 HotSpot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. Is Samsung's 28D, 590D, 28-inch Ultra HD 4K monitor too good to be true? I mean it's literally one-fifth the price of what you would have been expected to pay six short months ago if you wanted a 4K display for your PC. So let's get to it, shall we? Kicking things off, on the product page we find this little tidbit. Unlike other value 4K monitors, notably the Dell P2815Q, Samsung's value 4K monitor runs at 60Hz and boasts 1ms grey-to-grey response times. And unlike other 4K monitors in general, it does it as a single stream. No multi-stream side-by-side display tomfoolery, huge thanks to Ryan Schroedt at PCPerf for helping me test this by the way, since Samsung doesn't document the feature, and none of this cop-out 30Hz nonsense that may be suitable for watching movies but is a huge step backwards for gaming or even general computer use where we've become accustomed to 60Hz or higher refresh rates over the last couple of decades. Please note however that you will need a DisplayPort 1.2 output to run at 4K 60Hz with a single HDMI cable. Otherwise, you can run 4K 30Hz with a single HDMI input, or another cool option is that you could use an HDMI cable and a DVI to HDMI cable to both of the HDMI inputs with Samsung's picture-by-picture mode and a display spanning technology like AMD iFINITY or Nvidia Surround, except that AMD in their infinite wisdom doesn't allow custom resolutions in their driver and I can't get the DVI adapter output to run at 1920x2160, and Nvidia in their equally infinite wisdom doesn't allow two monitor surround configurations. Thanks guys! This solution works pretty well though and does help AMD users stuck with DisplayPort 1.1 outputs, but if you've got DisplayPort 1.2, then just run that by itself. The next spec of note is that while Samsung specifically calls out that the panel technology is TN, they're also claiming support for 1 billion colours. So what does that mean? 1 billion colour support versus 16.7 million on a typical 8-bit display implies that we're dealing with a 10-bit display. PCmonitors.info believes that Samsung is achieving their results with a true 8-bit panel and 2-bit framerate control dithering, pretty unexpected for a TN monitor, but the even more unexpected thing about this is that it actually appears to work pretty well. Obviously, this footage of the screens is being captured by a camera, encoded and compressed in editing, and then compressed again by YouTube, so if you can't see a clear difference in these grayscale gradients, you'll have to believe me when I say that our 590D looks a lot more similar to our ASUS ProArt 246Q, a true 10-bit IPS display with a 12-bit lookup table than it does to our 215TW, an 8-bit native display. Very impressive so far. But a monitor product page wouldn't be complete without some pure horse plop and Samsung's Mega Infinity, dynamic contrast ratio is the stupidest thing I've seen in quite some time. Fortunately, they list a static contrast ratio as well, and it's 1000 to 1, which is both fairly respectable and much more believable from having used the product. Let's move on. Physically, the monitor is a mixed bag for me. The slim bezel and thin overall design is great, the semi-matte screen is just the right mix of anti-glare and vibrant colors, and the rear-mounted joystick for the on-screen controls works really well, but I sure wish they hadn't gone with a glossy bezel, and the stand's features are very unexceptional with tilt only and no support for swivel, pivot, or even height adjust, which I could have forgiven if they'd included a four-screw VESA mount on the back so it could be replaced, but they didn't. However, I guess I can see why that would have been difficult with how thin the monitor is overall. At the back of the monitor, we find two HDMI inputs and a DisplayPort input, and along with the power brick, Samsung does include cables for each of those in the box. A nice touch. These can be used one at a time or in a couple of unique ways, with Samsung touting their unscaled 1080p picture-in-picture mode and their 1920x2160 picture-by-picture modes as content enjoyment and productivity boosters. Of course, you can also scale the 1080p picture-in-picture and move it around if you want as well. Alright, so specs are fun, but who is this product for exactly? There aren't really any native 4K movies or TV shows now, and there's plenty of time for better display options to become available before that really happens, so while the 590D is a crazy value for a 4K monitor, it's still pretty pricey, and other than high refresh rate gaming-grade LCDs, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more expensive TN monitor, something that may be a turn-off for media buffs and general consumers. But the price really wouldn't be that scary to a pro-sumer user or an entry-level creative professional, and 4K is a very tempting feature. So could it take the place of a value 1440p 27-inch like the ASUS PB278Q, which features a PLS panel, or even an entry-level professional display like the 24-inch PA249Q, which comes with a factory-calibrated 10-bit AHIPS panel, wide gamut support, and some other handy features, albeit at a 24-inch size? Short answer, no. Long answer, the pitfalls of TN are still here in spite of the 1 billion color rating. Side-to-side viewing angles were strong with minimal color shift, so from a normal sitting position the screen looks quite uniform, but vertical viewing angles are not good enough for any kind of serious professional work where color consistency is needed, with color