of use and ability to
deliver power, allowing
a single cable to
connect a laptop, drive
the display, charge
the laptop itself and
connect peripherals.
As resolutions and
refresh rates increase,
of course, USB will need
to keep up.
As it is, the existing
USB 3.2 standard topsout at 20Gbps. But USB 4
doubles that to 40Gbps,
significantly increasing
your display options.
Just as important,
the USB Implementers
Forum recently
announced a new
Extended Power Range
(EPR) definition known
as USB-PD R3.1. This
promises to increase
the maximum powerdelivery for USB-C
charging from 100W to
fully 240W. The existing
100W limit isn’t nearly
enough for powerful
gaming laptops. But the
increase to 240W will
make it truly viable to
run a high-performance
portable via USB-C.
The only snag is that
delivering that much
power creates somepractical problems. To
prevent shorting and
arcing, especially when
unplugging, new cables
are required.
Part of the solution
is to make the CC and
VBUS pins different
lengths, thereby
allowing the detection
of disconnect events
quickly enough to
enable the powersource to reduce
current before the
cable is completely
disconnected.
A snubber capacitor
installed at both cable
ends is also part of the
new EPR standard and
this will help to ensure
the new turbocharged
USB interface doesn’t
send sparks flying every
time you pull the plug.Hmmm, upgrades: USB is about to get a 240W power up, plus more bandwidthviewing distances, and so on. But when it
comes to desktop monitors, and much as
it pains us to admit it, Apple probably has
it right with its so-called Retina displays.
Those clock in at 200dpi minimum.
That’s significantly higher than the 160dpi
of a 27-inch 4K monitor or indeed the
140dpi of the 32-inch 4K class. When it
comes to things like super-crispy font
rendering and image detail, however,
high DPI really makes a difference. Go tosomething bigger like a 40-inch 4K display
and the result is a chunky 110dpi, the same
as that Alienware OLED gaming panel.
8K also allows you to view 4K content at
full resolution with plenty of screen real
estate left over for toolbars and timelines.
When it comes to PC monitors, you
currently have a choice between a
reasonable but perhaps not quite true
high-DPI experience from smaller 4K
monitors, or a larger display with big,fat pixels. The closest thing to an
exception is the Dell U4021QW, a 40-
inch ultrawide panel with 5,120x2,160
pixels. But even that is only 138dpi.
The answer is 8K. For an idea of just
what’s possible with 8K, try this for
size, literally. A 55-inch 8K panel has
more or less the same pixel density as
a 27-inch 4K monitor. In fact, it is more
or less four 27-inch 4K panels joined
together. As it happens, you can get
a 55-inch 8K TV for about $1,000 and
drive it at 60Hz over HDMI 2.1 provided
you have either an Nvidia GeForce 30
Series GPU or one of AMD’s Radeon
RX 6000 graphics boards. That sounds
appealing, right?
The problem is that every 8K TV
on the market uses the BGR, or Blue-
Green-Red, subpixel structure rather
than RGB (Red-Green-Blue), the latter
being the standard for PC monitors.
That matters because software,
including the Windows operating system,
leans on the RGB subpixel structure to
effectively create a higher addressable
resolution in some scenarios, especially
font rendering. Microsoft’s ClearType
font smoothing tech does just that. And it
doesn’t work correctly by default with the
BGR subpixel structure.
Without getting bogged down in detail,
it is possible to set Windows ClearType to
address BGR subpixels rather than RGB
and enable correct rendering. But some
applications don’t respect ClearType’s
global settings, including Chrome, so you
can end up with a mishmash of correct
and incorrectly rendered fonts.
Even though Dell launched the 8K
UltraSharp UP3218K way back in 2017, it
remains virtually alone in the market as
an 8K monitor rather than TV, still costsThe LG UltraFine 32EP950 is
a 4K OLED PC monitor, but it
costs $4,000 and is only 60Hz.JUN 2022 MAXIMU MPC 53
© LG