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Today's Fastest Retail LCD
An anonymous reader writes "ViewSonic has recently released a very exciting product, a nineteen inch LCD display with a 3ms response time. This is the fastest LCD panel currently available to consumers, and it is clearly aimed at gamers and movie watchers. Dubbed the VX924, the display is part of ViewSonic's X series which tries to comnbine performance with style. The word on the street is that Samsung will have a 4ms display available this year, but this may be the only 3ms."
This is not an article.
Most of the super fast LCD's are 6-bit, which kind of sucks.
"Hey, check out this exciting new product!!!"
I seem to recall some controversy about how response is measured. Some numbers are reported as the time it takes to go from black to white and back to black. Some are reporting just from black to white or white to black. And some are reporting the time it takes to go from one gradient of gray to another gradient.
Buyer beware.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
However, besides that, it's a top-notch monitor that I haven't had any problems with.
- A
I have a 19" LCD that I use everyday. Is it THAT noticeable if I have 7-10 ms instead of 3?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
...when will manufacturers manage to produce LCD screens with more accurate colour renditioning?
If you're into digital photography in any kind of non-serious way and actually want to preview pictures the way they'll look when they print, then I believe that a CRT is still the best method of doing this.
A shame really, as I'd save a load of deskspace with an LCD screen...
.Saw another article on this display. They drive the pixel hard, causing it to "ring," it really doesn't settle until ~8ms, iirc. The 3 ms is also gray to gray, the new standard that gives faster response times than the older black to white to black measurement.
Nothing to see here, not even an A to FR!
Could we at least get a coupon?
I learned from this old Slashdot comment that LCD timings are highly misleading. The '3ms' number means something quite different from what you think it means. In short, see this article, or this forum topic. I've reposted the contents of the latter below. .....because it measures the time it takes for full white to black or full black to white pixel transitions. So unless you have your monitor set to maximum brightness & contrast (so that the picture is so bright it burns your eyeballs out) and only use your monitor for flipping blank screens from white to black, and back again, whether the monitor has a 8ms response time or 100ms response time, it doesn't mean an awful lot.
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"Quoted response times by manufacturers are largely meaningless and misleading.
It's the same reason why monitors based on the 20ms Hydis panel outperform the 12ms Samsung panel, the 16ms AU Optronics panel, the 16ms LG/Phillips panel.......
In real world use, the vast majority of monitors (over 95% of them) don't perform anywhere near the quoted response times. That's why you see streaking on the 12ms Samsung panel - its performing at 25-30ms.
Let me try and explain further.
Look at the response times for the so called 'fast' Samsung 172X which is based on a '12ms' panel:-
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/other/samsung-2/gr2 -2.gif
Since most people have their monitors set to medium brightness (about 80-180 on the grey level scale on the graph) and many applications - particularly games use grey to grey pixel transitions (or one colour to another colour) - the typical response time is somewhere between 25-30ms. Not quite 12ms is it?
Now look at the same response time graph for the Acer AL1721 - a mid level TFT with claimed 16ms response time:-
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/other/response-6/a2 1-grey.gif
The graph is much flatter, so across brightness and contrast levels, you're going to get consistent response times. At most common user settings, the "slower" 16ms is actually faster than the "quicker" 12ms panel.
Not quite as straightforward as the manufacturers would like you to think. The problem is, by that time, most people have parted with their money. When I was first looking to buy a TFT monitor, I thought that Kustom PCs were a bit mad to stock the Acer monitors in preference to others. However, it's only on further examination that you discover they perform very very well in games - for example, the AL1731M is based on the Hydis panel - and will in fact, outperform the so called 'faster' TFT panels.
From Toms Hardware Guide:-
"For games, the Hydis 20ms panel is still the one to beat. It's not yet perfect, but we know of no other that is faster (based on our tests, of course, and not manufacturers' specifications). Once again, we must insist strongly that the manufacturers' specifications are not to be trusted. "
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20040326/ lcd-08.html
"The response times suppliers associate with their panels vary, anywhere from 16 ms to 25 ms. The only problem is that these figures mean nothing. Or at least, not a lot. An article published in 2001 that can be viewed at Xtremtech explains the situation pretty well, and we have summarized it for you in the section entitled "RT between colors". But this isn't the only problem..."
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20031105
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
First off - all claims at a 7ms monitor have basically been shown to be fairly exaggerated by the manufacturer, and dependent on enviromental and display factors. Response time is important, but so are things such as colour accuracy, viewing angle and contrast.
