New Microsoft Surface Studio Desktop

[Trevor.Dennis]

PetaPixel, and I am sure many other photography blogs, has shown us the new MS Surface Studio Desktop today, and it looks _very_ cool.  It's resolution is 4500 x 3000 which is going to work well for Photoshop with a 200%UI.  The cylindrical control gizmo can be placed on the screen to control a colour wheel and rotate the canvas.

It also looks amazing with a 12.5mm thick screen that can be placed at your preferred working angle like the Cintiq Ergo stand.   It's expensive at $3000 and upwards, but they make the point that it is a stand alone device that does not need additional tablet and pen like an iMac.  Some people are saying they could not live with Windows, but I couldn't use Photoshop on a system that was not compatible with Lazy Nezumi Pro.

The presenter in the last video on the PetaPixel page describes the screen as the best ever made.  Hmm...  I wonder what our Dag will think about that? 

There is also an update for the Surface pro with better graphics and more battery life.

[John Waller]

Trevor.Dennis wrote:

The cylindrical control gizmo can be placed on the screen to control a colour wheel and rotate the canvas.

The Surface Dial is that and a whole lot more from my brief reading of this morning's coverage. "The accessory we didn't know we needed" and "niche product" are the comments that stood out.

As a US$99 peripheral that's useful for some creatives, I don't expect widespread uptake. Reminds me a little of the Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator a decade ago.

The Surface Studio looks good though. I wonder if the PC market in general will be interested? I don't expect much interest from the Mac community with the new MacBook Pro announcements tomorrow.

[JJMack]

It look great but at $3K to $5K its not for me a 28" 192ppi 3:2 aspect ratio 13.5MP  I do not even have a display adapter that could drive the display if  sold separately. 

[davescm]

Love the look and the ergonomics but would I buy one - no.

What I love about desktop PCs is the expandability - the ability to add drives/memory , change the graphics card as things develop. This is more like a laptop  -  albeit a great one

Now if they sold the screen and a card to drive it...........................

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

davescm wrote:

Now if they sold the screen and a card to drive it...........................

Dave

I'm wondering if it would work like a Cintiq Companion 2, and couple up to a more powerful windows desktop system?  Dollar for dollar you'd be spending half as much again compared to a Cintiq 27QHD, but it does make the Cintiq look a bit clunky.  Then again, one of the reasons I can't get on with my CC2 is that the buttons and controls don't work for me, and the Surface Studio (SS) doesn't have any hardware controls.  I like to control brush size with the Intuos Express wheel, for instance, and the CC2 doesn't have a comparable control.

Incidentally, while looking for the Cintiq Ergo stand today, (to make sure I had the right name for it) I cam across this CC Arm/stand:

I recently changed the stands for my peripheral screens for arm mounts.  If I'd known how cheap they were, I'd have done this ages ago, as it has got me a ton of desktop space back, and my mouse can cover edge to edge without bashing into monitor or keyboard.  They are cheap as chips from B&H

[D Fosse]

Trevor.Dennis wrote:

Hmm... I wonder what our Dag will think about that?

Do I need to answer?

This is just a shameless iMac ripoff with a few added gizmos - doomed to fail because they're not staking out their own territory.

Right down to the DCI-P3 display. What relevance a digital cinema standard has for graphic design and photography (which is the iMac crowd) is beyond me. I suspect Apple just wouldn't touch anything with the name "Adobe" in it (Flash anyone?) - and so they couldn't use an "Adobe RGB" wide gamut display, they had to come up with a different flavor.

[JJMack]

The way I see things 1 2 3

$1000  Low resolution low cost

$2000 High resolution no touch  no work on wide screen

$3000 High Price to work on 3:2 display

Today will apple bring on something new or follow suite.

[JJMack]

Looks like apple users need to wait some more. Apple has to update the Mac Pro and iMac some time soon.

[Trevor.Dennis]

JJMack wrote:

Looks like apple users need to wait some more. Apple has to update the Mac Pro and iMac some time soon.

As things stand, Apple have the form / function balance swayed too far to 'looking good is more important than how well it works'.  The SS cantilever stand, for instance, is way more useful than the iMac stand.  I don't what the first device is your image JJ, but it misses a trick with its top mounted cantilever, which puts the screen too high for comfortable use.

The SS does have a mini-display port socket, and apparently will drive a second screen.

Microsoft Surface Studio | Tech specs

This is the only image I can find of the rear panel.

All in all, I like the idea, but it's not for me.

[JJMack]

Yes it not for me either. As good as thing get IMO there are still problems when things are intergrate too closely.  Touch and Pen support on the same device is a problem for me with or without parm rejection.  When you get older your not as steady as you were when you knew everyting as a teenager. So beinng a teenager has some advantages as does old age. All in one devices are not for me even when you can add on devices.  Like I do when I use my Wacom intuos Pro with my Surface Pro 3. When I use my Wacom intuos pro on my workstation or surface I  also disabled some touch support the Wacon drivers can provides. 

