The Surface Studio: A Revolutionary Display and Drawing Experience

The Surface Studio is Microsoft's latest creation, designed to revolutionize the way artists work with digital tools. The device features a 28-inch PixelSense touchscreen display with an astonishing level of detail and accuracy. With the ability to tap the screen or even rest your arms on it without wobbling, this display opens up new possibilities for digital creativity.

One of the standout features of the Surface Studio is its hinge design. Unlike traditional laptops, which can become unstable at certain angles, the Surface Studio's hinge is cleverly designed to provide a stable and comfortable working experience. The two points of the hinge work together seamlessly, allowing users to position their arms and hands in any desired angle without compromising the stability of the display.

Our review unit featured an Intel Core i7-68 20HQ processor, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 980M graphics card. While it's worth noting that Microsoft could have opted for more powerful components, such as Intel's new Skylake processors or Nvidia's Pascal chips, the existing hardware still delivers impressive performance. We were able to effortlessly edit photos in Lightroom and Photoshop, and videos in Premiere Pro, with smoothness and speed comparable to high-end desktop systems.

However, it's essential to acknowledge that gaming performance on the Surface Studio is not exactly exceptional. The GTX 980M handles games rendered at 2560 x 1440 or lower resolutions at 50% quality quite well, but pushing the display to higher resolutions or more demanding settings results in some performance hiccups. Nevertheless, even with these limitations, the device remains a powerful tool for creative professionals.

A notable aspect of the Surface Studio is its port selection and placement. While there's no Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C, the system still offers DisplayPort, USB 3 ports, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack – albeit in the back of the device. This design choice may be frustrating for some users who prefer more convenient access to these ports.

Microsoft has also introduced a new accessory called the Surface Dial, which allows developers to tap into Windows 10 APIs and take advantage of shortcuts like scrolling through edit history or undoing/re-doing actions. The dial can also serve as a brightness or volume knob for Windows. However, its limited functionality – no programmable buttons – is somewhat disappointing.

In terms of aesthetics, the Surface Studio is arguably the most beautiful computer we've ever used. Its large, high-resolution display makes it an ideal tool for artists, designers, and other creatives who value visual quality above all else. Whether working on a creative project or simply browsing through webpages, this device is sure to impress.

For those who can take advantage of the Surface Studio's capabilities and turn their passion into a career, this technology represents a game-changing innovation. It's an aspirational tool that pushes the boundaries of what computers can do, making it a benchmark for future generations of devices. If Microsoft were to sell the screen and hinge separately from the PC, we imagine many more artists would take advantage of this revolutionary display.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody its norm from tested and today I'm gonna be reviewing Microsoft's surface studio it's one of the most exciting pcs I've seen in a long time and surprisingly it's made by Microsoft well maybe not so surprisingly because over the past couple years Microsoft has been doing a lot of interesting things with their surface line I've been a big fan of what's become of the surface pro tablets what that has evolved to and also last year's surface book and maybe the surprising thing is that the newer service product is a large touchscreen all-in-one and when you think about all-in-one PC you might think that this is a competitor to Apple's iMac for example or other all-in-ones in the PC space and this is not that the closest thing this is a competitor to is maybe Wacom Cintiq a large screen digitizer made for artists to draw directly on and use in their work but the big difference between the surface studio and a Cintiq of course is that there is a computer built-in so today I'm going to be talking about this product in its three individual components the big large 28 inch touchscreen and digitizer the computer that runs Windows and all that software and maybe a hinge that connects them together the first thing I want to talk about is these surface Studios screen this massive display yes it's stupid thin and it's stupid big and it's crazy gorgeous but the thing that impresses me most the thing I like the most is how it takes an advantage of this 28 inches diagonal it's actually like the surface book a 3 by 2 aspect ratio display and what that means is that it's a little more square than a 16 by 9 or a 16 by 10 aspect ratio screen you'd find on a traditional large screen monitor and being a little more square you're gonna get more square inches more surface area it's 23 and a half inches wide and 50 and a half inches tall and