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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."
We thought in advance to disable the news generator on the front page, so it won't go down in 30 seconds like last time.
:D
Now it'll just take 3 minutes.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Like Dell's got a 20" 1600 by 1200 for about $1600. No, I don't work for Dell, and yes, I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.
I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).
The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I've been waiting forever for a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. I do all of my work currently on 19" CRTs running at 1600x1200. And, for games, where you want a lower res, the LCD pixel averaging thing doesn't work badly at all. I've tested.
No, when they get down to $2k, I'll start thinking seriously of getting one. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
That is the nearly half the price for a modern luxury car!!! What more could you ask for?
300:1 contrast ratio, and no digital (DVI) inputs? Boggle...
I'd rather two 17" Planars for just over $1000.
Anyone else use a ThinkPad with 15" screen with native 1600x1200 resolution? My eyes hurt...
Just reading the specs on this baby, and I notice that it doesn't support its highest refresh rate at its highest resolution. I've noticed this on lots of monitors. Can anyone explain why this is so?
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Anyone want to swap an NEC MultiSync LCD 2110 for my car? It's a pretty decent '74 Mazda.
Anyone?
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Sun Microsystems has a nice LCD monitor. It is 24.1 inches, 1920x1200, and can take input from many connectors (DVI-D, 13W3, HD-15 [with 13W3 adaptor] svideo, etc) it also has a built in 4 port USB hub. Havent checked prices anywhere, but it looks expensive.
/usr/games/fortune
Well technically, the review says 60Hz.
Also, CDs will no longer exist: pervasive networking will have replaced removeable media.
And no keyboards, replaced by voice/thought recognition.
And "paper" will only be used by some backward governments and lone survivalist types.
We will all wear white pants.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
(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
Analog interface? Feh. Maybe they have improved in the last 3 years, but after my first analog-interfaced LCD monitor, I said 'never again'.
All digital, all the time, baby. I purchased two SGI 1600SW's in 1999 and 2000, and have never looked back.
Thats nothing! i bought my 79 Buick Regal for $200! and my muffler only fell off once!
--JonnyBlog
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...
This monitor is over THREE THOUSAND US DOLLARS and it doesn't even have a DVI INPUT?!
What the hell was NEC thinking?!?!
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)
There is no such thing as plain 'refresh rate'.
There will be a maximum specified horizontal (measured in Khz) and vertical (measured in Hz) frequencies.
Vertical is what you normally call refresh rate.
Now, if you start putting, say, 1600x1200, that's 1200 scanlines per screen. Take your horizontal frequency, muliply it by those 1200 horizontal lines that have to be drawn before each vertical refresh, and you'll find where the limiting factor is.
The monitor can't scan horizontally fast enough to keep up with it's maximum vertical rate at high resolutions.
...use the font tag with absolute size values that break resizing by some browsers. (Netscape 4.x has this problem. Galeon, based on Mozilla, doesn't.)
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Same with LCDs. LCD pixels don't die off like CRT pixels do - they stay at full brightness until it's time to change. However, the screen *is* refreshed at a certain rate. LCDs are poorer at fast motion than CRTs because the minimum rise/fall time on an LCD pixel is slower than the die-off time on CRTs so a pixel can't go from white to black quickly as something moves across the screen. This is important to the refresh rate question because a refresh rate that exceeds the ability of the LCD to register the changes is wasted. Most LCDs quote in the 60-80Hz range for refresh, but the pixels can only respond to ~40 refreshes per second.
So, to recap: High refresh rates aren't necessary on an LCD to maintain a stable picture, but LCDs *DO* refresh and this needs to be taken into account.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
$3800.00 for a monitor (that has limitations pointed out by the rest of /.) is ridiculous! No DVI, fixed resolution, plus it is an LCD (cannot match CRT/Trinitron for crisp text, motion, etc). I would love to see their sales projections on something like this. Granted, there will be that handful of geewhizzers who jump on this, but the rest of us can make a complete system with $3800.00... easily!
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
I use a Dell 2000fp at work (21.1", native 1600 x 1200 resolution). It's an amazing display and can be had for as little as $1270 (see here for details). Even without the special offers, the list price is $1,599 -- half the price of the NEC.
See this page. Well below $2K, 1600x1200 and other good specs, on usenet (google groups) I found quite some happy users of this one. Of course 1920x1200 would be even nicer but too expensive IMO.
So, you're the guy who does that?
Get back to work!! Stop posting on slashdot!! I hope they hire an assistant for you soon.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Well, this older machine probably didn't have ana lgorithm to do stretch a 640x480 image to 800x600. Or, you may not have turned it on - on various Dells you had ot use a function key to enable this.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Only the operating system has the semantic information required to do a good job of rendering your display into a given grid of pixels.
(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,
I'd like to have a 3200x2400+ 19" display. The thought of not needing to antialias
anything because my screen is 150+ dpi makes me want to sp00ge.
