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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

I'll take my unicorn in black, too.

I'm not a monitor manufacturer, just an opinionated blogger. But are you telling me that a matte surface would cost more to manufacture than a glossy surface? DPMI support costs a lot? Of my wishlist items, DisplayPort seems the toughest to this layperson, but even that doesn't seem unreasonable.

In my earlier blog entry about the same monitor, I said I'd also be willing to pay a tiny bit more. If I could get the "professional" version with the attributes I listed above for $600, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

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> ...But are you telling me that a matte surface would cost more to manufacture than a glossy surface?

Ex TV Product Planner here - yes matte costs more than glossy. If nothing else there is the volume but I think the production techniques for glossy are intrinsically cheaper too.

Thanks for posting this. It's good to finally have a rationale for why glossy has dominated matte in recent years beyond the one I've heard over and over ("glossy looks better at first glance in a Best Buy"). If it's truly a matter of price, I suppose it's fair that only professional monitors use matte screens.

I for one be willing to pay a modest premium for matte.

It isn't the only reason, contrast ratio is higher too so it is needed to be competitive on specification too. If you can control the lighting so that it doesn't reflect to you it can be better as matte will scatter light in all directions. The intrinsic cost difference would be pretty small without the economies of scale I think. Matte would have to be special order panels and you wouldn't be able to pick them up on the spot market.

"matte will scatter light in all directions."

Unless you are saying one pixel smears into another, doesn't scattering light in all directions end up giving better viewing angles with good brightness uniformity?

I always thought the reason a matte screen hurt contrast was because of scattered light from the room raising the black level.

Mostly I'm talking about ambient light, hence worse blacks and lower contrast ratios. It may also scatter outgoing light reducing sharpness and brightness (some may be scattered back in to the panel) a little but that is pretty minor.

Dell will beat them to it - the new Dell UltraHD, while only 28", is a proper desktop 4K monitor with what will (most likely) be far better color accuracy and usability, for $699.

Seiki just dropped their price to $500 which is attractive, but I think the Dell's build quality and internals will be worth the $200 premium.

The dell 28 inch 4k monitor is also only 30hz though. The 60Hz ones are still more in the 1200-3000 range

The Asus 28" 4K is 60Hz @699, and the Lenovo 28" 4K is 60Hz @799. They won't be available until April, though.

All of these are using TN panels. TN's bad viewing angles in a 28" size must be a sight to behold.

I think you mean DPMS, DPMI is a little different[1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPMI

I'd need to dig a bit to know for sure, but I'd probably they're using off the shelf parts for HDMI that may or may not support DPMS, and either way it'll probably be some hardware changes. If they've already tooled up, yes, it will take some coin to make the transition.

Oops! You're right, I had that initialism wrong. I've corrected it to DPMS.

Also, I will concede that it wouldn't be cheap to add the features I want, but I'd nevertheless pay a small premium to see them happen.

It doesn't only cost money, it will also cost time. In this case the time is the important part, not the extra two dollars you are willing to spend. This could bump up the release date 6 months or more and by then they have lost whatever market there was.

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