Hands On With the Microsoft Surface Studio 2

For digital artists who have learned to use an electronic stylus like the Microsoft Surface Pen or the cracking Surface Punch as their creative tools, it doesn't get much improve than the Surface Studio as a replacement for a concrete easel.

But equally an actual PC, the Studio has never been cutting border, thanks to Microsoft's determination to bequeath it with 6th-generation CPUs and Maxwell-based Nvidia GPUs at its launch ii years agone. Perhaps it comes as little surprise, so, that for the 2d generation of this all-in-one desktop, Microsoft decided to make the parts that requite it its street cred as a digital canvas even better while quietly making overdue component upgrades that still don't position information technology as a cut-edge PC.

I spent a few minutes with the Surface Studio 2 this week at Microsoft's launch event, and information technology became rapidly apparent that every bit long as you don't need as much raw processing muscle equally you tin can go, it is a beautiful, flexible canvas whose unique input options brand information technology far more versatile than competitors from Dell and Apple.

In that location's really just 1 noteworthy update in the Surface Studio 2: its display. The 28-inch screen is the same size as earlier (positively ginormous, given that the already-huge Apple iMac Pro and Dell Precision 5720 utilize 27-inch screens), and it contains the same resolution (four,500 by 3,000) and pixel density (192 ppi) as its predecessor. Information technology's non exactly 4K, given its 3:ii aspect ratio, but it's essentially equivalent to 4K.

The differences prevarication in contrast, luminosity, and the range of colors the new screen tin can offering. Microsoft says that thanks to the new liquid crystal technology, the Surface Studio 2's display is 38 percent brighter and has 22 percentage more contrast than its predecessor does. When you combine this improvement with the individual colour scale and support for the P3 color gamut, you become a brilliantly vivid brandish that'due south also unapologetically bright, as if to say that pixels are just as worth a canvas as actual canvas.

Whether or not that's the case is up to private artists, of course, so Microsoft brought a few of them along to its event in New York City's already creative person-filled Greenwich Village to demonstrate how they use the Surface Studio 2. For example, one Great britain-based creative person demonstrated how he used the Surface Dial to quickly create an impromptu kaleidoscope of adding and subtracting pre-created layers to an image.

A quick flick of the dial added color and shading to a nighttime scene depicting an outdoor restaurant. Slowing down the dial's rotation a fleck, I could clearly meet how each layer added complexity to what was otherwise a uncomplicated image that any DSLR-toting tourist could take snapped. It's a nifty way of showing a client the amount of work that went into editing the paradigm, the creative person explained, and far more effective than only clicking through layers with a mouse to add them.

All of this is quite possible with the first-generation Surface Studio, and the Surface Dial and Surface Pen aren't any different. Only I did go the sense that the colors in the Surface Studio 2 demo were more well-defined and the screen was brighter than before. We'll take to await until we get a Surface Studio 2 into PC Labs for formal testing earlier we know for sure.

The other upgrades Microsoft bestowed on the Surface Studio are really picayune more than bandages to make sure that its components are reasonably up to date. Fifty-fifty with the upgrades, withal, the CPU and GPU are withal a generation behind the cutting border. The Surface Studio two uses a seventh-generation Intel Core i7-7820HQ, despite the fact that Intel introduced eigth-gen chips a year ago and 9th-gen chips will likely appear this year.

Likewise, the GPU choices at present consist of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or GTX 1070. These are plenty powerful graphics processors, especially if you're primarily using them to employ filters to images instead of play graphics-intensive games. However, they're a generation behind now that Nvidia is selling its GTX 20-serial chips.

Finally, Microsoft removed the dual-drive configuration option for the Surface Studio 2. Your storage options now consist solely of SSDs: either in 1TB or 2TB capacities.

From a component perspective, then, the Surface Studio ii lags far behind the Precision 5720 and iMac Pro, each of which offer workstation-class Intel Xeon CPUs and GPUs. So the Surface Studio 2's main strengths are its scenic display, which is even amend now, too equally its unique input options. Exercise those make it worthy of an upgrade if you already have a offset-gen model? We're eager to find a definitive answer, and so check dorsum before long for our full review.