Re: Nah, I'll take the bezels
"You sound very angry" is a nice piece of projection; I'm merely suggesting that one of these things, costing as much as a very decent high-end gaming PC, doesn't have much of a bleeding edge over a pair of cheapo monitors that were first manufactured in 2020, and that the article is somewhat gushing over them, in the style of an advertorial, on a site that one might reasonably expect to have readers with a bit more technical nous than that.
I'll whistle through your points; please know that this isn't supposed to be an angry rant, or rebuttal in any way. You honestly would know if I'm angry, because my writing would be peppered with far more naughty words.
Of course this thing has an edge on a pair of cheap monitors bought three years ago; my point really is that it doesn't have much of an edge, and certainly not one that earns the eye-watering price.
Yes, I am apparently a desktop user; I also use a work laptop. It's plugged into a little Belkin hub that in turn is plugged into those two 4K monitors. The cable that does this (and also powers the laptop) has a Thunderbolt one. I get that this monitor has some of the functionality of a docking station, meaning in most cases, you wouldn't need to have that, and you'd free up some desk space and remove some of the tangle of power cables, but it's really not that much of an inconvenience to have to plug my work laptop into the thunderbolt cable that is plugged into that, rather than directly into a monitor, and, again, incorporating a whizzy hub into a monitor does not, in my eyes, justify the exorbitant price tag.
I do agree with you here, too, about the point that 120Hz does not justify the price, and that it is a luxury good; there's not much more to be said here, we seem to be arguing the same point.
My point about 20Hz was a dramatic exaggeration; of course there is a visual difference between 30Hz and 60Hz, however if you take someone who has always used a low refresh rate, they will only notice that scrolling is "jerky" once introduced to a higher refresh rate. As you say, higher refresh rates are nice, but not necessary; they really are only noticeable to any real degree in gaming, with fast-moving graphics, for example, when turning rapidly in a FPS game. I would be genuinely surprised if there are any monitors out there on the market today that didn't offer 60Hz refresh rates though. 60Hz is pretty close to the limit of human vision in most cases (peripheral vision has higher sensitivity, up to maybe 200Hz). Again, if my monitors offered 120Hz, at the price I paid for them, I'd be very happy, but I'd not actually be prepared to pay a significant extra premium for it; probably £50 tops? I suspect that in the coming years, the standard will be pushed up, especially since the economics of manufacture strongly suggest that the underlying panels used in monitors are capable, and it is the control electronics that limit the refresh rate. The limiting factor for most people is more likely to be the frame rate their graphics card can push out, especially at 4K, unless you are willing to drop a couple of grand (or more, with the current "AI" boom pushing up memory prices) on a top-end card.
I think you hit the nail on the head with what the "killer feature" is; it's a top-end 6K monitor. However, at this price, it doesn't actually have all the bells and whistles. All the bells and whistles would include DisplayPort 2.1 (not 1.4), a higher PPI dot-pitch, 240Hz refresh (or at least 144Hz, as found in a lot of gaming monitors), and, to pick nits, 8K resolution.
I'll agree with you about the bezels; even "bezel-less" monitors have a millimetre or two around the edge where they have to meet, and the perfectionist in me is always fiddling with my monitor alignment to make sure they sit right nest to each other. It would be nice to do away with it. However, in day-to-day use, I simply do not see it. Part of this comes down to the field of human vision; for all practical intents and purposes, you find yourself looking at one monitor or the other at one time, exactly what this monitor emulates with its split-screen. The 5° viewing angle of the central vision fo the human eye comes into play. In use, unless you are looking at the edge of the screen, your brain won't even see the bezel.
Apart from my NAS, my home is fully wireless as well. My workplace network isn't.
This is interesting, because I have pretty much the opposite situation. My workplace (when I have to visit the office, which is very rare these days) is 100% wireless. My work laptop is wireless. My home PC is connected to the access point via a patch cable, because it offers marginally lower latency, more bandwidth, and less potential interference from neighbours' wi-fi. The pi-400 that runs the NAS and pi-hole is wired too, because I want the shortest and most reliable route between the thing providing the DHCP leases, and the thing providing the DNS service. Other devices are wireless, although I'm considering plugging the networked printer in because my wife always has issues printing to it wirelessly. To be fair, I can see where the network hub on this monitor might be useful when using this monitor as a laptop dock, if the office in which it is located still has miles of CAT5 in the walls. Again, though, it's very much a "bosses computer," which in my experience, means it will be sat on his desk, unused, while he is in "important" meetings elsewhere. My experience of that sort of manager, and the latest toys, is that, in a fair number of cases, they never even get taken out of their box. I'm left thinking of the two first-gen Raspberry Pis that a former director obtained the moment they went on sale, which stayed in his desk drawer for their entire lifetime.
Now, your last point is an interesting one. If someone offered me one of these over my two, let's face it, midrange monitors, would I choose it? In all honesty? No. The reasons for this are simple; the things this does better than my monitors, I really won't feel the benefit of. 120Hz would be nice for gaming, but that is far outweighed by the fact that this thing is too big to be practical for my purposes. To take the whole screen in at once, I'd have to be sat a few feet further back from my desk, at which point, the fact that it has 6K resolution is entirely moot. As it is, I have to get pretty close to my pair of 4K monitors to see the individual pixels; these are useful when doing close-up work, and it's nice for gaming to have pixels smaller than I can see, for the effect of smoothness, but I have already hit this limit. As my eyes get older, it's going to matter even less. For practical day-to-day use, two 27" monitors side-by-side is the sweet spot. Being a normal human, with normal human eyes, I can look at exactly one of them at a time; as mentioned, the fovea in the human eye has a range of vision of only 5°, and everything outside of that might as well be a child's drawing made in crayon, because your brain is frantically filling in the made-up details to give you the illusion of a wide field of accurate vision. What purpose, then, would having a bigger monitor serve, for me personally? Technically, none whatsoever; the actual purpose of these is, as far as I can ascertain, "showing off". I'm really not interested in that sort of willy-waving (which, incidentally, is also why I happen to think people who drive Porsches are wankers, but if they leave me alone, I'll leave them alone).
There's a curious disparity here, between what people think is "better" and what is actually better for them. In my case, the most practical set-up is the one I already have, at a sensible price-point; what others may deem to be "better" here would actually be, functionally, inferior for my use cases. This is the thing, though; these are my use cases, yours may differ. I reckon, though, that if you did opt for one of these over two smaller, and in my eyes, more practical, screens, you might actually regret it. I just happen to think that the only real use case for a massive 6K screen like this is as a Veblen good, and it is my informed opinion that Veblen goods are for suckers. That's just my opinion, though. Bear in mind that nobody's epitaph ever read, "he had a Porsche and fucking big monitor that he never turned on, while his wife was bonking the milkman," and in two years time, there will be an 8K version of this, or one with a higher refresh rate, and the bloke who bought this one will be seething.
