Microsoft Surface Studio review: By Kashan Asif

 

Microsoft Surface Studio review:

By Kashan Asif

The Microsoft Studio is a huge departure from the spreadsheets and [word] processors image that Microsoft has had and even embraced in the past. As a company whose bread and butter has pretty much always been businesses.

 One of the immediately attention- grabbing features of the Surface Studio is it’s aptly named Studio mode where the display moves with incredible ease on the Zero-Gravity hinge from a vertical position down to just 20 degrees. An angle that was specifically chosen because it perfectly matches a standard drafting table. In this position it is not only stable but it is optimized for natural interactions with the surface pen and the surface dial.

Let’s take a moment to talk about its impressive 28 inch 3:2 aspect ratio with the resolution of 4500 by 3000 resolution “Pixel Sense “display. This aspect ratio will naturally give you a lot more actual surface area than a similar widescreen monitor in the more cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio that has become standard on modern devices, but that’s not it’s only interesting feature. It has 13.5 million pixels at a density of 192 PPI, which may not seem earth – shattering at first but consider this, Windows since the 1980s has been written for 96 DPI, meaning that at 192 you can run windows 10 at exactly 200% scaling and avoid the text dithering and the visual artifacts that show up at other scaling percentages, or with other DPI counts in windows.

Along with the surface studio at 200% scaling you can get the great image clarity of the higher resolution, but the usability of larger icons and for those of you still printing documents, 12-point font on the display is identical to 12-point font on a printed page. If you hold a piece of paper to the screen, 1 inch on the paper is 1 inch on the screen, just like the old days. Each and every display is color calibrated at the factory to guarantee color accuracy and precision which are not the same thing, by the way.

It’s the thinnest LCD monitor ever built at this size.  With color profiles of SRGB DCI P3 and vivid, and they even threw in 10-point multi-touch for those who after seeing it for the first time, want to get the hands-on experience. Moving on to the base of the Surface Studio display we have the entire computer, They fit everything in here that runs the screen, and I do mean to say I that way  as it almost feels like there’s been a role reversal here, Where the computer feels like an accessory to the display , instead of the other way around.

At $42, 00 this is unsurprisingly the highest end model but don’t imagine that the base version is particularly affordable either as it costs $3,000. It also is not user upgradable and you can’t even buy the screen itself, you can’t even use the screen once the hardware becomes outdated by just plugging in another computer. There are no video inputs just a singular video output. In conclusion, the surface studio is one of the most interesting product releases in my opinion of 2016 hands down. This is a new direction for Microsoft and one I’m sure I’m excited to see them continue to explore.