Looking for a new monitor.

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Zero Angel
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Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

I'm on the hunt for a new monitor. My budget is about $300 or so. I've been doing some research and my findings so far are these

TN: Best response time, important for gaming. Mediocre color fidelity (most not all?)
VA: An IPS-like technology, good color fidelity, slow response time
IPS: A technology that increases color fidelity over TN monitors, slower response time than TN.

Best monitor I ever owned was a big, heavy (60lbs), high-end Sony CRT that I ran at 1152x864@110hz, and i'm kind of getting fed up with LCD/TN monitors. I want a monitor that has:

1) Good color fidelity
2) Good 'darks'/black point/contrast ratio
3) Good response time and minimal ghosting
4) Has good performance as a programmer/graphics monitor as well as a gaming monitor.
5) Wont murder my eyes (as some monitors that 'strobe' the backlight to regulate brightness are wont to do, and i'm pretty sure my current main one does that)

So the few that i'm looking at are either

1) A 120Hz monitor with 'Nvidia 3D vision' (like this one)
2) A big (27in), high-resolution TN monitor
3) Any variety of VA (BENQ) or IPS (Samsung, ASUS) monitors that are no smaller than 23in.

I've done some cursory research into some of the IPS technologies and have read the reviews on various products and honestly it makes my head spin.

Anyone own/recently purchase any of those kinds of monitors?
Last edited by Zero Angel on Fri May 30, 2014 7:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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MrTwosheds
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by MrTwosheds »

I bought one recently, an hp2311x, nothing special about it, seems fine though.
Not sure you need worry about thing like response time, I think this is just sales troll. What you do need to look out for is actual physical durability, some of the monitors around at the moment have really poor cases/stands, they wobble... You also might want to get one with all 3 types of input socket, who knows what you will need to connect it to? I would advise good old physical shopping, rather than online purchase as it is very difficult to tell much about what you are actually buying online, An good examination in store should give you some idea which ones are cheap because they are badly built.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Red Spot »

Not sure if you can get the brand where you come from, but I've found German made screens to be excellent and very sharply priced.
Try Schneider or Telefunken (not sure if they make monitors though, but their TV's are great .. and cheap).
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

@ Twosheds, actually the response time does matter for gaming. It affects the amount amount of time it takes for a pixel to change from one color (or brightness) to another color (which results in blur and ghosting which furthermore affects the fidelity and sharpness of the image when it moves on the screen). That said, TN monitors nearly always have a very fast response time, and even the lower-end (modern) TNs have a response time which varies between 2ms and 10ms. Keep in mind that 10ms is 1/10th of a second which does actually make a difference, but if you get at least 5ms, then your monitor has great response times which may matter in reflex-based games.

Anyways, I've looked over quite a few good monitors. Some big ones with high resolutions, some nice ones with thin bezels (and also IPS), and based on my research, I settled on two finalists:

Monitor: BenQ XL2420
Detailed Review: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/benq_xl2420t.htm

This is a 120hz monitor with excellent motion performance (and I dont know if anyone's ever owned a CRT before that could do 120hz, but it is fantastic). Downsides, maybe a bit too much expensive for my tastes (~$320 CAD), the 3D glasses need to be bought separately and cost an extra 120 quid, also it's a TN monitor; no experience with 'Nvidia 3D vision' so dont know if its mindblowing enough to warrant investing in.

And this one:
Monitor: BenQ GW2750HM
Detailed Review: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/benq_gw2750hm.htm

A panel using VA technology. Poor brightness/contrast defaults (extreme brightness) but when tuned properly has really good color accuracy and contrast (although VA offers slightly less color saturation compared to other IPS technologies), overdrive looks like it does a relatively good job of compensating for ghosting. 4ms response time (grey-to-grey) is outstanding for an IPS-like technology and outperforms some TN monitors (though note, the 'true' response time is actually 12ms which can lead to color shifting that must be compensated for by overdrive). Not bad for gaming. 27 inches, holy crap. Relatively cheap (~$200 CAD). Downsides, may be prone to PWM flicker especially since its necessary to turn the backlighting down (way down), also none of the advantages of the above monitor.