saturation being noticeably higher at the top of the monitor versus the bottom from a fixed viewing position. But creative pros, the news isn't all bad. From a workflow perspective, the extra pixels are, well, I'll put it in the words of my editor Edzel. I want one. And he's got a point. If you view your new 4K display as an additional piece of equipment rather than as a replacement for your existing monitor, I think you'll be much happier with your purchase. Check out this Premiere layout. That is enough screen real estate for an unscaled 1080p program, plenty of room for source, clips, and timeline, as well as all the little tools you need. Then, when you're done with that, you just drag it over to a smaller color-calibrated display for any serious color work, and for a little over $1,000 you've got a super value-optimized dual monitor setup for your work. And if your work doesn't depend on color, then there are lots of ways that other professionals might use the extra pixels. Online poker players can leverage the extra space by spreading everything out manually, or day traders might use a program like DisplayFusion to divide it up into four virtual 1080p workspaces. The sky is the limit. The caveat here, though, is that unless your eyes are very, very good, using it in this manner will be difficult. And while you can scale up UI elements in Windows so that they're larger but just sharper due to the higher pixel density, not all programs scale text correctly and some will look downright awful. But what about games? If your graphics card can take the heat, PC gamers have had 4K content for years. Now, Samsung claims that due to its 1 millisecond greater response times, you will not notice any lag, so this might be a fantastic gaming monitor, but is it true? Unfortunately we don't have the gear to test it empirically, but to give us some idea of what we're working with, we pulled out the fairly well-regarded PB278Q and took some high-speed footage of our two monitors running Far Cry 3 side-by-side. We opted to use Samsung's gaming mode for our tests. This is a welcome feature that's found on many TVs that does slightly reduce image quality but promises less lag from the image source, and our results are pretty impressive. The two displays were nearly impossible to distinguish from each other, playing back even frame by frame at 240 FPS, so that's about 4 milliseconds per frame in gameplay, but when entering and exiting menus, we got some interesting insight. While the input latency on the PB might be slightly less, because the 590D's pixels switch so much faster, the image actually reaches the eyes of the gamer at the same time or even slightly faster. This information, combined with this monitor's wicked pixel density that all but eliminates the need for anti-aliasing, translates into a very satisfying gaming experience with very little noticeable delay and motion blur. The 280D 590D is a solid recommendation for gamers. Just make sure you've got the graphics card muscle and frame buffer to back it up, which leads us to our conclusion. Now the saying goes, save the best for last, but in this case I actually saved the worst for last. I know your finger has been itching on that buy button for the last 8 minutes or so, and if you do buy one, please use our affiliate links in the video description. But only do so if you fully understand the drawbacks of this monitor. It may be the best value 4K display on the market, but it's still pretty expensive and some corners did get cut. First up, the high quality metal construction of the stand is a selling point that seems to be missing on Samsung.com and rightfully so, but can be found on retailer websites including Amazon and NCIX. The stand is indeed made of metal, but I wouldn't drive my car over a bridge made of it. The second big drawback is the uneven appearance of the panel when certain uniform colors are displayed. Thankfully, full white and full black are not affected, but some colors such as dull blue and any shade of gray are affected. To capture this on camera, we did have to shoot from an angle, but the effect, the modeled effect is very noticeable in person even looking at it straight on. It was actually the first thing I noticed about the monitor when I powered it up for the first time. The last thing that would delay the purchase for me personally is that the monitor uses DisplayPort 1.2, not the upcoming 1.2A, which is rumored to contain support for AMD's G-Sync competitor, FreeSync, a feature that I would really like to see on any monitor that I spend over $500 on for gaming. Although it's no fault of the monitors, it's not available yet. So with all that out of the way, no, it's not perfect, but if you're okay with all that stuff, if you want a 4K display on a budget, will you be happy with your purchase? Is this worth the asking price compared to other products available in the market right now? The answer is yes. All the yes, go buy it now. Yes, it is a phenomenally good value. Anyway guys, thank you for watching. My team and I worked really hard on this video and we hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like it, please share it, and if you didn't, please dislike it and let us know what we can do to make it better in the comments below or on the forum linked in the video description. We do take your constructive criticism very seriously. Also linked in the video description is a support link to buy t-shirts, give us a monthly contribution or use our affiliate code when you buy random stuff on Amazon. Again guys, thanks for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.