[Conrad_C]

D Fosse wrote:

What relevance a digital cinema standard has for graphic design and photography (which is the iMac crowd) is beyond me. I suspect Apple just wouldn't touch anything with the name "Adobe" in it (Flash anyone?) - and so they couldn't use an "Adobe RGB" wide gamut display, they had to come up with a different flavor.

I've asked myself the same question about whether Apple didn't want to use a standard with Adobe's name on it. But Apple also made Adobe DNG the format for raw capture in the iPhone 7, so who knows. Choosing DCI-P3 makes sense for Apple because they dropped Aperture but kept Final Cut Pro, so it makes sense for Apple hardware to support their remaining pro visual application which happens to be about digital cinema. But Microsoft doesn't have that same motivation, so it's not clear why Microsoft preferred P3 over Adobe RGB.

We can gain some more insight into this by flipping the question around. What relevance does Adobe RGB have? It was designed almost 20 years ago, to find an RGB gamut optimized for as many CMYK print colors as possible within the limits of an 8bpc display system. But after 20 years, the proportion of design done for print vs screen has tilted dramatically toward the screen. It's possible to argue that P3 might be just as relevant as Adobe RGB for many designers today. (My display is calibrated for Adobe RGB, though.)

In the end, what's important is that Adobe RGB and P3 are very similar in many ways, and both are roughly the same amount larger than sRGB, so print designers gain a lot from moving up to either of those gamuts. While Adobe RGB is still an overall better match to CMYK print colors, there are some print color ranges P3 can reproduce on screen that Adobe RGB cannot (and vice versa). P3 is not irrelevant.

[D Fosse]

Conrad C wrote:

We can gain some more insight into this by flipping the question around. What relevance does Adobe RGB have?

Yes, good point of course. And you could go even further: there really is no "standard" with these displays - you need a fully color managed environment to use them properly anyway, whether Adobe RGB or P3.

The argument for Adobe RGB is that it is still the de facto industry standard for commercial print. It's convenient, if nothing else, to have a display that covers the data you're working with. Not required, but convenient for soft proofing with confidence.

The argument for DCI-P3 is harder to find, except in the area the P3 standard was developed for: Digital cinema. The assumption here is that data are not color managed, so the display has to match the source color space. But that backfires when you move to general HD video, which complies not with P3, but Rec 709.

[postrophe]

Hi

(note)

The new MacBook Pro now features P3 colour.

MacBook Pro now features P3 colour, which makes 25 percent more colours available than standard RGB — revealing a much broader range of greens and reds.

it’s the first Mac notebook to support wide colour, for even more vibrant greens and reds. This ensures truer-to-life pictures with realistically vivid details, essential for graphic design, colour grading and editing.

Pierre

[gener7]

And a 25% increase in Wallet Gamut

Still I may get one to replace ye olde Macbook.

Gene

[Conrad_C]

D Fosse wrote:

The argument for DCI-P3 is harder to find, except in the area the P3 standard was developed for: Digital cinema. The assumption here is that data are not color managed, so the display has to match the source color space. But that backfires when you move to general HD video, which complies not with P3, but Rec 709.

It's not a backfire at all…it's forward-looking. Now that it's getting harder to buy a TV that isn't 4K, Apple and Microsoft are probably less interested in the established video standard (2K/1080p 8bpc Rec. 709), and more interested in being able to support the standards for UHD 4K/8K. And because the capabilities are about a lot more than just resolution, the new standards also include wide gamut and HDR, as well as 10 bpc bit depth to support all of that. For example, the UHD Alliance certification standard requires display representation of "more than 90% of P3 colors," a "minimum 10-bit signal," and mastering color in BT.2020 (Rec. 2020). That's where Microsoft and Apple are going.

So now we have those two new wide gamuts, P3 and Rec. 2020 (to replace Rec. 709). The only reason we are getting P3 today instead of Rec. 2020 is that P3 is achievable today. Adobe RGB and P3 displays are probably going to fight it out until the day displays can reproduce the very large Rec. 2020 gamut at consumer/enterprise prices and quantities, and then we'll probably transition to that. But for now, P3 is the closest practical match to the emerging standards.

You're right about needing color management, and Apple knew that too. The Mac already had color management of course, but they were only able to make P3 practical on iOS after implementing color management in iOS 9.3. Once they did that, they had the support to use any gamut on their Mac and iOS displays.

And you still have a point about needing to preview Rec. 709/sRGB content properly. Last time I checked, this was actually a problem on the Mac. There seems to be no way to make a Mac P3 display emulate sRGB like the good third-party displays can do. (If someone knows how, I'd like to know!) It's up to applications to provide a sRGB preview, such as through Photoshop soft-proofing. On this point, the Microsoft Surface Studio seems to have an advantage because it apparently does have a switch that puts the monitor into sRGB gamut mode.

