I've had my eyes on this Asus for a while now, but the rtings review mentions aggressive matte coating that seems like it might negate the high PPI advantage by randomly blurring the result. What's your impression?

I bought the 6K ProArt on launch, replacing an older 4k 27" Dell monitor. The new monitor is definitely an upgrade, but not as great as I was hoping. Like you said, the matte coating is by far the worst part of this monitor. I would say that it isn't bad enough to return the monitor, but it's definitely noticeable on white windows.

I've definitely enjoyed having the extra screen real estate over the 27" monitor, and the extra resolution has been very helpful for having a bunch of windows open in Unity.

This year at CES there were a number of new monitors unveiled that compete in this space. There's a new Samsung monitor (G80HS) that is a 32" 6k with a higher refresh rate than what you'd find with existing offerings. Unfortunately it has the matte coating instead of glossy, so clarity will suffer.

Also of interest are the new 27" 4k offerings with true RGB stripe subpixel layout. This should fix text rendering problems, especially on Windows. Both Samsung and LG are making these OLED monitors with the true RGB layout. There will almost certainly be glossy coatings offered with these panels, and they'll have higher refresh rates than IPS. The main downside will be brightness for full screen white windows. I think the Samsung panel is a bit better than LG in terms of brightness.

(Author here.)

This is akin to how I've (technically?) stepped back from a 5K 27" to a 4K 32". Likely due to scaling and how far I sit from the screen (about 24" -- average I think) things look the same? At least, I don't notice that the 4K is any worse.

Me being me, I can't help but think I should have a 5K or 6K or whatever, but the price is... high. So I figured I'd try a 4K 32" since the OLED was cheap and the result was this post because the subpixel pattern messed with me. But now for the replacement I'm looking at a simple (but nice color / high end) 4K 32" IPS LCD.

And having been using one for the last day, I'm pretty content with it. It's like everything I wanted from the OLED without the eye strain.

If you're keen on a weekend project, consider converting a 5k iMac to work as an external display. Glossy display, and bang for buck!

I actually had a 5K iMac that I sold when I got the Mac mini. As I was deciding on the display I looked at doing that, but I wasn't super keen on the unfinished look. And IIRC it was going to cost about $250 in parts at the time. I was able to get the ASUS for about $700 and sell the iMac for ~$300. So it was really only about $150 more to not DIY it and have a more finished final package.

It is a really neat looking project, I just determined it wasn't for me.

It has gotten a bit cheaper, a lot easier and somewhat better lately. But I agree that it does not make that much sense because you end up with a product that has many flaws and is a bit annoying to use.

The main factor is being able to sell the iMac for that relatively high price. I can't figure out why they are still so expensive because most of the early 5K models are kind of useless nowadays (on low end version, the compute just cannot cope with modern media/files at such a resolution). But maybe it's people converting them to display driving the market...

The person who bought mine was a family friend who wanted a large display for her kid to do 3D printing stuff. Since he was just going to be running a slicer and some basic modeling stuff, it seemed perfect. I got a bit of cash, he got a computer with a good display, and it was a general win all around.

Ah yes for those use cases it makes perfect sense.

Apple excuse for stopping the big iMacs was that when you bundle up the display with the compute it makes it hard to upgrade and the whole thing become useless. But in reality it just looks like some bad "reasoning" to force people to spend more on a less elegant solution that probably won't get upgraded that much.

At least an old school 5K iMac can have some secondary use case, like you demonstrated or even just to watch movies, do some light document editing and such. And you can convert them to displays if you really want, but that should have been a built-in functionnality in the first place.

I guess this is why they still commend a relatively high-price, a good large display still has many uses even if the compute is weak.

The studio display is kinda useless outside of Mac use, so even though it's great quality its really not a good deal.

I really hope Apple finally release another big iMac because I won't get another Mac Mini or a Mac Studio. I like macOS (less so nowadays) but the whole point of the Mac was the integrated hardware for base/mid-range power. Their small desktop boxes that cannot take any upgrades are really pointless as a desktop because you end up with cable galore and not much space saved. This is so stupidly inelegant, I can feel Jobs rolling in his grave. They added front accessible ports, so that's something I guess, but come on, they stink of greed and profit maximisation at all costs...

To be honest, it’s probably the worst 6k monitor out there, but I’m still enjoying it. I got it basically before any reviews were out and I initially thought I had a defective model. The matte coating is pretty bad, and the screen being darker near the edges is also very noticeable when you look for it. It’s also 60hz which is pretty disappointing.

With all that said, I would still recommend it over anything not retina.