combined that you get over 364 square inches of usable touchscreen that's significantly higher than an amount of surface area you'd get on like a 27-inch 5k display inside that space are 4,500 pixels by 3000 pixels of resolution 192 dpi now why is 192 important it's not the highest pixel density if we've seen on a screen but 192 importance for Windows because Windows was written for 96 dpi for the longest time dialog boxes menus and many legacy applications at 192 dpi or PPI you can pixel double meaning you can run Windows 10 at 200% scaling and not get any of the visual artifacts or texturing that you might see with windows at non-integer CLE 125 percent when is our 50% and at this size screen size and at that dpi when you hold up a piece of paper one inch in the real world compares the one inch on screen at 192 PPI running Windows at 200% in scale and you're effectively using the screen at 2250 by 1500 resolution times 2 which is high enough not to have windows feel cramped texts and images do look super sharp even up close and up close is important because this is a computer in a screen that I found myself getting really up close to that's how I ended up you it's not far away it's not several feet away it's really in my face because it has its touch and pen capabilities just like on the surface book and the surface Pro's I love using touch screen in Windows to compliment my use of the keyboard and mouse for scrolling webpages for tapping dialogue boxes and even heading send after writing an email touch adds just that little bit of convenience to the little things that enhances the overall experience but of course this isn't just a touchscreen it's a digitizer made to work with Microsoft's surface pen the same pen that was released last year on the surface book and based on the entry digitizer technology that Microsoft acquired a few years ago and what does that mean it means it's pretty great as a digitizer just based on my own experience I couldn't detect any notable visual latency and the responsiveness was great and the accuracy was precise enough that I could draw very small or very large and take use of that pressure sensitivity but what do I know I'm not an artist so what we decided to do is bring in some artists who do use Wacom Cintiq s-- as their daily work tool and draw for a living one of the artists we brought in was Marty Cooper a friend of ours who's a cartoonist and a storyboard artist and the first thing he said is that he loved the screen size of the surface studio he thought that the responsiveness of the surface pen was not any better than last year's surface book but really good latency compared to his Cintiq but something marty did notice on the surface studio and in the surface book was phenomenon where the pen would register marks before the tip of the pen actually touch the screen and you can actually notice it when you hover the pen above the surface you can see a little cursor and then some programs actually start drawing before the pen touches the screen surface now for him because he moved his arm really quickly in drawing his lines he would get these little small hooks or tails at the beginning and end of his lines which he said wouldn't be acceptable in his professional work environment the other artists we brought in to test the surface studio is Clara Hummel an art director and game developer at a local game studio and she's been using a Cintiq for a decade and draws regularly in Photoshop she also loved the size and the resolution of the screen which means that she not the zoom all the way in and pixel peep when she was trying to do fine detail work in her artwork Clara thought the latency and the responsiveness of the surface pen was great and did have any issues of palm rejection which is important to her because she actually draws left-handed but she thought the subtleties of the pressure sensitivity on the surface pen weren't as good as on her Cintiq light touches didn't register as well and she also wished that she could program the button on the surface pen as a right-click in fact both Marty and Clara wish there were buttons on the screen or on the pen they can program to use in their applications both of the artists we had come in test the service studio mentioned how much they loved having a screen canvas this big and the colors looking that great but both also had small quirks that they would consider to be deal-breakers connected to the screen is a hinge and a pretty unique hinge it's no small feat engineering that this is what allows the 13 pounds screen to live on top of the computer and then also rotate down to about 20 degrees and I found that anywhere in between the 90 degrees vertical and 20 degrees all the way down you would actually still have a lot of stability you'll be able to tap the screen draw on the screen even rest your arms on the screen and not have it wobble like you would a laptop bent at that angle and even though the hinge is the two points of the hinge work together so you can't raise it up and then bend it over the artist that we talked to had no issues with that being a limitation they were still able to work at any of these angles and finally let's talk about the PC portion the computer part of the surface studio the