Surface Studio is really a surprising piece of development from Microsoft. There are lots of stuff to like about it. Its screen, for example, a custom-built 28 inches 4500×3000 unit that's less than a half inch thick, looks remarkably gorgeous.
Surface Studio is large, bright and has glorious colors. It supports the DCI-P3 color space with 30 bits per pixel that gives it much more punch and depth, especially for red colors.
The screen is beautiful but heavy. It weighs about 6.1kg/13.5lbs. So, if you pick it up on its own you will surely notice that.
Surface Studio has one awesome trick. If you fold the screen from its common upright position down to a 20-degree angle for "studio mode", it becomes a computerized drafting table that you can write and draw on without any effort.
Yes, the screen is heavy but it's almost perfectly balanced by the springs within the hinge, and you can move it between the two positions with a single finger. That is why Microsoft calls it the "Zero Gravity" hinge.
Like we used to with Microsoft, there are human interaction innovations with the Surface Dial as well - a Bluetooth spinner and clicker with haptic feedback.
If you spin the wheel, you can deal with either system functionality (like changing the volume) or application features (like the amount of red, green, or blue that the current paintbrush is using in a painting app).
Also, there's an application that allows third party software to provide Dial-specific features. The unusual ability is that it can be used off the screen or on the screen (when in studio mode). If used on the screen, the Surface Studio knows exactly where the dial is, and can draw radial menus or other controls around the device.
This reminds of the Surface Studio's namesake, the original Surface tables which ran Windows Vista. Surface tables could detect and identify certain objects when placed on their surface, and could accordingly draw interfaces or other information around the objects.
Those objects were then tracked as they were moved throughout the screen, providing a sort of mixing between a physical object and the digital world.
Where this comes into its own is when being used with pen input; some property of the pen can be twiddled with offhand while drawing with dominant hand in order to allow, for example, changing the color of a line as you draw it.
This kind of two-handed pen input is really rare, and it's the proof that Microsoft always thinks about how people use and interact with computers, and trying to push new styles of interactivity.
More information about Surface Studio is coming up in next articles.
