ViewSonic launches the VG2860MHL-4K-- a 4K/UHD (3840x2160) resolution monitor the company says is designed to cater for the needs of enterprise applications such as financial trading and content editing.

The display features 10-bit colour processing to deliver 1.07 billion colors as well as up to 96% sRGB. A MultiPicture function supports picture-in-picture (PIP), picture-by-picture (PBP) and equally split horizontal and vertical images from up to 4 video inputs.

Connectivity comes through DisplayPort 1.2 and Mini DisplayPort 1.2, both supporting 4K resolution at 60Hz. Further ports include HDMI, MHL and x4 USB.

They say the flap of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but the wings of a particular species of butterfly might actually be key to the glare-free displays of the future.

The butterfly in question is the glasswing butterfly, a Central American species famous for having transparent, glass-like (thus the name) wings. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) researchers say these wings have very low reflection (around 2-5%) of visible, infrared and ultraviolet light-- a survival adaptation for the insect, but an inspiration for the creation of low-reflection surfaces.

For the curious, a flat glass plane has a reflection of anything from 8% to 100%.

According to IDC global Q4 2014 PC monitors drop by -4.4% Y-o-Y to reach 34 million units-- a 1.3% improvement over analyst forecasts, as the adoption of lower-price mobile devices eats into the monitor market.

"For consumer-oriented vendors like Samsung and LG the holiday season helped fuel the sector. Shipments were also bolstered by high volumes of renewals for devices still running Windows XP in both the public and private sectors," the analyst says. "Geographically, W. Europe, the 2nd largest regional market in terms of units shipped, experienced year-over-year gain for the fourth consecutive quarter, recording 8.4% growth Q4 2014."

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) publishes the Embedded DisplayPort (ePD) standard version 1.4a-- a replacement to the February 2013 eDP v1.4 bringing an increase in video data transfer rate.

It incorporates the VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC) standard 1.1, as well as a segmented panel architecture allowing for higher panel integration.

Leveraging on DisplayPort 1.3 as base specification, eDP 1.4a operates at the HBR3 link rate of 8.1Gbps per lane (for maximum bandwidth of 32.4Gbps), allowing it to support 8K resolution displays. Another addition is Multi-SST Operation (MSO), a technology supporting Segmented Panel Display, a VESA display architecture for thinner, lighter and lower-cost display panels.