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Nat!

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Dell UP2414Q with OS X, fresh experiences

I tried it out on my Macboook Air 13, 1.7 GHz over the mini Display Port (aka Thunderbolt). It worked and it worked well with the resolution of 3840x2160. Of course everything is too small, but I was expecting lags when scrolling through a large PDF document or when browsing with Firefox. But to my surprise that didn't happen. Actually I was really surprised that it worked at all, I didn't think that was possible, since the Air has no dedicated graphics card.

Tried it on my desktop that sports a GTX 660. First I used a HDMI cable. The monitor complained that it didn't receive any DisplayPort signal. It's not like my Samsung which is automatically scanning the input sources, you have to tell it to do this manually.

When I fixed this I had no more problems. I could enable HiDPI modes with Quartz Debug and set the resolution to 1920x1080 HiDPI . That looks fantastic!

The disadvantage of HDMI is that it's only 30Hz. I needn't really care about that, since I am not gaming on the machine anyway, but just for principle I want the 60Hz.

Therefore I then tried it with the DisplayPort cable. Dell packs a mini DP to DP cable, that you can use either way. In this case I needed DP to mini-DP.

It booted up well enough into 3840x2160, but when I changed the resolution to 1920x1080 HiDPI, it didn't work. The reason why I can not say. see Update

So is it worth it ?

I gotta say yes. €1099 well spent.

Mental note: Enable screen sharing on the machine I am testing resolution changes

Update 1

Went out to play football for a few hours and put the system to sleep. When I came back and woke it up, I noticed a vertical stripe on my display. AFAIK technically the monitor is treated as two logical displays and one was darker than the other. Who was at fault ?

I checked with my Windows laptop also via HDMI, but the problem persisted. My Windows laptop can ony do 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 (curiously recommended, does Windows know something I don't ?)

I tried again with my Macbook Air 13 (HiDPI works too BTW), changing from HDMI to DisplayPort, and the stripe was gone. Turned off the monitor and the desktop, turned it back on: the  Dell logo looked OK for a while, but then the change to split brightness happened again.

Finding the remedy was pure luck, I accidentally pressed "Reset Color Settings"in the monitor menu "Menu/Color Settings"  and the stripe vanished.

Let's see if this turns out to become a big annoyance. Looks like a firmware update could fix this, but will there be any ?

This keeps occurring and sometimes reset "Color settings" doesn't do it, but instead I have to reset "Display settings.

Update 2

See also: This nice article about 4K Displays and OS X. He solved the problem with the DisplayPort and HiDPI, which is apparently a problem due to the refresh rate. I will try this out sometime, when the HDMI split screen problem returns.

Most of the display problems can be fixed by installing a driver from NVidia directly. I still haven't managed to get 60Hz going with OS X though. It does work with my hardware in WIN 10. For trying 60Hz it is important to set the DisplayPort protocol in the Monitor to 1.2 Screenshot

Update 3

I wrote "can't go back now" in the earlier article.

Well I took that out, because I am now sitting at my desk in the office at my old 22" Samsung, and quite frankly it's OK too. Sure sharper is nicer and better but all things considered it doesn't make a huge practical difference, especially if you're like me just reading and writing texts all the time.

Update 4

On the other hand, back at home, damn it sure looks a LOT nicer. I mean a lot. :)

Update 5

On the other hand, back at home, damn it sure looks a LOT nicer. I mean a lot. :)