Seiki SE39UY04 for Development on Linux

Posted: Wednesday, 15 Jan 2014

I’m not a gamer or an artist. I’m a software developer and system administrator. I use linux on the desktop, and below you’ll read how I decided to gamble on the Seiki SE39UY04

I was just about to pull the trigger on two new 1080p monitors when the SE39UY04 dropped in price to $499. That would give me 2x the resolution I would get out of the 2 1080p monitors at a price I couldn’t ignore.

Gamer friends cringed at the 30hz refresh rate. I swore of games years ago because of the terrible things that Unreal Tournament and StarCraft did to my bed time. My cursor blinks about once per second, and i3 doesn’t offer much in the way of fancy desktop window animations. Seeing the desktop animation in the following video made me feel like it’d be entirely comfortable for the type of work that I do:

Garrett does a great video review as well:

He talks a bit about the monitor powering off. There’s a setting in the service menu that disables the four hour power off function. The sparkle that he talks about around 3:15 is definitely an issue with some gradients.

Here are two other reasonable reviews on the web that I considered:

Photographer friends cringed at the color fidelity prospects. I understand. I would rather enjoy silence than listen to poorly reproduced music, but I am not a visual artist and I don’t do any work that demands accurate color reproduction. /u/trackpete’s Editing Large at 4k was a fantastic resource for seeing first hand exactly how the color fidelity played out in real life. He includes side by side photos that will show the difference in color reproduction assuming that you’re viewing the images on something other than the subpar Seiki.

My emacs theme doesn’t look much like a sunset, so I felt like I could live with the situation. I’m not dead yet, so I guess I was right.

Getting the monitor running with linux was my only remaining concern, and fortunately there’s a guy named houkouonchi that made me confident enough to make the purchase. He wrote a detailed review of the device and its bigger sibling on Amazon, and he provided detailed information about configuring the Nvidia driver and X to send a 4k signal to the Seiki.

It’s not a perfect monitor, but it’s the most value for my hardware dollar since building the Q6600 workstation that served me for years and upgrading to an SSD in my subsequent workstation. I’ll happy when 4K displays with wide color gamut and fast refresh rates are both common and affordable, but I’ll enjoy this bargain basement display until then.