Hi all.
There's been lots of mentions of the Seiki monitor in various threads but I wanted to have a central thread to get all the good and bad points of this monitor - and Apple's support for it - in one place. Like a lot of folks, I just got one of these from the $499 Black-Friday specials. In general, it's amazing and there's nothing else available for 4k display for less than 3 or 4 times the cost. The Dells that are about to come out are 24" and 28" also, which is too small for using at the real 4k resolution, so I'm' guessing they're targeted at HiDPI / quad-pixel res like the Retina MacBooks.
Anyway, here's the good and bad and tips I've found after a couple of weeks. This is using my setup, which is a late 2012 15" rMBP running 10.9.
Good:
Meh:
Bad:
Tips:
So, please respond with what you're seeing on your Mac and info about what kind of Mac and version of OSX you're running.
Obviously, I'd also really appreciate it if anyone has a fix for the problem I'm seeing with power cycling the monitor and rebooting.
Thanks and good luck to everyone else with one of these or the 50" version!
David
There's been lots of mentions of the Seiki monitor in various threads but I wanted to have a central thread to get all the good and bad points of this monitor - and Apple's support for it - in one place. Like a lot of folks, I just got one of these from the $499 Black-Friday specials. In general, it's amazing and there's nothing else available for 4k display for less than 3 or 4 times the cost. The Dells that are about to come out are 24" and 28" also, which is too small for using at the real 4k resolution, so I'm' guessing they're targeted at HiDPI / quad-pixel res like the Retina MacBooks.
Anyway, here's the good and bad and tips I've found after a couple of weeks. This is using my setup, which is a late 2012 15" rMBP running 10.9.
Good:
- Huge, but easily fits on desk and is smaller, lighter, and much lower power than the dual 27" monitors I used to have setup. Not to mention cheaper and no bezel bar in the middle!
- Bright, sharp picture.
I adjusted picture using Disney WoW disk and then used Spyder4Pro calibrator on Mac and picture looks great.
- Remote.
- Several inputs (3 HDMI, Component, VGA, USB)
- Oh yeah - it's also a TV but I haven't tried hooking up to my cable and most of my channels require a CableCard and Tuning Adapter so it's not high on my priority list.
- Works with both rMBP's HDMI port and MiniDP/TB port using Accell adapter.
- Some people have said they see bad cursor lag and breakup of the image when moving windows around but I haven't seen any of this. It all looks very smooth and video looks great. I know gamers have problems with the 30Hz refresh, but I don't play any games so it doesn't affect me.
Meh:
- Sound isn't very good, but I'm not using it.
Bad:
- Apparently, scaling is very bad for 1080 inputs. I don't care since I'm just using with a Mac and it will do any video scaling. However, I did hook it up to my BluRay player to try the Disney WoW calibration disk and it looked fine to me.
- Problems with idle/sleep/turning on
- The Seiki doesn't support the DPMS power management protocol so it doesn't go into low-power mode when the Mac turns off the display after inactivity. Instead, after some amount of time, it actually turns off.
- The big problem is then trying to turn it back on again.
- When I come back to my Mac after it's turned off, I hear the fan going full but don't know what's causing that on the rMBP.
- I turn on the Seiki and try waking up the Mac/display but have no video.
- If I open the Macbook, there's no video on the internal display either.
- If I try and reset by unplugging the HDMI and plugging it back in, the Mac reboots!
- I'm not up on parsing the reboot report, but I see stuff about panic, Kernal Trap, com.spplr.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily / com.apple.driver.AppleIntelFramebufferCapri and other stuff that all looks video-driver-ish.
- For now, I guess I just have to set preferences to never sleep the display.
- The Seiki doesn't support the DPMS power management protocol so it doesn't go into low-power mode when the Mac turns off the display after inactivity. Instead, after some amount of time, it actually turns off.
Tips:
- Update your firmware. It's a piece of cake - just download file from Seiki and put it on a flash drive. Added more menus for adjusting video, including backlight control!
So, please respond with what you're seeing on your Mac and info about what kind of Mac and version of OSX you're running.
Obviously, I'd also really appreciate it if anyone has a fix for the problem I'm seeing with power cycling the monitor and rebooting.
Thanks and good luck to everyone else with one of these or the 50" version!
David
