Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

That is almost certainly a typo.

Even so, The difference between the high-end and entry-level models is the former are "Dell UltraSharp XX Ultra HD Monitor" and "Dell XX Ultra HD Monitor".

It doesn't have to be this way.

What way should it be?

Dell: Manufacturer

(UltraSharp): The high-end moniker

XX: Size

Ultra HD: The name for that resolution

Monitor: What it is

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and not a normal person, but the naming scheme seems quite reasonable. Way better than the utterly indecipherable "Dell 324y5943X" crap you get with some other manufacturers. The resolution name, "Ultra HD", is stupid, but that wasn't Dell's decision to make, and the industry has been naming resolutions like that for twenty years.[0] (VGA, SVGA, XGA, SXGA, etc...)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.sv...

UltraSharp UltraHD is awful. You're right, they have to use UltraHD. But "UltraSharp"? That's what I was getting at.

Also, how about just a simplified product line like, I don't know:

Dell UltraHD 24" Dell UltraHD 32"

Along the lines of Cinema Display.

Because not everybody needs a wide-gamut monitor with plenty of room for calibration at what most users would consider low brightness levels? (Where "low brightness levels" means that monitor-white is not significantly brighter than "bright white" paper under ISO-spec lighting at 95 cd/m^2.) $1K-ish is cheap for a graphic arts monitor (compare with LaCie and Eizo), but it's a heck of a lot more than the average consumer needs to spend for their purposes.

UltraSharp is an established Dell moniker though, been around much longer than UltraHD.

Anyway, as for unifying the product line- Dell being Dell, that would mean simply cutting the UltraSharp product line, which I would consider a loss.

Why do the new UltraHD monitors need to have the same name as previous Dell monitors? It's just a name. In fact, UltraSharp vs UltraHD seems like a great way to distinguish between 4K+ and lower res monitors, while still making both seem "good" to consumers.

Ultrasharp is to Dell monitors what "MacBook Pro" is to Apple laptops. Dell clearly intends, with their 24/32 vs cheaper 28, to have pro quality and mainstream quality displays both at UltraHD/4k resolution the same way they have both pro quality 1080p (ultrasharp) and cheap crappy 1080p (not ultrasharp).

It is unfortunate for dell that the 2160p resolution got labeled something so similar to their existing brand.

Sure. But as someone who has owned several Ultrasharp monitors, I don't feel that it would hurt their brand to come up with a different differentiator for 4K monitors. The brand is Dell, not Ultrasharp. I can almost guarantee that anyone who even knows what Ultrasharp means would be the kind of people to research the specs of a monitor before buying it anyway. So maintaining that 'brand' across all their high-end monitors just doesn't seem necessary.

You don't just toss out branding. When was the last time Apple, king of branding, casually discarded a branding?

Macbook

Macbook Pro

Mac Pro

These names have been with us for, what, nearly a decade?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com