My main complaint against LCDs right now is that they aren't very high resolution for the
price. I'm definately not going to drop $3k for a display that only does 1600x1200.
But hey, I'm a rez freak...I run my 19" CRT at some odd resolution like 1920x1200[1]
just to squeeze out a few extra horizontal pixels at a reasonable refresh rate.
Why? Because information wants to be wide.
:wq
[1]Yes, the aspect ratio is screwed up. So I compress the image vertically, much like
letterboxing a widescreen movie...works pretty well if you don't mind text being small.
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
It only cost me $1150, and it's worked better than I could have imagined. I had my doubts about how games/video would look, but it's only slightly worse than a standard display. UT runs great at 1600x1200. Also, the 2000FP has four different inputs, D-SUB, DVI, SVIDEO, and COMPOSITE.
I would recommend the 2000FP over this piece of junk NEC anyday.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
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
I purchased an NEC MultiSync XP21 years and years ago. It was $2500 or so, way, WAAAAY out of my price range at the time. I thought at the time that not getting headaches and retaining my vision were worth the price.
Well, they were. Although it is a little dimmer than it used to be, I still use the monitor daily, at a high refresh rate, and my vision is still what it used to be. The only time I get eyestrain is when I am forced to work on smaller monitors, or on a system with a low refresh rate.
Sometimes things like this are worth the price.
My Dell Inspiron 8200 has a 1600 x 1200 LCD panel and it is awsome.
It's nice to have multiple 800 x 600 windows open; code in one window, email in another...etc.
Try it you'll like it.
-ted
Yeah, I love how the LEDs on Apple displays resize themselves whenever you switch resolutions!
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?
:).
I just bought a 24" 1920x1200 resolution Samsung SyncMaster 240T for $4200 (literally, I just got it yesterday).
If you are spending $3800 on a big monitor, for goodness sake spend the extra $500 and get an extra 3 inches in size and the ability to support true 1080i HD resolution up front. I work on 1600x1024 monitors during the day, and let me tell you, the added space 1920x1200 gets you is worth the price difference alone. The extra size (21" vs. 24") is also well worth the price difference.
And unlike the Apple monitor, it has standard video interfaces (analog VGA, DVI-D, s-video and RCA video, though the latter two are IMHO unimportant) without a troublesome dongle.
Driving 1920x1200 through a DVI-D port from an NVidia card under XFree 4.2 on a gentoo GNU/Linux makes watching those old Babylon 5 divx's a real treat (even if the increased size makes some of the artifacts visible
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Nope, cause LCDs don't work like CRTs do.
With an LCD, an illuminated pixel is illuminated until the controller changes it, unlike
CRT pixels, which start fading as soon as the electron beam has passed.
A refresh rate of 60hz on a LCD is fine, because it just means the display is getting
updated 60 times per second, with the pixels staying lit between refreshes.
60hz on a CRT would be unacceptable for most people, because the screen is going dark between
refreshes, which is perceptable as flicker.
:wq
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
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!"
I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time
Getting an LCD doesn't mean you have to give up your old monitor. While 1600x1200 native mode on a DVI output is fantastic, I also like to play games. My Dell fp2000 (just over $1200 shipped during the last special) is running out of my Radeon 8500 DVI out. While I could play games at a lower res, (with only a little screen tearing -- the Dell is a *fast* 25ms pixel refresh) I also have my 19" CRT hooked up to the same card. So for games -- CRT. For everything else - dual screens, but mainly the Dell. Make the CRT your primary and you don't have to do anything - just start the game up and it deactivates the LCD.
scant
adj : less than the correct or legal or full amount often deliberately so; "a light pound"; "a scant cup of sugar"; "regularly gives short weight" [syn: light, scant(p), short] v 1: work hastily or carelessly; deal with inadequately and superficially [syn: skimp] 2: limit in quality or quantity [syn: skimp] 3: supply sparingly, with a meager allowance [syn: stint, skimp]
Maybe i'm missing something, but i don't really understand the logic behind purchasing a monitor like this. arguably, it's foot print is probably smaller (in terms of depth) and there may be some power saving issues (i wouldn't know) but, on the whole, it just doesn't make sense to me.
I looked around at larger monitors for a long time- including LCDs, and the conclusion i came to is that it's just not worth it. for a quarter of the price of this monstrosity i can get two 17 inch monitors and a couple of nice video cards and run a dual display that gives me more screenspace. i just think it's a better solution.
That's exactly what I did almost two years ago and i haven't regretted it since. i don't think i could ever go back to a single display at home- it would drive me nuts.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
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.
c.f.
sarcasm ('sär-"ka-z&m)
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain ["tired of continual sarcasms"]
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm ["the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800"]
synonym see WIT
source: Merriam-Webster
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
How can anybody complain about too much resolution? That's like complaining about too much money.
