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21.3" LCD Monitor Reviewed
SLDave wrote in to plug his review of the 21" NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper,
and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time.
And at the price of a decent used car? Update: 05/01 18:31 GMT by T : ARP has another idea, writing: "Here is a review of Samsung's
210T which is another 21.3" LCD. Not only is this cheaper than the NEC, but
it also has DVI as well as RCA and S-video inputs that turn into a
high-definition multimedia display."
I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time.
I would feel good! Finally an LCD screen with a usable resolution. The resolution should preferrably be as high as possible. If you can't read the text then choose a larger font.
If you are into fast action games you should probably buy a CRT anyway.
My friend has a SGI 20" CRT monitor he bought on ebay real cheap. The lowest res it supports is 1280x1024, which is a pity, because he can't play Diablo II anymore except in a window, and when he's booting up his machine, he can't see anything but a blur.
His solution? He bought a two-port monitor selector, and hooked up his old 15" CRT as well, and just keeps it on the floor next to his desk for when he needs it for command-line stuff.
However, the specs of this LCD show it goes down to 640x480 in portrait mode, which is cool by me.
And if anyone feels like balking at the sub-80hz refresh rates, try finding something higher in an LCD screen. Mine is a 17" IBM LCD, and only goes to 1280x1024 at 70Hz.
The speed of time is one second per second.
(From the specs)
Resolutions Supported:
Landscape:
720 x 400 @ 70 Hz
640 x 480 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
800 x 600* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
832 x 624* @ 75 Hz
1024 x 768* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1280 x 960 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
Portrait:
480 x 640 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
600 x 800* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
624 x 832* @ 75 Hz
768 x 1024* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
960 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1024 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz
Perhaps that's because LCD's don't have refresh rates? The are not driven by an electron beam scanning back and forth?
IF your LCD has a 'refresh rate' of 70hz that just means that the conversion circuitry that takes your analog VGA signal works at 70hz. There is absolutely no reason to make it work any faster, because the effect does not propagate to the visible screen...
LCDs have a fixed number of "pixels", and the only way to change resolution is for the pixel driver to interpolate or some other trick : It can do this perfectly for for direct divisors of its resolution (for instance a 1600x1200 display could do 800x600 perfectly, simply using 4 display pixels for every 1 incoming pixel).
Depends what you mean. There are physically 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels, so if you want 1280x1024, some of the logical pixels will be mapped to 1 physical pixel, some to 2. Now, there's various blurring algorithms to consider, but it still looks bad. You could do 800x600 perfectly (each logical pixel = 4 physical pixels), but why would you want to?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
(also from the specs)
*Due to the interpolation necessary for
operation of LCD panel resolutions at
full screen, it is recommended that LCD
monitors utilize the full resolution
capability of the panel and are operated
at their optimal or maximum resolution
when text or fine lines are being viewed
Recommended Resolution:
Landscape: 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
Portrait: 1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz
However,
In the article, the author complains about dead pixels (though not loudly) and expresses a wish that NEC ship monitors without dead pixels.
It won't happen. Almost all lCD monitors have dead pixels.
An LCD monitor is, in effect, an IC that is several inches square. One flaw == 1 dead transistor == 1 dead pixel. Most LCD manufacturers will quote some number of dead pixels as "acceptable" - if your display has less than that many dead pixels they won't accept it back as bad.
The only way around this is to increase the number of transistors on the display, and design some redundancy - if one transistor dies, the others for that pixel will take up the load. However, since a transistor can die on or off, it gets to be very difficult to design the circuit such that no matter how the transistor dies, the circuit works.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Apple now offers Cheaper Brighter 23" 1900 pixel ultra bright displays for under 3400 if you know where to shop.
You need 1900 pixels if you want to edit negative from film stock editing systems (apples Cinema tools for 35mm) or if you want to edit digital video at 1080i HD.
1080i HD is pretty sweet but you cant do it on this costlier smaller and lower rez monitor mentioned in the news and its MUCH less bright per sqaure centimeter than apples and has less contrast and MIGHT not offer 160 degree viewing angles VERTICALLY as well as horizontally.
Apples 23 inch is the cheapest ultr size 1900 pixel monitor in the world in 2002 and I know 3 people that have them in their homes.
Some use two montors a cheap 1200 dollar 1600 pixel (like the one mentioned) as a tools pallete side monitor, because apples high end boxes have two graphics acceleterators for two tubes on one agp nvidia card. (double headed video cards).
No one on slashdot knows this stuff because any pro-apple posts like this are never ever modded upwards.
Several current video cards will drive up through 2048x1536, including the nVidia ones.
On the other hand (and here's the lead-in to my question), this is nVidia's hardware support limit, and it would seem that there is an identical (but undocumented) virtual display size limit in the XFree86 nVidia drivers.
With a 240T, I would really like to run virtual on the order of 3072x2048. I've heard rumors that the ATI drivers don't have this virtual limit the way the nVidia drivers do. Is this true? Does anyone here have actual experience running 32-bit virtual screens as large as this on ATI or Matrox cards? It is just a little bit too expensive to buy one just in order to experiment and find out...
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
What timing. We had NEC send us this very same monitor to demo for a month. Several of us are checking it out. The guy before me had it for a few days and decided he'd better not keep using it or he'll get too used to having it and won't ever be able to give it back. He loved it and now he's back to his 18" LCD monitor. I'm five days into a review of this thing and have mixed feeling about it.
:). I hope that this is not a QC problem, but just a beat-up demo problem. I think the dead pixels are a real negative.
I also have been using an 18" NEC LCD monitor until now and am impressed with the huge size of this thing. While the previous user used it on Windows 2000, I'm using it on XFree86 4. I like the amount of real estate it gives me to work with on the screen, but I noticed that it makes the bad fonts I have look even worse. (I don't have the antialiasing setup yet.)
I also, like the reviewer, noticed the abundance of dead pixels on the screen. A quick count shows fifteen I see without really hunting around. I kept trying to wipe them off until I realised that they wern't dust specks, duh
Would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got the money to burn and find one with good pixels. Will I buy one for my personal system? Not anytime soon. Would I prefer to keep this to my current 18" LCD? No. The 18" is just fine for me. Plus, I'm planning to add a second monitor and Xinerama for the extra real estate.
We're ordering some of these for our network guys, though. For them, the extra space on the screen will allow them to better visualize the network status. I don't think the programming staff (me) will be getting any soon.
And that's fine with me.
They're getting better. My previous LCD was a 15" running at 1024x768, and it looked great only at that resolution.
My new one is bigger (haven't measured it, probably 17") and its native resolution is 1280x1024, but I run it in 1024x768. Occasionally I'll see little text blur, but most of the time it's very good.
--RJ