why are 4k monitors so much more expensive than 4k TVs?

I don't quite get why a 42" 4K TV can be often less than half the price of an average 28" 4K monitor?? Starting to really get my back up a bit.

Sure the monitor is "better"... slightly...But some of these TV's have pretty decent specs of LED, 60Hz and decent input lag times.

Just wondering if we are getting ripped off a bit and should I get a 4K TV. After all, all I am really looking for is 4K @ 60Hz on a decent screen.

bigger tvs are
easier to produce
sold in mass bringing costs down
dont need fast responses as monitors
60hz

personally i wouldn't buy 4K again. 4K was my 800 pound mistake

i have the ASUS PG27AQ PG278Q & Acer X34A

4K just seems the obvious option for me.
Im put off going 1440p because everything I watch on it at 1080p will be scaled weird. For example I watch a lot of youtube in the evenings and most of it is 16:9 - 1080p. This would scale fine at 4k (4:1)

A 1440p or 1440p UW isn't the right tool for the job.

1440p makes perfect sense for gaming with modern titles but little sense for anything else.

smogsy said:

bigger tvs are
easier to produce
sold in mass bringing costs down
dont need fast responses as monitors
60hz

personally i wouldn't buy 4K again. 4K was my 800 pound mistake

i have the ASUS PG27AQ PG278Q & Acer X34A

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Sadly though a lot of those dont hold muster now.

1. More in a TV with tuners, oparting system etc
2. Granted but surely dead easy to remove the extras and sell as a PC Monitor?
3. There are a lot of 4k screens with response times faster than high end expensive 4k monitors costing double the price
4. All 4k monitors are 60Hz

Basically we are being conned at the moment. You can go our and buy a 4k HDR superior TV with decent response times for less money than a 32" 4k monitor which doesnt even have HDR and the same colour gamut.

smogsy said:

dont need fast responses as monitors

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Well this part isn't exactly true.

Monitors are largely 'faster' because they use little-to-no-post processing. That, and of course a large majority of them are TN monitors, which are cheaper displays to make, but also inferior in pretty much every respect to other types outside of G2G response times.

Basically, this entire argument should be a reason for monitors costing *less* than TV's.

But you were right about all the other reasons for the most part. Big production/sales is really the #1 factor by a mile.

smogsy said:

personally i wouldn't buy 4K again. 4K was my 800 pound mistake

Click to expand...

Oh you'll buy a 4k monitor again, or at least some variant. It'll become the standard soon enough.

Greebo said:

Basically we are being conned at the moment.

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You're not being 'conned'.

It's simply the reality of manufacturing scale.

beany_bot said:

4K just seems the obvious option for me.
Im put off going 1440p because everything I watch on it at 1080p will be scaled weird. For example I watch a lot of youtube in the evenings and most of it is 16:9 - 1080p. This would scale fine at 4k (4:1)

A 1440p or 1440p UW isn't the right tool for the job.

1440p makes perfect sense for gaming with modern titles but little sense for anything else.

Click to expand...

Well 1080p doesn't exactly scale 'ideally' to 4k, thanks to Nvidia, AMD, Intel and display makers not including nearest neighbor scaling, sadly. I really hope this changes soon.

But you're right, otherwise. 1440p is a pretty useless resolution for anything except gaming. 4k is going to become the new media standard, *along* with gaming, making it the much preferable upgrade option for 1080p users this day and age.

Seanspeed said:

You're not being 'conned'.

It's simply the reality of manufacturing scale.

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Well in the old days, monitors were higher res and did come with high refresh rates and cost more than the same size tv which was acceptable.

No they are worst on every front and cost up to twice as much.

What has changed?

By your basis, monitors should have been priced so high in 1080p days that nobody could afford them?

Greebo said:

Well in the old days, monitors were higher res and did come with high refresh rates and cost more than the same size tv which was acceptable.

No they are worst on every front and cost up to twice as much.

What has changed?

By your basis, monitors should have been priced so high in 1080p days that nobody could afford them?

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Manufacturing scale has changed.

TV's have long been common, but they are more ubiquitous than they ever have been. The market for them has only grown, and the switch to LCD production has meant they can produce cheaper displays than ever before. Whereas desktop PC's are becoming something of a dying breed in the average household. Higher-end monitors are pretty much the realm of professionals and gaming enthusiasts alone nowadays. This is where the higher costs come from. You can buy a 24" 1080p/60hz TN monitor for cheap as chips if that's all you want.

beany_bot said:

I don't quite get why a 42" 4K TV can be often less than half the price of an average 28" 4K monitor?? Starting to really get my back up a bit.

Sure the monitor is "better"... slightly...But some of these TV's have pretty decent specs of LED, 60Hz and decent input lag times.

Just wondering if we are getting ripped off a bit and should I get a 4K TV. After all, all I am really looking for is 4K @ 60Hz on a decent screen.