brains of the operation my biggest reservation about the surface studio was that you had to buy it with a non upgradeable PC attached and thankfully the computer here doesn't feel underpowered for a display of this size and resolution in our review units we have a system equipped with Intel skylake processor it's an Intel Core i7 68 20 HQ which is a 45 watt quad core part our system also has 32 gigs of ram and Nvidia's GTX 980 m the base unit has an nvidia gtx 960 5 m now the biggest questions we had about the service studio was why didn't microsoft put in Intel's new KB Lake processors and also Nvidia's new pest Cal chips and my guess is that the design of this PC part this chassis x' constrain the parts that Microsoft could important in it they couldn't just swap out Maxwell chips for Pascal chips and skylake parts for cable art parks without changing the thermal design of the system remember the Pascal chips even the gtx 1070 uses more power than the laptop base 980m now performance wise the surface studio is still a very capable machine I was able to edit photos in Lightroom and Photoshop and videos in Premiere Pro effortlessly on this machine though for video edits I would still want to attach a second display for media management the smoothness of video editing at a time it took to render and export clips was pretty in line with my expectations for a quad core system on par with that of a high-end desktop but not of a dedicated video editing workstation gaming was also respectable on the surface studio the gtx 980m handles games rendered at 20 to 50 by 1500 50% resolution really well like call of duty infinite warfare or battlefield one and on this screen even pixel doubled those games looked fantastic but don't expect to be will play games at the native 4.5 K resolution and while technologies like oculus new asynchronous space warp features let you technically run reality on the surface to do that isn't the point of this system and trying to run via on this only highlights the fact that you're spending north of three thousand dollars on a PC that delivers far from best-in-class PC performance also like the surface laptops the ports here are a little limited there's no Thunderbolt 3 or USB C you do have DisplayPort for an external monitor for USB 3 ports Ethernet and SD card reader and a headphone jack but they're placed in the back of the system and I thought that was an inconvenient placement that's a result of Microsoft choosing the beauty and niceness of this system over practical functionalities kind of an apple move there there's also the surface dial a new accessory that works with all Windows 10 pcs developers can tap into the windows wheel API and let the dial command shortcuts like scrolling through your edit history or undoing and redoing by default it works as a brightness or volume knob for your windows but it helps you use for scrolling through webpages and has nice haptic feedback dial is also a button but that button isn't programmable by the user and I wish they added more buttons either to the top or the sides of this accessory now when paired with a surface studio supported apps will recognize the placement of a dial on the screen and pop up an on-screen menu for shortcuts like changing color palettes but outside a few applications that partnered with Microsoft to directly support the dial on surface studio it's not something that's gonna change how artists use or existing tools today these on-screen shortcuts for the dial are also designed for right-handed users holding the dial in their left hands so left-handed users who hold the dial in the right hands aren't able to see them surface studio is easily the most beautiful computer I've used and it's definitely the closest anyone has come to building a giant interactive digital canvas for consumers but it's definitely not for everyone and I can't even say it's for all artists but for those artists that can take advantage of this technology and make money from their art and art as their livelihood it's a game-changing innovation I think this is an aspirational tool it's a piece technology that's a benchmark for what computers can be and frankly it makes me wish I was an artist and that Microsoft would sell the screen and the hinge separate from the PC so that I could take advantage of something this cooleverybody its norm from tested and today I'm gonna be reviewing Microsoft's surface studio it's one of the most exciting pcs I've seen in a long time and surprisingly it's made by Microsoft well maybe not so surprisingly because over the past couple years Microsoft has been doing a lot of interesting things with their surface line I've been a big fan of what's become of the surface pro tablets what that has evolved to and also last year's surface book and maybe the surprising thing is that the newer service product is a large touchscreen all-in-one and when you think about all-in-one PC you might think that this is a competitor to Apple's iMac for example or other all-in-ones in the PC space and this is not that the closest thing this is a competitor to is maybe Wacom Cintiq a large screen digitizer made for artists to draw directly on and use in their work but the big difference between the surface studio and a Cintiq