[postrophe]

Hi

Thank's for your feedback Conrad, interesting.

What I read is Adobe is working with Apple about about a few matter.

Pierre

[D Fosse]

Conrad C wrote

Now it's getting interesting! There's a whole horizon of implications here, that are just now beginning to dawn on me <slaps forehead>...

Because if Microsoft is making a machine with DCI-P3 display, they have to start color managing their apps in a way previously unheard of. They have no choice if they want this thing to work.

Even though I appreciate the simplicity and reliability of Windows' hands-off policy in color management, I've always sort of envied the way Mac OS acts as a local sheriff, imposing full color management on all the children apps. As long as the bug police is out too.

But in a Windows environment, this simply won't work unless the applications themselves do it. That's everything from the web browser right down to the desktop. Perhaps this is why they shipped the new "Photos" app without color management - to clean the table for now, busily building something new and better in the garage.

And who knows - perhaps 30 bit display will finally get some love too?

[JJMack]

Trevor.Dennis wrote:

PetaPixel, and I am sure many other photography blogs, has shown us the new MS Surface Studio Desktop today, and it looks _very_ cool. It's resolution is 4500 x 3000 which is going to work well for Photoshop with a 200%UI. The cylindrical control gizmo can be placed on the screen to control a colour wheel and rotate the canvas.

If you look at the picture Photoshop 2x UI is being use and it looks like Photoshop UI is larger than need be. Note pallets are not being displayed except for the swatch palette most likely small as possible it large.  Think I would see if a second display can be added using its mini display port and put Photoshop's UI on a low resolution display. Use Photoshop 1x UI edit images on the high resolution 3:2 aspect 28" display in floating Windows.  I'm not a fan of Photoshop 2x UI its to much unless your display's resolution is well over 200ppi.  It is not good on my Dell 4k 24" 185ppi display and looks big on this 192ppi display. I also do not use 2x UI on my surface pro 3 which Adobe default to. At 216ppi the UI is small but useable with a mouse. Not so easy with the surface pro 3 pen but scaled 2x Photoshop's UI does not fit on the Surface pro 3 display 2x makes the height 720px high less the then Photoshop required 768px.

[Imaginative_warmth1587]

I think everyone is asking the wrong questions and making the wrong statements here. The real questions and comments should be aimed at Adobe: What is Adobe doing to make sure that all of Adobe CC will run as flawlessly as possible on this new Surface Studio? One of the things that is needed is to make sure that pen-hovering artifacts don't occur right before the pen actually touches the screen. Is that a software issue or a hardware issue? Is Adobe working with Microsoft to make sure that those who do want to use the Studio can have a great experience using it?

[jbm007]

If the product becomes viable I am sure they will look at it. Right now its an expensive neat toy.

I used it quite a bit at Adobe MAX.

It is no Wacom tablet substitute.

Its ease of use and touch/tablet capabilities have a long way to go to catch Wacom.

"It's resolution is 4500 x 3000 which is going to work well for Photoshop with a 200%UI."     No it won't. The UI would need to scale @ 150%UI  for PS to display properly.

PS has major scaling issues at 4K and 5K monitors.

I would love for it to succeed; as I love my Surface Pro 4.

JMTW

[JJMack]

jbm007 wrote:

If the product becomes viable I am sure they will look at it. Right now its an expensive neat toy.

It is no Wacom tablet substitute.

Its ease of use and touch/tablet capabilities have a long way to go to catch Wacom.

"It's resolution is 4500 x 3000 which is going to work well for Photoshop with a 200%UI." No it won't. The UI would need to scale @ 150%UI for PS to display properly.

PS has major scaling issues at 4K and 5K monitors.

I have not user one and do not plane on getting one.  For what you ger the price is a bit high nut IMO not overly high.  I love the 3:2 Aspect ratio and with over 4k Pixel and less then 5k the ppi resolution will be so high the Scaling Photoshop UI will be necessary and I agree that Adobe 2x scaling is too much and the are major problem with it.  Windows Dialog are nor scaled and displays are scaled the should not be.  2X scales Photoshop UI on  too large on displays with resolution lower than 200ppi  and waste space that would be better used for image display.

There are things I do not like about the Surface Studio.  I don't like that the display's surface is glossy and as a desktop all in one machine its not  really upgradeable.  The Display is to large to be portable so I would have liked it to be just a display with a lower cost to like a large cintiq you could attach to a workstation.However with that number of pixels that display has a new display adapter would be required for use.  The pen requires power where the Wacom pen does not.  I do not care that the pen only has a thousand lever or pressure where the new wacom has 8 thousand.

If I wanted all in one to drop that much cash for an all in one I think I would op for the new Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16" .  However, It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and its 275ppi resolution would require scaling the display for Photoshop. So I would need to modify Photoshop to use windows scaling for Adobe Photoshop UI scaling has major problems. The Wacom has a better Peb and a 3d Scan Camera.  Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16