Click to expand...

I couldn't figure it out myself. TV's offer higher image quality zero, dead pixels have more electronics and don't suffer back light bleed and glow problems. I come to the conclusion that the PC users make easy pickings today.

Seems you just slap a fancy name and picture of a robot on the side of the monitor box and people lap them up. It's crazy how many times I've seen people say things like it's only got backlight bleed in two corners or half a dozen dead pixels after spending many hundreds on a monitor.

Gray imports like Wasabi Mango and Crossover might be the way forward.

I'm actually in the market for a 4K display, should i be looking at TVs instead?

I won't be gaming on it, it's for work purposes.. so response times arent really an issue...

Do any TVs come with displayport input, is there even a difference between HDMI and displayport?

Jaaay said:

I'm actually in the market for a 4K display, should i be looking at TVs instead?

I won't be gaming on it, it's for work purposes.. so response times arent really an issue...

Do any TVs come with displayport input, is there even a difference between HDMI and displayport?

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For work I would say yes for sure. TV all the way. (If nothing else it's the only way monitor prices will comes down if we stop buying them).

Yes some TV's come with DP. DP carries more data than HDMI (on the whole) so can run more pixels / higher Hz. (Google for specifics)

beany_bot said:

1440p makes perfect sense for gaming with modern titles but little sense for anything else.

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its great period. ultrawide gives you extra horizontal space for productivity too. and for movies its far superior as most are shot in the same aspect.

will never be able to go back to a 16:9 monitor now.

reference normal 1440p: the scaling from 1080p is perfectly fine..

james_2k said:

reference normal 1440p: the scaling from 1080p is perfectly fine..

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really? it looks like arse on my 34um95. Vaseline central.

Used to look so blurry on my 1440p apple screen too. Couldnt stand it. Would rather turn down the game details to get a playable framerate and certainly couldnt use it as a desktop resolution.

im not talking running it in 1080p in games or applications, im just talking about 1080p videos, whatever upscaling ive been using it has always looked fine for me. 1080p blu rays etc even youtube, no problems at all.


running games in 1080p does look bad yes

We all have a sphincter, and 99.999999% of companies will want to ride that for all its worth.

That's the most likely reason.

One thing you must take into consideration is that all 4k screens, whether 24" or 65" are 3840x2160

it is my understanding that it is more difficult, and therefore more expensive the higher the pixel density gets - i.e, easier to fit 8.3m pixels in a 65" space than it is to fit it into 24" or 27" space.

the smaller the screen gets the higher the pixel density as you know - this is why a 24" 4k is strangely more expensive than you would expect, but due to the higer pixel density compared to a 27" the image quality looks better side by side (albeit only slightly, but I have seen this in practice)

comments made about manufacturing are also true - if you picked a popular 55" LG 4K TV, and our 27" monitor, we might manufacture say 10,000 per month of the monitor, and 100,000+ of the TV for global shipment, obviously equating to the costs of business for that product being split over a larger volume.

believe me - I understand the frustrations, on the surface it doesn't seem to make sense - but when you take into consideration all the factors involved the picture becomes much clearer - much like 4K

dan

I'm not sure about this manufacturing argument.

Inside, the majority of the materials are the same I'd guess, silicon, plastic etc.

Plus most homes in the western world have a flat screen monitor in them, maybe not as many monitors as TVs, but enough to make a sizeable market (rather than a niche one) that you'd expect under normal competitive forces to drive costs down.

I don't get the cost disparity I'm afraid

Seanspeed said:

Well 1080p doesn't exactly scale 'ideally' to 4k, thanks to Nvidia, AMD, Intel and display makers not including nearest neighbor scaling, sadly. I really hope this changes soon.

But you're right, otherwise. 1440p is a pretty useless resolution for anything except gaming. 4k is going to become the new media standard, *along* with gaming, making it the much preferable upgrade option for 1080p users this day and age.

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Something a lot of people don't realise.

I don't find scaling 1080p video to fullscreen on a 1440p (16:9) display an issue as its rare you get an encoding that has both actual 1920x1080 resolution and high enough bitrate that pixels are perfectly preserved anyhow - most use lossy compression that are some degree of approximation of the uncompressed data and often what sites call "HD" or "1080p" are like 540 or 800 pixels vertical :s

Porker said:

I'm not sure about this manufacturing argument.

Inside, the majority of the materials are the same I'd guess, silicon, plastic etc.

Plus most homes in the western world have a flat screen monitor in them, maybe not as many monitors as TVs, but enough to make a sizeable market (rather than a niche one) that you'd expect under normal competitive forces to drive costs down.

I don't get the cost disparity I'm afraid

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Because it doesn't work like you're thinking it does.

A 27" IPS monitor may not have a significantly greater material cost than a 32" IPS TV of similar capability, but when that 32" TV is expected to sell 20x as many units, component costs can be reduced greatly through economy of scale.