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."

Comments

Give us your worst, /.

[Cutriss]

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.

Now it'll just take 3 minutes. :D

A Decent Used Car???

[hansendc]

That is the nearly half the price for a modern luxury car!!! What more could you ask for?

1600x1200 all day??

[qurob]

(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

Refresh rates?

[mindstrm]

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...

Re:Changing res

[ergo98]

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).

Re:Your gettin' a Dell, dude

[Waffle Iron]

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.

That reminds me of the storage display teminals I would sometimes use in the early 80's. Some of these were huge, like a 25-inch TV. The CRT had a special layer that would permanently turn on any time the electron beam hit it. You could only add to the "on" pixels; the only way to turn off pixels was to clear the whole screen. The TTY output would add to the screen until you filled it up, but you couldn't scroll.

I remember being able to view 400 lines of code at once on one of these. At the time, it blew away any other display technology at viewing code. The downside was, it really blew chunks at motion, since it was static. You could actually get some work done with a real line-based editor like TECO, though.

"Useful for debugging Windows"?

[Wakko Warner]

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.

Re:Oooh!

[roca]

Sounds like you want an IBM T221. For only $8000 you get a 22" monitor with --- most importantly --- 200dpi resolution (overall 3840x2400 pixels). I've seen it running GNOME and there's nothing like it. The main problem is that the mouse cursor is a wee bit small, and so are the fonts in a lot of poorly written applications.

Dead pixels

[wowbagger]

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.

Re:Dead pixels

[jeffehobbs]

As a point of reference, Apple's official pixel tolerance count for the new 15" LCD iMac screen is six -- you need to have six (6) dead pixels before Apple will replace the screen. That's why I always suggest to my friends who are interested in LCD monitors (or new iMacs) that they go to a store and check one out before purchase. LCD monitors are expensive enough that any decent salesperson wouldn't blink an eye if you said you wanted to unpack the merchandise and hook up the screen before plunking down your hard earned cash. If it were me, I'd even bring a burned CD with one of those LCD checking utilities that cycle through the RGB colors (then white and black) to give it the once over. Dead pixels are annoying.

~jeff

Spend $500 more and get a 1920x1200 24" Samsung

[FreeUser]

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 :).

My demo 2110 review

[lhand]

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 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 :). 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.

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.