Seiki 50" 3840x2160 TV Mini-Review

[notarat]

I received it last Friday and have been using it all weekend and I am quite pleased with it so far. I replaced a Dell U3011 with it and I don't think I'll be hooking the Dell back up anytime soon.

Gaming at 30Hz with VSync on is a little "odd" feeling so I disabled VSync and played about 7 hours of Fallout 3 and 12-13 hours of Skyrim and I liked it a lot, though it really puts my 7970s through the wringer...I think their temps started out at almost 60?C and went upwards of 74?C for the most of my play time...I do notice a little input lag, though it is not enough to really affect my gaming style. However, I did not buy it as a "gaming" monitor so I don't consider it a "con".

It's great to surf the net with and as far as productivity apps are concerned, it's bada$#. I love being able to have several spreadsheets open at the same time while modifying code in my database to link the table to the fields in the various spreadsheets.

I didn't see tearing like I thought I would. I'm actually surprised at just how little tearing I see overall.

VLC can upscale movies quite well and I watched the following movies without any problems

Avengers (Blu Ray Rip)
Prometheus (Blu Ray Rip)
T2 (Blu Ray Disc)
Brave (Blu Ray Disc)
Supernatural Part of Season 7(Blu Ray Rip)

It's kind of odd being able to surf the web in one window while watching a movie in what is larger than fullscreen on my 30" Dell.

I can't speak to reliability but the company does offer a 1 year replacement warranty and I figure that in a year or so the prices of 4k2k TVs will have dropped to the point that if it does break, a replacement will not cost significantly more than my $1300 I paid. That beats the crap out of spending $5000 for one of those Sharp 32" 4k2k monitors currently on the market.


Here's a pic compared to a 30" Dell U3011

My background

 

[notarat]

Thank you to whichever mod moved it back to the proper forum.

Follow up on this mini-review.

I've had it for about a week and noticed some issues with the resolution suddenly resetting itself. Basically, the screen would go black and then resume functioning 2 seconds later as if nothing had happened.

The company sent me an updated firmware and I flashed the TV today. I know I'm probably jinxing myself but since I flashed it, it's been fine.

Using a 30Hz LCD is a little "odd" at first, but after a few days with it there's no way I'd go back to my U3011. If playing games at a lower resolutionis the only trade-off I have to make to gain this much desktop real estate, it's a no brainer.

I do a lot of spreadsheet/database work and it is frikkin AWESOME to have 3 spreadsheets and a database open simultaneously without having to resize anything or minimize/maximize windows

As far as picture quality goes, this panel is far superior to the Samsung 40" I have. I really had to look closely to see any bleeding at all on this panel while the Samsung has what I would call large swaths of bleed.

Crossfire works fine and my games run well, but are limited to 30fps unless I turn off vsync.

I understand that there are people who will not even consider this unit because of the 30Hz limitation. To each his/her own. Everyone has their own preferences and likes.

For me, it's a better investment than my 30" was since I paid less for this than I did my U3011

Just for informational purposes I ran the Bioshock Infinite benchmark and here are the results

Per Scene Stats:
Scene Duration (seconds), Average FPS, Min FPS, Max FPS, Scene Name
32.35, 115.42, 10.01, 423.79, Welcome Center
7.05, 106.51, 21.58, 137.52, Scene Change: Disregard Performance In This Section
22.14, 141.94, 31.05, 224.49, Town Center
8.06, 143.87, 90.00, 247.24, Raffle
9.03, 201.51, 86.59, 268.05, Monument Island
3.02, 214.20, 148.16, 295.85, Benchmark Finished: Disregard Performance In This Section
81.65, 137.89, 10.01, 423.79, Overall

As you may imagine, Running something like Valley at 3840x2160 at Ultra with 8xAA places a large strain on my video cards (they only have 3GB each) so I dropped the specs a little due to the sheer increase in resolution