I think i'm gonna go with the VA panel. Although the other IPS technologies are about as equally good, the GW2750HM appears to be an outstanding monitor that just happens to have VA as its IPS-like technology.

UPDATE: Just ordered the VA panel.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by MrTwosheds »

The last monitor I had was a Benq, it lasted about 2 years before it just stopped functioning. You may be right about response time, But I suspect the few millisecond differences would not be perceivable by most people and other factors such as network latency and computer performance would make it an irrelevance most of the time anyway. Personally I gave up worrying about "high performance" issues quite a while ago, whats high this year will be shockingly low in a few years time. Best to aim in the middle for both price and performance and just try to avoid substandard manufacturing. Paying big prices for high performance is daft when the technologies change so quickly, What I want from a monitor is for it to remain functional for as long as possible.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Nielk1 »

I use 2 Dell U2412M monitors.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

MrTwosheds wrote:The last monitor I had was a Benq, it lasted about 2 years before it just stopped functioning. You may be right about response time, But I suspect the few millisecond differences would not be perceivable by most people and other factors such as network latency and computer performance would make it an irrelevance most of the time anyway. Personally I gave up worrying about "high performance" issues quite a while ago, whats high this year will be shockingly low in a few years time. Best to aim in the middle for both price and performance and just try to avoid substandard manufacturing. Paying big prices for high performance is daft when the technologies change so quickly, What I want from a monitor is for it to remain functional for as long as possible.
What you said about things being obsoleted so quickly is more true for some things than it is for others. Look at mice and keyboards for example, your optical mouse from 10 years ago is nearly as good as any laser or 'enhanced optical' (bluetrack, darkfield, etc) mouse today and the 'good' PS/2 keyboard you bought 10 years ago can probably run circles around any $20 USB keyboard produced today. It took AGES for the CRT to advance, heck I had a CRT monitor that came with my Commodore 64 that had greater clarity and better color reproduction than most of the TV screens produced in the 90s. Heck, throughout my childhood and teen years I hooked my NES, then SNES, then PS up to it because it was just that good.

Now, I believe that modern computer monitors are different from CRTs because manufacturers will always coming up with technologies to reduce response time, pixel density, improve gamut, etc, but if you really think about it, even LCD monitors advance relatively slowly, or at least not as quickly as things like smartphones, memory, processors and videocards (ESPECIALLY videocards). At worst, the stats of your mid-range LCD from 5 years ago is now the same as your 'commodity grade' LCD that gets pushed out with every low-end PC produced today, but at least it's not in the trash and at least you can still plug it into whatever computer you want (either as main or as a spare). Point is, if you care about quality at all, then you'll probably be replacing your LCD every 5 years or so anyways once the technology has had a couple of evolutions and early-adopter bugs are worked out. You might as well get something in the mid-range so that it has a longer 'useful' life. I mean, all this depends on whether you can afford it, buying PC components and living on ramen for a month and then worrying about falling behind on bills is not worth it.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Nielk1 »

Funny thing is IPS was an older technology that improved more recently beyond the other options in capability.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

Nielk1 wrote:I use 2 Dell U2412M monitors.
Actually heard good things about those monitors even before I started becoming interested in purchasing a new monitor. I'm surprised I never came across it in my search. I blame the fact that theres now a million, billion IPS monitors on the market now.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Nielk1 »

Zero Angel wrote:
Nielk1 wrote:I use 2 Dell U2412M monitors.
Actually heard good things about those monitors even before I started becoming interested in purchasing a new monitor. I'm surprised I never came across it in my search. I blame the fact that theres now a million, billion IPS monitors on the market now.
I love them. Because they are 16:10 I can have one rotated in portrait and it isn't too thin. I put my web browser, IM friends list, etc, on the portrait one, games and video and primary attention stuff (like a website I am posting too rather than just reading) on the landscape. As I have 2 I can prioritize one since even numbers don't spread things across screens like games so well.

