The new Asus 4K monitor priced at $4000, too bad little can support it

The recently-announced Asus PQ321 4K monitor raised a few eyebrows at the Computex 2013 showroom last week, being one of the first consumer available panels which support 4K resolution.

Now, the panel gets its priced revealed at a hefty $4000. Yet, the fact that even a Retina display MacBook Pro can barely support its output should be an even bigger concern than the price.

The panel was recently hooked up to a 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina display, which sports a Geforce GT 650M graphics card. Noticeable lag was encountered after the laptop’s signal was upscaled to 4K resolution, particularly with graphic-intensive applications like Adobe Lightroom.

Unfortunately, as the MacBook Pro represents one of the most capable configurations around, it’s going to be a struggle to find any laptop that is able to output resolution at 4K and still be usable. Intel’s upcoming Haswell processor line promises to have integrated 4K support as a main feature upon its release, but that’s still a ways away.

Still, desktop PCs with capable GPUs should be able to take advantage of the marvelous display, until the mobile computers catch up. And that shouldn’t take too long, now that the first Haswell-powered devices are about to hit the shelves.

The 31.5-inch monitor from Asus, set for release at the end of this month, is capable of displaying images at up to 3840 x 2160 pixels, and can output over one billion colors to boot. However, it seems that Asus’ impressive piece of display tech is just a little ahead of its time.

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