Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2014
So after reading all the pros and cons that Amazon reviewers had to say about this monitor, I decided to jump ship and buy it.
1 week using it and here is my review:
EXTERNAL LOOKS
A- Bezel frame: Thin (~1.5cm from all sides) and with matte finish. Compared to my ASUS VG278H whose frame is a bit thicker but full reflective plastic.
B- Monitor stand: Made of matte plastic, now I am guilt-free for placing the center speaker right under the monitor on its stand not fearing to scratch it.
C- Adjustment: As you probably know, you can adjust the height and tilt of the monitor (i don't care about the 90 degree rotation really), you must know this feature of height & tilt adjustment is crucial for TN type monitors to give you the best "sweet spot" to get best picture possible.
D- Function Keys: Many pro reviewers said ASUS should move the keys to the bottom instead of the weird behind the monitor new location. I agree with that. But I don't agree with the pro reviewers that this caused them to press the on/off multiple times while trying to adjust the monitor specs, this never happened with me. Lets face it, pro youtube reviewers review like 100 things a week, they go on fast and clumsy when testing so yes it does happen with them, but when you are the final owner and you adjust the monitor to your liking, this should not happen with you.
USING THIS 4K BEAST
A- TN Panel: Compared to my other ASUS VG278H (using at home) and ASUS VE278Q (using at work), this 4K monitor has excellent viewing angels like them, if not a tiny slightly hard-to-see better than them.
B- Colors: side by side as I'm writing this review, comparing this 4K with the VG278H, the 4K has more vivid & crispier colors, however the VG278H is more brighter and handles the contrast/brightness better. Is this really affecting my view? No. Any effect on gaming or regular photo viewing? No. If they weren't side by side, you won't notice. I tried to adjust both monitors to give the exact same colors but after 15 minutes I gave up, I managed to get them very close to each other, but when you see the same background on both monitors you can tell there is slight difference between the colors, but not something like WOW that's TOO much. Does it bother me? No.
C- Regular computer use (mainly browsing the Internet): I completely agree with what people said that the fonts are TOO SMALL in the 4K to the extent that they are unreadable. I have excellent eye sight (knock on wood) and I sit like 2-3 feet from the monitor, I can't read, period. So if you already own a 1080p (or 1440) monitor, DO NOT THROW IT AWAY, use it as an extended desktop monitor and open all regular windows over there. I use the 4K for viewing videos, photos and watching youtube. I have set Google Chrome to zoom its pages at +%200 so i can also watch youtube at 4K resolution (yes, apparently some youtube videos stream at 4K, never knew that!) But the catch is the Chrome tabs are SO FREAKING SMALL to read their titles! I can live with that, at least the pages content are easy to read like a regular 1080 monitor. All other Windows windows (like control panel, folder browsing, My Computer, other programs like MS Office, etc...) area dragged to be used in the 1080p monitor, then when I watch a movie or run a game, the computer will automatically use the 4K since it is the PRIMARY monitor. Even when viewing photos, it will open the photo viewer in the 4K. Basically speaking everything will open in the 4K by default, you only drag what you want to the 1080p and next time you open it, it will open there immediately.
D- Windows Scaling: I tried using the Windows scaling stuff (I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64x) but NO NO, because 1- You have lost lots of real estate space on the 4K monitor and 2- It will also scale on the 1080p which looked horrible. You can't tell Windows to scale on one monitor and forget the other. So if you have a secondary 1080 or 1440 monitor, don't use scaling and apply the techniques I described in point C above.
E- 60Hz refresh rate: My 1080p ASUS VG278H is a 120Hz monitors, many people told me you will regret going back to 60Hz. I had a theory before that I posted in a reply at one of the reviewers here in Amazon about this monitor, that the extra huge number of pixels is going to compensate me with the drop of the refresh rate. Let me tell you and it's up to you to believe me or not, YES IT DID. One simple test i did was to open a folder window, drag it to be split between the two monitors so now half of it is in the 4K @ 60Hz and the other is in the 1080p @ 120Hz, i started dragging the folder window up and down, it was smoother on the 4K! Whether you believe me or not it's up to you, but I am completely satisfied. Theoretically speaking, the 4K is almost the same physical size as the 1080 monitor (28" & 27" respectively) but packs double the amount of pixels at each axis, so when you move something across the 4K monitor, it is relatively moving slower than the 1080p thus compensates for the difference in Hz between them. Everything in the 4K monitor moves smoother (but slower area coverage for same mouse movement) than the 1080p.