I love the color fidelity and speed of it.

By now they might have a later model of this monitor though that could be better.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Red Spot »

If you're going for Dell, try and see if you can order the screens via your employer. Where you pay say €300, for a screen you company may only pay €200,- and thats without having some form of lease with them.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

So I received the GW2750HM in the mail today. The default brightness was at 100 and it was eye-blindingly bright. I lowered it down to 14, changed the on-monitor gamma setting to 4, lowered the 'blue' value to 95 (to get rid of the blue tint on the whites), then ran Windows monitor calibration. Result:

Color Vibrance: Really good. Pictures with vibrant colors look very vibrant, but without colors blowing out at all. One thing I did notice when comparing to my old monitor was that the 'Windows 7' wallpaper (the blue one with the planty looking white streaks) actually looks blue on my new monitor, and its a rich 'full' blue with only the tiniest hint of cobalt. On my old one, it takes on a strangely 'aqua' color on the brighter parts of the image, which I thought was the intended color until now.

Sharpness: Default sharpness setting of '1' is perfect. In fact one of the main handicaps with my old monitor was that I couldnt use a lot of desktop backgrounds without really messing with my ability to read the text on my desktop icons, limiting the amount of choices I had -- I suspect the smaller size (24in) along with a tiny amount of light bleed and mediocre contrast ratio was the culprit, but it's not really the case with the new monitor. I can easily read text even at the lowest sharpness setting on the monitor (which is great, since it doesnt have to overcompensate).

Brightness Shift: Not bad. The brightness shifts as move you your head from left-to-right but it's very subtle, though has the potential to blow out highlights or overdarken dark spots if you move your head too much to the left or right, but keep in mind that this is only at the very top or very bottom of the spectrum (luminance values 1,2,3,252,253,254)

Color Shift: Almost nonexistent. The only color shift i've seen was on a pure red background, the left side of the picture tends to look slightly pinkish if you move your head to the right.

Backlight Bleed: Almost nonexistent. I was watching a movie in super widescreen, and the blackbars at the top and bottom of the screen looked black enough that you couldnt really tell it apart from the black bezel, now that's black.

Light reflections: The screen is matte but only does an average job of absorbing ambient light. To get the best out of really dark spots of an image, you should be mindful of where you place your light sources.

Overall: It's a nice upgrade but nothing immediately mind blowing. Still worth the price I paid for it ($220 CAD) and I don't regret the purchase in the slightest.
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by GSH »

See this review for a 4K monitor under $700 that has a better TN panel than almost all other TN panels. Slashdot thread also available.

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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by Zero Angel »

My dream monitor would probably be something like the LG 34UM95 ultra-wide monitor. It's expensive as heck right now ($1,300 CAD~$1,200USD) but if ultrawide monitors become a thing then the price of such a thing will undoubtedly go down.

A review of it by LinusTechTips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnrxNfxRK_4


_____________
This one looks exceedingly good too. A 27 inch monitor @ 144hz with 3D
http://www.ncix.com/detail/benq-xl2720z ... 2-1224.htm
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Re: Looking for a new monitor.

Post by GSH »

I've still got a Dell 2405FPW, going on close to a decade of service, on my main box at home. I'd like it to keep in service until I can get something with this wishlist:

- 4K (or close), 24-28"
- Adaptive vsync (Adaptive vsync for any GPU maker, like gsync but not tied to nVidia)
- High quality image
- 120+Hz a bonus
- 16:10 ratio -- 1080p is 1920x1080 (16:9), but I have 1920x1200 (16:10) on my 2405FPW, and this helps give a bit more vertical resolution
- Under $1000

(Of course, I'd probably need a new GPU to push more pixels :) )

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