Asus PB287Q: A budgetfriendly Ultra HD display

       UNTIL RECENTLY, SHARP’S $3500 PN-K321 was about as affordable as 4K desktop monitors got. With the $649 PB287Q, Asus joins Dell and Samsung in making Ultra HD desktop monitors affordable for consumers. Are today’s applications, hardware, and operating systems ready to make the leap? Our tests of the PB287Q revealed mixed results.

The Asus PB287Q
4K display includes
two HDMI 1.4 ports
and one DisplayPort
1.2, but it lacks a
USB hub.

      The 28-inch PB287Q has an impressive list of features, including 3840-by-2160-pixel resolution, LED backlighting, two HDMI 1.4 ports, a single DisplayPort 1.2 connection, a bright 330 cd/m2 luminance rating, and a 1-millisecond gray-to-gray response time. It offers picture-in-picture as well as pictureby-picture support, MHL support, and decent built-in 2W speakers. The highly flexible stand has height adjustment, pivot, swivel, and tilt capabilities.

No USB hub

      On the downside, the PB287Q lacks a USB hub for connecting peripherals. Its on-screen menu system is clunky, as well: Six dots and a power icon near the lower-right corner are meant to guide you when you’re using the physical buttons on the back. I found myself hitting the wrong button more often than not. Frequently the menu timed out as I fiddled around trying to press the right combination of keys.
      You use those menus to access the brightness, color, and speaker-volume settings; as well as eight SplendidPlus display modes, including Reading, Theater, sRGB, Game, and Standard modes. The Standard mode proved to be the best option for our tests.
      Providing four times as many pixels as 1080p high-definition displays, 4K monitors require serious graphics horsepower to run at full resolution and standard refresh rates. The PB287Q can run at 60Hz when connected to a compatible graphics card via DisplayPort 1.2. Refresh rates are limited to 30Hz over HDMI 1.4. When it’s running at 30Hz, you can almost feel the cursor drag across the screen. Playing games at 60Hz over DisplayPort 1.2 seemed smooth enough, however, and I’ll attribute any lag I saw to the graphics card’s struggles to support the high resolution.

Early days for 4K

      Apple’s 4K support extends only to recent MacBook Pros and to the new Mac Pros. OS X 10.9.3 dramatically improves the look of Ultra HD monitors in both native and scaled resolution modes, but many applications are not optimized for Ultra HD—at full resolution, icons and menu text are tiny. You can increase text and icon size easily enough, but many times I found my aging eyes squinting at itty-bitty text.
      On PC graphics cards, 4K support is more common. Windows 8.1 does a good job of displaying its icons, menus, and other screen elements at reasonable sizes regardless of the resolution setting.
      Next to the Sharp and its IGZO screen, the PB287Q has a limited angle of view: Colors shift as you move left, right, up, or down from center. Text on the Asus had a grainy, slightly broken appearance, as if some pixels were missing; it looked better from a bit of a distance, but it was never as clean as the text on the Sharp.

The PB287Q can pivot into portrait mode.

      The 31.5-inch Sharp has a pixel density of 140 ppi; the Asus, 157 ppi. That increased pixel density makes icons and screen elements appear smaller, which is more of a problem at very high resolutions. In test photos, the colors on the Asus were a little muted compared to those on the Sharp, but again, the PB287Q costs one-fifth as much as the PN-K321.
      If you need an Ultra HD display to view large images or to work on 4K video, you’ll find the Asus PB287Q to be a serviceable choice. It works best with DisplayPort 1.2, so make sure that your existing hardware is compatible.

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Toshiba Satellite P50t: The first laptop with a 4K display

TOSHIBA’S SATELLITE P50t boasts two important firsts: It’s the first laptop to feature a 4K display, and it’s the first to be Technicolor Color Certified. You likely have at least a passing familiarity with 4K video, but I would argue that the latter claim to fame—which you might never have heard of—deserves more praise.
       It’s easy to go gaga over the Satellite P50t’s display, which boasts a resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels. The laptop is outfitted with a 15.6-inch screen, which means it offers an eye-popping pixel density of 282 ppi. But don’t buy this in anti- cipation of watching your favorite movies and TV shows in glorious 4K—there is almost no content available in that format right now.
      The Blu-ray format, meanwhile, will need to be overhauled before it can be used to distribute 4K movies. No one expects that to happen before the end of 2014. And the P50t is equipped with a DVD burner, not a Blu-ray player, so you can forget about the computer up-scaling Blu-ray playback from 1080p to 4K. Even if it could, the P50t’s battery will give up. In our grueling battery-rundown test, Toshiba’s machine crapped out in just 1 hour and 52 minutes.