F- Gaming general experience on two monitors: I won't waste time saying how games will look better on the 4K, YES THEY DO. When you game, Windows will use your 4K for the game, the other monitor will stay open on Windows desktop displaying whatever was being displayed, but your mouse pointer won't be able to go there anymore unless you exit the game. So if you are downloading a torrent or performing some activity, you can keep an "eye" on it while playing a game in the 4K monitor.
G- 4K Gaming horse power required and the 60Hz/fps limitation: As I mentioned in point E, I have not seen any difference that makes me regret gaming on 60Hz, it is not affecting the gaming experience at all and I have tested on both screens one at a time, in fact, it looks way better to game in the 4K. As for the horse power, let me tell you, 4K is not a walk-in-the-park for your computer, I have 2x SLI EVGA 780Ti Superclocked ACX cards, the twin were able to maintain a steady 60fps performance with less than AAA games or AAA games that are 2-3 years old like (Call of Duty Black Ops II, Counter Strike GO, Sim City), but on high end graphics demanding AAA games like (Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed Black Flag) the fps averages around 45fps and i have seen it drop down to 15 when the screen gets too crowded for a second. By the way I'm talking here about full/ultra/super all-on in-game graphics settings. So to counter the low fps in these two games, I took an advice from one youtube review of this monitor which is to disable the AA in games because since you have higher PPI for the same surface area then AA is going to be smoother in games even if turned off, so I tried it and it wasn't that bad, this have increased my "worst" fps in those two games to 25 and the highest to 50fps. When any of those two games load first time, they stutter badly for the first minute or two while it is loading all the tiny graphic details like the vegetation and human faces, cars, ships (Assassin's Creed) all around your character, then the stuttering will be gone. So every time I run the game, I take my character for a 10 seconds walk around the city and drive one car till I see the stuttering has finished then enjoy a smooth game (until all hell breaks lose when 4 police cars are trying to ram my car that's when the game stutters a bit).
FINAL THOUGHTS
Do I regret spending $650 on this 4K? No. Games look superbly better, the 60Hz thing is NOT affecting gaming experience at all, period. But you MUST keep in mind you seriously need HUGE horsepower to play AAA games at full specs (minus the Anti Aliasing), otherwise if you have one 780Ti card or a lower 2-Way SLI GPUs, most likely you will need to lower game specification to get a playable game above 40-45fps. I "assume" if you have NVIDIA Titan it should be able to handle the 4K easily due to its 6Gb on board video memory, but that's a @2000+ card. Our personal photos are looking much better on the 4K, so sharp and beautiful and no longer we have to zoom in and out since almost each photo fits in the 4K frame without zooming, so you are viewing at original size on 4K, WOW. Even my wife who doesn't really care about gadgets and computers noticed that photos are much better on this 4K monitor. My only beef with this monitor that there is a tiny small grey-ish mouse-pointer-size (remember mouse pointer is twice as small in the 4K as it's in the 1080/1440) grey pixels that seem to be generating from way behind the monitor's front surface, as if it was a 3D effect, but since it is tucked at the bottom left corner (just above the Windows Start button) and when I game i never see it, I decided against sending the monitor back for replacement. I only see this tiny grey area when i have a plain white page like browsing the Internet.
If you are thinking about this monitor, go get it, you won't regret it.
EDIT 21/8/2014: Added more information, spelling and typo corrections and general formatting.
EDIT 24/8/2014: I found a proper solution for tackling the very small font of the 4K when using the monitor for regular daily use (Above point #C in reviewing the monitor use). Due to the small fonts produced by the 4K, reading Chrome tabs and the URL bar was really too difficult to handle although i set the pages themselves to zoom %200 by default as mentioned above, however many windows were being opened in the 4K monitor since it was set as my primary monitor and I found my self more and more using the 1080 screen and wasting time dragging windows to it. So since I have changed all the resolution setup inside my games to play at 4K, I did a test and found that it really did NOT matter if the Windows 7 Desktop resolution was set to 1080p on the 4K monitor as the game will STILL launch at 4K res (3840 x 2160), so now my 4K screen is locked at 1080 res on Windows Desktop and I'm using it now properly, no more dragging windows so i can read! Another advantage now I can use those two-screens themed wallpapers which looks cool since the resolution match on both monitors! I have also put all icons on the 1080p monitor and kept the 4K desktop surface clean with only the taskbar in it! Hope this update helps.
