending on compression level and detail in the footage. Even with 128GB RAM in the Z820, it's easy to overrun the buffer on some of these EPIC clips.

Contacting SEIKI for support -- trying to iron out the sync drop outs and judder... That seems to be near impossible to actually get in touch with anyone. My drop outs seem to only be present on the HDMI 3 input... The one that's actually convenient to use when the TV is mounted. ;{

On initial testing and impression, I was ready to order 2 more of these. Now I'm going to wait a bit and see what happens. The 55" Vizio XVT UHD comes out in July. And several others starting in June and continuing through the rest of this year.

What I still want the most is a 30 to 32 inch desktop monitor with 4096 pixels across. That seems to be asking the impossible at the moment. Sharp almost hit the nail on the head the the PN-K321 32". But they way they opted to implement their 60Hz support is a turn-off. It was a decision made out of leveraging currently available components. Can't say I fault them for it. I would have made the same decision seeing how all new HDMI 2.0 components are less than a year away.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hi5 4K is shipping in limited quantity it seems. I know a couple people who have one and have got to play with it myself -- with the SEIKI. I can't answer about different modes. It seems like it takes whatever 4 matching SDI feeds it's given and spits out something compliant with HDMI 1.4a. It pretty much means 8bit / 24bits per pixel RGB. Not sure on the chroma sampling translation i.e. 4:2:2, etc.. and how it translates through. SEIKI did not lose sync in any of the small amount of testing done. It worked, via output from the Rocket and from the Kona 3G. That's really all that I have to say about it. Results were no different than simply connecting the SEIKI right to the HDMI output on the GeForce card as another display at 2160p. At least with that method, we weren't limited to Rocket output and could use it as some seriously large desktop real-estate. Excel spreadsheets are good for a laugh in 50 inches of 4K.

The colleague of mine who has the Hi5 should be getting his SEIKI any day/ time now. Maybe he will chime in... He's not much of a RED shooter / user, though. Sadly, he's a Canon C500 guy.... <sigh>

Can't comment on the BMD converter that essentially does the same thing. I've seen/ heard a few reports that it is incompatible with all but a few select projectors or monitors. Seems to be what is echoing in this thread -- I think BMD used the same output specs and timings for that box as they did with the DeckLink 4K's HDMI, having the same issues.

 

[Phil Holland]

Yeah, not having a 4K monitor when we're all shooting 4K+ cameras is a sin indeed! Unfortunately, feeding the display is still a challenge for any purpose other than just playback. I was getting stuttering and judder on playback to the monitor as well. Also seeing that with blu-ray output. Seems to me this is internal to the SEIKI.

On a faster system, like the couple Xeon E5 systems I was testing with, I can play back 3840x2160 ProRes just fine. It looked pretty darn good and performed well enough.

Just out of curiosity, what's your disk space/storage situation look like?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Just out of curiosity, what's your disk space/storage situation look like?

Not too big or too expensive, relatively speaking. Lots of stuff backed up to LTO tape, mostly LTO-4 at this point with about 1/3 of it on LTO-5. All my primary workstations, 2 x Mac Pro towers, HP Z820, SuperMicro based dual Xeon, have internal RAID-0's of at least 8TB. The SuperMicro build has a Sans Digital SAS tower connected to an ATTO R680 with 8 x 2TB in a RAID-6 config. That workstation, the Z820 and my Mac towers all have 10GoC adapters in them and share a 32TB SAN setup (Intel). One of the Mac towers also has an ATTO card connected to a MAXX Digital EVO2K 8TB RAID. I have a desktop LTO-4 (HP 1760), but rarely use it these days. When I do it typically gets connected to an iMac or MBP via an ATTO H680 card in a Sonnet Thunderbolt expander. My LTO-5 is mounted in a rack with most of my other equipment and connected via ATTO in a Thunderbolt expander.

All systems to incremental backups to the SAN at scheduled intervals. I archive to tape as projects finish, or once per month. Occasionally will hit specific stuff if I want that extra layer of redundancy. Both my Mac Pro towers are using OWC SSD's for their OS/apps drives. I have OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs as primary OS/apps drive in both the HP and Supermicro. Other than that, I have a few minor workstations, older stuff, a couple Linux boxes, two Macbook Pros (one retina), a 2011 iMac. Other than that, I've purged most all of my equipment.

I have a Promise R6 12TB RAID-5 connected to Thunderbolt on the iMac. Have one just like it on a nearly identical iMac that stores most personal stuff - pictures, iTunes, other media, etc.. on the "family's" computer. Been real happy with the Pegasus RAIDs, even with one drive failure.

For the 10G LAN/SAN I'm using the Netgear Prosafe XS712T switch that gives 12 ports all at 10Gbps. If you shop around, it can be had for under $1400. The 8 port model is about $850. I would really like to find an 8 or 12 port gigabit switch that has a 10G uplink port. I can't for the life of me understand why such a thing does not seem to exist. I suppose it makes far too much sense to make any product as obvious or logically planned as that. Whatever. ...sorry to go off on a tangent.

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Rocket or K3G through the Hi5 should be 10-bit, the hi5 specs say 10bit, the panel is 10bit, hdmi1.4 allows 36bit @ 4k/24. Did you try a ramp test pattern or gradient?

Side note, Using nvidia card, in the nvidia control panel you can switch from RGB to YCbCr444, and SEIKI and Sony monitor sync to both. I thought maybe it was a RGB vs YUV problem, as the BM HDMI stuff is YUV only, but thats not the case - must be just a timing problem, BM must not be using reduced blanking.

As to the drop outs, can confirm same issue - PS3 Bluray -> Onkyo 818 with 4k upconversion, works, but randomly looses sync.
If you look at the service mode menu, the HDMI switch spread spectrum is non-functional. That would reduce emi on the inputs, could be the cause, or could be just nonfunctional in the menu.

Hi5 4K is shipping in limited quantity it seems. I know a couple people who have one and have got to play with it myself -- with the SEIKI. I can't answer about different modes. It seems like it takes whatever 4 matching SDI feeds it's given and spits out something compliant with HDMI 1.4a. It pretty much means 8bit / 24bits per pixel RGB.

 

[Phil Holland]

Thanks Jeff. This is what I'm banging my head against the wall about at the moment.

I'm going to be likely building a 24TB solution for online space with the intention of expanding to 48TB, maybe a bit more when that happens.

LTO is certainly part of the plan in terms of archival backup.

For the most part I'll be worrying more about building a new "beastly" workstation closer to Red Rocket-X's release. But, I gotta start that research now.