of course is that there is a computer built-in so today I'm going to be talking about this product in its three individual components the big large 28 inch touchscreen and digitizer the computer that runs Windows and all that software and maybe a hinge that connects them together the first thing I want to talk about is these surface Studios screen this massive display yes it's stupid thin and it's stupid big and it's crazy gorgeous but the thing that impresses me most the thing I like the most is how it takes an advantage of this 28 inches diagonal it's actually like the surface book a 3 by 2 aspect ratio display and what that means is that it's a little more square than a 16 by 9 or a 16 by 10 aspect ratio screen you'd find on a traditional large screen monitor and being a little more square you're gonna get more square inches more surface area it's 23 and a half inches wide and 50 and a half inches tall and combined that you get over 364 square inches of usable touchscreen that's significantly higher than an amount of surface area you'd get on like a 27-inch 5k display inside that space are 4,500 pixels by 3000 pixels of resolution 192 dpi now why is 192 important it's not the highest pixel density if we've seen on a screen but 192 importance for Windows because Windows was written for 96 dpi for the longest time dialog boxes menus and many legacy applications at 192 dpi or PPI you can pixel double meaning you can run Windows 10 at 200% scaling and not get any of the visual artifacts or texturing that you might see with windows at non-integer CLE 125 percent when is our 50% and at this size screen size and at that dpi when you hold up a piece of paper one inch in the real world compares the one inch on screen at 192 PPI running Windows at 200% in scale and you're effectively using the screen at 2250 by 1500 resolution times 2 which is high enough not to have windows feel cramped texts and images do look super sharp even up close and up close is important because this is a computer in a screen that I found myself getting really up close to that's how I ended up you it's not far away it's not several feet away it's really in my face because it has its touch and pen capabilities just like on the surface book and the surface Pro's I love using touch screen in Windows to compliment my use of the keyboard and mouse for scrolling webpages for tapping dialogue boxes and even heading send after writing an email touch adds just that little bit of convenience to the little things that enhances the overall experience but of course this isn't just a touchscreen it's a digitizer made to work with Microsoft's surface pen the same pen that was released last year on the surface book and based on the entry digitizer technology that Microsoft acquired a few years ago and what does that mean it means it's pretty great as a digitizer just based on my own experience I couldn't detect any notable visual latency and the responsiveness was great and the accuracy was precise enough that I could draw very small or very large and take use of that pressure sensitivity but what do I know I'm not an artist so what we decided to do is bring in some artists who do use Wacom Cintiq s-- as their daily work tool and draw for a living one of the artists we brought in was Marty Cooper a friend of ours who's a cartoonist and a storyboard artist and the first thing he said is that he loved the screen size of the surface studio he thought that the responsiveness of the surface pen was not any better than last year's surface book but really good latency compared to his Cintiq but something marty did notice on the surface studio and in the surface book was phenomenon where the pen would register marks before the tip of the pen actually touch the screen and you can actually notice it when you hover the pen above the surface you can see a little cursor and then some programs actually start drawing before the pen touches the screen surface now for him because he moved his arm really quickly in drawing his lines he would get these little small hooks or tails at the beginning and end of his lines which he said wouldn't be acceptable in his professional work environment the other artists we brought in to test the surface studio is Clara Hummel an art director and game developer at a local game studio and she's been using a Cintiq for a decade and draws regularly in Photoshop she also loved the size and the resolution of the screen which means that she not the zoom all the way in and pixel peep when she was trying to do fine detail work in her artwork Clara thought the latency and the responsiveness of the surface pen was great and did have any issues of palm rejection which is important to her because she actually draws left-handed but she thought the subtleties of the pressure sensitivity on the surface pen weren't as good as on her Cintiq light touches didn't register as well and she also wished that she could program the button on the surface pen as a right-click in fact both Marty and Clara wish there were buttons on the screen or on the pen they can program to use in their applications both of the artists we had come in test the service studio mentioned how much they loved having a screen canvas this big and the colors looking that great but both also had small quirks that they would consider to be deal-breakers connected to the screen is a hinge and a pretty unique hinge it's no small feat engineering that this is what allows the 13 pounds screen to live on top of the computer and then also rotate down to about 20 degrees and I found that anywhere in between the 90 degrees vertical and 20 degrees all the way down you would actually still have a lot of stability you'll be able to tap the screen draw on the screen even rest your arms on the screen and not have it wobble like you would a laptop bent at that angle and even though the hinge is the two points of the hinge work together so you can't raise it up and then bend it over the artist that we talked to had no issues with that being a limitation they were still able to work at any of these angles and finally let's talk about the PC portion the computer part of the surface studio the brains of the operation my biggest reservation about the surface studio was that you had to buy it with a non upgradeable PC attached and thankfully the computer here doesn't feel underpowered for a display of this size and resolution in our review units we have a system equipped with Intel skylake processor it's an Intel Core i7 68 20 HQ which is a 45 watt quad core part our system also has 32 gigs of ram and Nvidia's GTX 980 m the base unit has an nvidia gtx 960 5 m now the biggest questions we had about the service studio was why didn't microsoft put in Intel's new KB Lake processors and also Nvidia's new pest Cal chips and my guess is that the design of this PC part this chassis x' constrain the parts that Microsoft could important in it they couldn't just swap out Maxwell chips for Pascal chips and skylake parts for cable art parks without changing the thermal design of the system remember the Pascal chips even the gtx 1070 uses more power than the laptop base 980m now performance wise the surface studio is still a very capable machine I was able to edit photos in Lightroom and Photoshop and videos in Premiere Pro effortlessly on this machine though for video edits I would still want to attach a second display for media management the smoothness of video editing at a time it took to render and export clips was pretty in line with my expectations for a quad core system on par with that of a high-end desktop but not of a dedicated video editing workstation gaming was also respectable on the surface studio the gtx 980m handles games rendered at 20 to 50 by 1500 50% resolution really well like call of duty infinite warfare or battlefield one and on this screen even pixel doubled those games looked fantastic but don't expect to be will play games at the native 4.5 K resolution and while technologies like oculus new asynchronous space warp features let you technically run reality on the surface to do that isn't the point of this system and trying to run via on this only highlights the fact that you're spending north of three thousand dollars on a PC that delivers far from best-in-class PC performance also like the surface laptops the ports here are a little limited there's no Thunderbolt 3 or USB C you do have DisplayPort for an external monitor for USB 3 ports Ethernet and SD card reader and a headphone jack but they're placed in the back of the system and I thought that was an inconvenient placement that's a result of Microsoft choosing the beauty and niceness of this system over practical functionalities kind of an apple move there there's also the surface dial a new accessory that works with all Windows 10 pcs developers can tap into the windows wheel API and let the dial command shortcuts like scrolling through your edit history or undoing and redoing by default it works as a brightness or volume knob for your windows but it helps you use for scrolling through webpages and has nice haptic feedback dial is also a button but that button isn't programmable by the user and I wish they added more buttons either to the top or the sides of this accessory now when paired with a surface studio supported apps will recognize the placement of a dial on the screen and pop up an on-screen menu for shortcuts like changing color palettes but outside a few applications that partnered with Microsoft to directly support the dial on surface studio it's not something that's gonna change how artists use or existing tools today these on-screen shortcuts for the dial are also designed for right-handed users holding the dial in their left hands so left-handed users who hold the dial in the right hands aren't able to see them surface studio is easily the most beautiful computer I've used and it's definitely the closest anyone has come to building a giant interactive digital canvas for consumers but it's definitely not for everyone and I can't even say it's for all artists but for those artists that can take advantage of this technology and make money from their art and art as their livelihood it's a game-changing innovation I think this is an aspirational tool it's a piece technology that's a benchmark for what computers can be and frankly it makes me wish I was an artist and that Microsoft would sell the screen and the hinge separate from the PC so that I could take advantage of something this cool\n"