High definition at a bargain price.

These are the most exciting times for photographers, with 4K displays coming to market in the guise of LED TVs.

I wrote the other day of the $220 32″ Seiki TV I bought to replace two 21.5″ displays for my day job. Easily wall mounted it is working splendidly, delivering 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution, driven by my back-up economy Hackintosh using an ancient nVidia 9800GTX+ graphics card. The all in cost, with display, is some $1,000 and any failed part is replaceable same day – it’s called a short drive to Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley – with the costliest part being the $220 display. Try that with your iMac.

For comparison, the Retina Display in the MacBook Pro is 2560 x 1600. You can expect to see these on most laptops in the new future, as well as on the iPad mini.

Now a new breed of LED display panel is coming to market, generally referred to as ‘4K’, meaning 3840 x 2160 pixels, or four times as many as the current HD TV spec of 1920 x 1080. Sony will sell you 55″/65″ ones for $5-7,000 or an 84″ version for $25,000. But there’s no need to pay those silly prices when you can get the newly released 50″ Seiki – the same as the maker of my modest 32″ 1080P set – for much less:

50″ Seiki 4K TV.

Weighing but 49lbs, it comes with three HDMI inputs and offers far higher resolution than the overpriced displays from the likes of NEC (whose 27″ 2560 x 1440 sells for $930) or the Dell’s like-resolution 30″ U3014 which is $1250. The Seiki offers almost 3 times the display area at 50% higher resolution for $150 more. Optimal photographic use would be to tile the display into two or four tiles to allow, say, Lightroom Loupe/Develop views, as well as Photoshop, all running simultaneously on the one big screen.

Now I very much doubt whether current PC hardware (by which I mean Hackintosh boxes, as Windows is anathema here, though feel free to check back when hell has frozen over) can deliver the 4K resolution of which the Seiki is capable, but there’s good news. Just yesterday, Anandtech ran an article profiling the first Gigabyte motherboards which will run the forthcoming Intel Haswell CPU ($300 for the i7), and we can expect to see these at Amazon within a couple of weeks, probably priced around $100-200, depending on the external connections provided. A related article discusses Haswell and its 4K capabilities, specifically focusing on Home Theater PCs. Their test saw them using the integrated HD4600 GPU which comes with the CPU, but I imagine that an nVidia GTX660 ($200) would provide abundant power to drive the 4K display with no issues. Indeed, they used the same Seiki mentioned above to prove this. Anand specifically state:

They mention some connectivity issues with the Seiki, but I’m confident it’s not something that will remain unsolved for long. Further, they go on to say:

How does all this work for the Mac OS X devotee and Hackintosh builder? I believe we will see a new version of OS X, 10.9, at WWDC in a week’s time or maybe shortly thereafter, which will support Haswell. As for Gigabyte – the preferred motherboard maker for Hackintosh builders, those should be out by the end of this month and you can bet that the excellent software hackers at Tonymacx86.com will be all over the project in no time. These guys live for change! So things look promising, and the appeal of a 4K 50″ display for processing photographs is great indeed. Exciting times.

Will we see a >50″ 4K LED set from Apple in the near future? Who cares? I, for one, do not have the required $7,000 to blow on jewelry, especially when I can build something better for $2,300. Gizmodo has a review of the Seiki, but it’s written by 16 year olds for 14 year olds. You are better off with the comments at Amazon US.

4K on Blu-Ray?

Sure.