 Color calibration

So let’s turn our attention to the Satellite P50t’s other first: The first laptop to be Technicolor Color Certified. You’ve probably seen the Technicolor brand in the credits of many films. The company has provided technical services to the motion-picture industry for decades. Technicolor developed the Technicolor Color Certified specification as a means to guarantee the color you see on a consumer computer or mobile display is accurate, without needing to whip out a calorimeter or other pricey hardware. The spec focuses on three use cases: Entertainment, e-commerce, and consumer content creation.

Chroma Tune lets you choose from five color spaces.

      In the entertainment space, Technicolor Color Certified guarantees that the colors you see on your display when you’re watching a movie are exactly what the director and the cinematographer intended. When it comes to e-commerce, the spec ensures that the color of the items you buy from online retailers will match what you saw online when you placed your order. And when you’re producing your own content, you can be certain that the photos and videos you shoot will look the same on your computer as they do in your camera.
      Technicolor partnered with software developer Portrait Displays to achieve this goal. Portrait’s software talks to the computer’s graphics and display hardware to automatically control color settings and adjust color gamut.
      You’re not limited to using the Technicolor color space. Using Portrait Displays’ Chroma Tune app, you can switch between Technicolor and a “cool” color space for working with productivity apps, for instance.
      Put these two technologies together and you get an absolutely gorgeous display. The 4K demo footage Toshiba preloaded on the machine looks amazing, as do games—when you turn the resolution down to 1920x1080 to get a playable frame rate, that is. At that res, the P50t delivered BioShock Infinite at 37.4 frames per second. There’s just one major shortcoming: Glare. There are times when the Satellite P50t’s screen looks like a 15.6-inch mirror. The problem is particularly acute with nighttime scenes.

Games look greaton the Satellite P50t’s display

Specs and performance

Most of the rest of the P50t’s specs are impressive: The machine is powered by Intel’s Core i7-4700HQ processor, augmented by 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory. And it has a discrete graphics processor in the form of an AMD Radeon R9 M265X, which taps 2GB of its own GDDR5 memory. Toshiba includes gigabit Ethernet and an Intel Dual-band Intel Wireless-AC 7260 adapter, so you can take full advantage of your 802.11ac router’s excellent streaming capabilities.
All four of the Satellite P50t’s USB ports are USB 3.0, and there’s an SD memory card reader in front. Although its key travel is very short, the backlit island-style keyboard felt great under my fingers .
      In terms of overall performance, The Satellite P50t trailed HP’s workoriented ZBook 15 Mobile Workstation and Dell’s entertainmentfocused XPS 15. But the Toshiba clobbered Dell’s Inspiron 7537. While all four machines are outfitted with Core i7 processors, the Dell’s Core i7-4500U is only a dual core and that PC is equipped with a 5400 rpm mechanical hard drive. The Toshiba is equipped with a 1TB hybrid hard drive (a 1TB 5400 rpm hard drive augmented by 8GB of solid-state memory). The HP has a mechanical drive, too, but it spins its platter sat 7200 rpm. The XPS 15, meanwhile, comes with a 512GB SSD, and SSDs have an outsized impact on our benchmarks.

The Toshiba’s WorldBench score would be even higher if it had an SSD instead of
a hybrid hard drive.

Is it just too early for 4K?

The Toshiba Satellite P50t delivers the highest resolution of any laptop you can buy today. But you won’t want to play games at its native resolution, and there’s almost no entertainment content to watch on its beautiful screen. The day will come when 4K movies are as common as 1080p video is today. Until then, dropping $1800 for a Toshiba Satellite P50t buys bragging rights and a color-accurate display more than anything else.

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