The Elusive 4K 16:10 Big Picture Touchscreen Monitor

~contrarian

4K is everywhere these days. Except that's 16:9, not 16:10. Not to mention the whole extra feature of touch tacked on.

It's my white whale. Of course a brand new model is readily available for the right bit of coin which would make the Apple tax feel painless. There's even proper SKUs for it after all e.g. https://www.cdw.com/product/barco-coronis-6mp-touch-screen-monitor/6911923. Let's go back to the beginning however.

If you as a consumer were to Google best 16:10 monitors in the current year, you'd quickly find out there aren't any that exceed 1920 x 1200 or any large ones being sold among the listicles. Or so it would seem. The odd one out is the Dell Ultrasharp 30 which is a standard-bearer of sorts and which for every generation has always been counted among the last of the 16:10 beasts.

Exception notwithstanding there aren't any other large conventional monitors in the mainstream market by which I am disqualifying smaller tablets and portable monitors. Above Dell, you have NEC and finally Made in Japan Eizo, and that's when you start dealing with the world of medical monitors.

Even as their numbers dwindle and they become progressively rarer and rarer to encounter either in the wild or on online catalogs brands like those soldier on. Somehow 16:10 has managed to hold on against the onslaught of 4K 16:9 and still not been killed off so there is hope that one day the panels will trickle down when 5K, 6K, 7K, and even 8K aren't the luxuries they are today. 16:9 ruled over laptops for a long time, but there are some alternatives now.

For 16:10, you have to start by looking at the monitors made within the past decade which are still valid options even when they're hobbled by dual DVI-D which hasn't been common since Nvidia 10*0 series cards. Because touch is the clincher, I have to compromise to source a touchscreen monitor and doubly so for one that is 16:10. That means looking at used ones with 20k hours of backlight burn-in. Any monitor can theoretically be touch enabled, but it really comes down to a chosen few of the medical monitors that get breveted. This is specialized gear for industry use that eventually gets parted out. It goes without saying that touch monitors meant for collaborative work and command and control are going to be better than that for digital signage and POS.

In 2022, it's a bit sad to still be on Full HD 1080P. It'd be like playing games at 30 FPS. Of course you're not meant to be playing games on 60 Hz monitors for professionals except in a pinch. 1920 horizontal is unacceptable, but even 2560 doesn't look very good on a 30 inch diagonal screen which while being akin to a giant tablet loses pitifully against the pixel density of actual tablets let alone smartphones. 1440 vertical is only okay up to 27 inches.

https://www.beetronics.com/ is actually quite no-nonsense if you're okay with being constrained by 1920 x 1080. Elo seems to be a leader if you can afford their products.

Why go to all of this trouble? My preferred way of using the computer is different. I even have to pay for the privilege of using a fancy schmancy drawing tablet arm. I'm just lucky Microsoft actually made a touch first desktop OS a decade ago in Windows 8.