Never mind that it's not much of a review--listing all the features printed on the box and in the manual and making a couple of comments hardly qualifies as a review. But the guy doesn't event know the first thing about LCD monitors. His two main gripes are the dead pixels and the interpolation necessary for lower resolutions.
Dead pixels suck, and a zero-dead-pixels policy is an admirable goal indeed, but not an economic reality. Anyone familiar with the issue would know that and not even bother bringing it up--unless the review sample had 20 dead pixels or something.
Interpolating lower resolutions is a fact of life for discrete pixel devices and will look nasty regardless of how it's done and by whom. Again, not something worth bringing up, unless witnessing a display that can miraculously do it with perfect quality. Using sub-pixel addressing might improve interpolation quality somewhat if done right, and there are better and worse approaches to it, but in the end it's still a hack.
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
A) Didn't read the article.
B) Completely missed the point.
C) Is the goatse.cx guy.
D) A & B
E) All of the above.
I believe the correct answer is D, although arguably it could be E. Why am I bitching about CmdrTaco this time? Because of quotes like this:
"I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time."
Really, how much of an idiot can this guy be? First of all, it's a huge screen. The whole point of a large display is to use really high resolution (ie 1600x1200). Things do not look unusably tiny at that resolution on 19" and higher monitors. Of course, if you have a monitor that size then lower resolutions are a total waste! If that's not his complaint, then he should have noticed that it is a "MultiSync" monitor. That means it can handle different frequencies and hence, different resolutions. So you're not stuck in 1600x1200 as Taco erroneously complains. The article gives the specs, stating that it can go from 640x480 up to 1600x1200.
Please... this is a news site for nerds. At the very least CmdrTaco could not say something so stupid that he sounds like his mommy bought him a 'puter for Christmas. "Why are the icons so small? I don't like that!"
Why bother.
I would guess that the one resolution that would look great on this monitor is 800x600, since it would only require pixel doubling rather than some ugly interpolation. They don't mention whether they actually tried this resolution, and I am guessing that they didn't, because it would have surprised them. It would look just fine. Of course 800x600 is so small that it would be pretty useless for anything other than gaming with a crappy 3d card.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Where do you live Taco? For $3800 you'll be driving a bile colored 1998 Oldsmobile Delta that smells like an ashtray.
Without wanting to show off, I just pushed by 19" CRT to one side to fit one of these as my primary display in a multi-head setup. And in the UK it cost only £1,100, which means that I can't see you yanks paying more than $1,800 or so for the same (YMMV).
Apart from the pain of trying to find a card that will drive the DVI interface at UXGA (most top out at 1280x1024, a Radeon 8500 should do it) then I've got to say that it's a very nice screen (no dead pixels so far), and I have no problems with 1600x1200 - I've always preferred a higher resolution (that's what adjustable font size if for). A CRT may have truer colours, but the rock solid, flat, matt image is fine for me and emacs...
--
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
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?
Ok I went out and bought a used car, now can anyone tell me how to replace my monitor with it?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
After I took the picture, I noticed that you could get two full browser windows plus a terminal window all visible at once if you put the dock on the bottom of the screen. Stunning. I plan to buy one in a few months. Enjoy!
D
Interesting that Apple is a price leader in such an absurdly expensive product category. It's probably because they sell a lot of them to their hardcore, screen real estate loving graphic arts users. Oh, how they must grin when Adobe and Macromedia add acres of pallettes to their applications!
But here's a gotcha if you're eyeing the monitor.
If you have a 450 dual processor, as I have, the included graphics card is not compatible with the HD display (presumably because it needs more than 16MB video RAM). So watch out or resign yourself to getting a new computer or graphics card.
(I'm likely to get a new machine because it's time for me to get something faster anyway).
By the way, for some reason the URL for my pictures didn't appear in my post, so if you want to see them, they're at
http://www.amazing.com/applestore/cinema.html
Since I'm a dedicated MacOS X user, there's no question I'm going to get the Apple. It might interest you that I believe Samsung made the flat panel used by the Cinema HD Display.
I have a 1600SW I use under Linux at work, and I still haven't figured out any way to hook it up that works at full resolution with Linux and doesn't involve absurdly overpriced graphics cards. Sigh.
D
I have a 1600SW I use under Linux at work, and I still haven't figured out any way to hook it up that works at full resolution with Linux and doesn't involve absurdly overpriced graphics cards. Sigh.
:-)
You can use an NVidia or radeon card (make sure you get one with the DVI serial chipset that can handle 1600x1024 resolution), and attach the DVI out to an external dongle SGI sells separately.
This works, and if you've already got the monitor its viable, but the dongle is a little finicky, and you may get some 3/2 scaler artifacts when in text mode, or watching mplayer fullscreen (the artifacts go away in normal graphics mode, and if you move the mplayer display over a few pixels), but it does work FWIW.
Nowhere near as nice as the Samsung, or the Apple 22"/23" displays, but nothing to sneeze at either.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy