Microsoft Surface Studio All-in-one PC with 28-inch 4.5k Ultra HD touch display announced

Microsoft Surface Studio All-in-one PC with 28-inch 4.5k Ultra HD touch display announced

Microsoft unveiled a new all-in-one touchscreen desktop computer at its media event in New York today. The Surface Studio is alarmingly thin and objectively beautiful, but its most unique trait is that the whole screen tilts down on a four-point hinge to become a tabletop touchscreen PC. It doesn’t tilt down totally flat, but it sits at about a 20 degree angle, which seems like a natural amount of tilt for drawing, drafting, and swiping things around on the screen.

Pricing starts at $2,999. Brawnier options go up to $4,199. The Surface Studio is available for preorders starting today and will ship in “limited quantities for the holidays,” according to Microsoft.

Along with the desktop, there’s a Surface Pen of course, the same one found in the Surface Book and the Surface Pro. There’s also something called Surface Dial, which looks like a sleek little jog wheel. It sits on the desktop and works as a scroll wheel or a jog wheel. But placing it on the screen automatically brings up a context-aware menu. In a drawing app, for example, it will bring up a color picker or a wheel of brush options. A haptic engine inside the Surface Dial makes it feel like a real mechanical piece—a member of the design team says it was modeled after a safe dial, and it feels like that for sure. It runs on two AAA batteries (the swivel base comes off magnetically and those AAAs supposedly last a year) and communicates to the computer via BT LE. The Dial will come with the Surface Studio through December. After that, it’s a $99 add-on.

The guts of the computer are inside a box that serves as the base. Inside is a Core i5 or Core i7 quad-core processor, up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, and a 2.1 surround sound system. There’s just one cable coming out the back; the keyboard and the Surface Dial are wireless.

That screen measures 28 inches on the diagonal and boasts 13.5 million pixels—that’s a pixel density of 192ppi. The display is scaled true to life, so when you look at a document in Word that prints out to an 8.5 by 11-inch sheet of paper, it’ll show the actual size of the document on the screen. The display is a 3:2 aspect ratio, so it’s taller and more square than the “widescreen” displays seen on other all-in-one PCs. That’s nice for things like drawing on an on-screen canvas, but also nice for working on tall documents or surfing the web.

The Surface Studio’s touchscreen LCD is 1.3 millimeters thick, and the computer itself 12.5 millimeters thick overall. Microsoft VP of Surface Panos Panay, who demonstrated the Surface Studio at a media event today, claims it’s the thinnest LCD ever made. Panay says Microsoft had to redesign the screen’s internals from the ground up to get it that skinny. And while the display is very, very thin, it does weigh 13 pounds, which is heavy for constant fussing on that hinge.