I have two 17" VP171b monitors by Viewsonic which are rated at 7ms and I have never noticed any ghosting at all, even in Doom 3. Why would you need faster? Seems like the MHz race to me at this point. Read reviews on Tomshardware.com and Customer opinnions (that are well written) on Newegg.com - that's what I did an I am very pleased.
19" LCD have only 1280x1024 resolution like the 17" why not a 1920 x 1200 ?
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
from what i know, Viewsonic ("sonic"...WTF?)is budget, very budget. That said, there are many ways an lcd manufacturer can throttle response time, but at the expense of picture quality and the like.
Its native resolution is 1280x1024!
In my experience, for 4:3 aspect, 1600x1200 is the minimum to work with.
I am very surprised that Sony would "sacrifice" resolution for response time. I guess this product is geared toward a different market.
The cheapest I found it was on PCNation for $355 with free FedEx shipping. More here.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
More advertisements. Who in their right mind can even notice the difference between 3ms and 7~ms anyways? robots? .. well.. I might notice a difference considering mine's so old it takes 1-3 seconds, not milliseconds, but I think I'll live.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
From LCD monitors I've looked at, the color of the 6-bit LCDs is not as good as the 8-bit LCDs. Some LCD monitor makers recently switched to 6-bit in order to get lower response times. There was nothing in the review about this. Shabby work.
This monitor only supports 6 bpp, unlike your CRT and other LCDs that use the full 8. This means that the monitor cannot display 16.7m colors at one time. If you open up Photoshop or some other app that can display color gradients, you'll notice banding of the colors.
I bought it more than two months ago. This just isn't news at all.
Especially when the same company announced a 2ms-display just a couple of days ago.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
All the best product announcements come out on /. Man, if I want to know about a nerdly phone or an LCD monitor that /matters,/ I'm going to be sure to click through to the cool product announcements.
Can we please create a Product Announcements Section and let me turn it off?
That would be the nerdliest way to deal with this stuff: organize it right out of my existance.
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These can all be different for a given panel technology, and the manufacturer often picks the smallest. For some technologies, black to white and white to black are actually faster than gray to gray, but gray to gray is the most important for typical gaming or video use.
What's the color depth? 6 or 8 bit? I don't care how fast an LCD is... If it shows even a HINT of color banding then it's worthless to me, worse than the crappy used packard bell 15" monitor I have hanging off of my server.
Unfortunately, not many manufacturers are listing color depth in the specs, focusing instead on non-standard claims of response time. There ought to be at least 4 standard measurements - overall brightness, color depth, resolution, and black-white-black response time. Instead, we get resolution, *maybe* a claim of supporting x million colors which could mean anything since they all interpolate to improve image quality anyhow, and a bogus response time number.
The worst part is that so-called enthusiast and gamer hardware review sites let them get away with this. If the color depth isn't printed on the box, the review sites don't even bother to get and report the number. So they're comparing 6 and 8 bit LCDs against each other and not reporting an important difference between the two, or giving great review ratings on monitors without bothering to mention that the monitor only supports a 6 bit color depth so you're guaranteed to get color banding in many situations.
Ok, we admit it... They're ALL fast now. So how about some info on actual image quality?
I have a 30in apple lcd, and very happy with it. does anyone knows who makes apple's? How does it hold up in comparison to this viewsonic.
The reason I ask, I have a 20in viewsonic as well, and it blows. I can't get many shades of white/grey to even register (using the same video card/ os). is this one going to be fast, but have similar problems?
http://www.behardware.com/articles/572-13/comparat if-lcd-19-4-6-8-ms-tn-ips-va.html
I could have sworn I hit my /. but I seem to have gotten onto Digg. BBL. Gotta check my DNS server...
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Does the color of what I am watching affect the amount of ghosting?
Example: on my old iBook, I would get a ton of bluryness while watching Simpsons/Family guy DVDs(esp. Simpsons ones), however even when watching fast motion on anime dvds(they tend to use different tones) I wouldn't really notice it at all. Can someone smarter than me explain this?
Monstar L
LaCie and NEC will be happy to hook you up... For a price. The LaCie 319 and 321 are both LCDs with amazing colour (for an LCD) http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10016 if you are interested. They are damn expensive though, and it's their still image that's good, not their moving one. You can also look at NEC as LaCie doesn't actually make them, NEC just makes them to LaCie's specs so you can get the same screens from NEC in a different package.
So if you want good LCD colour, you can get it, but it will cost you. All in all a CRT is still the best choice, since it still had better colour and since CRTs handle motion fine, but if you want something that's small and good for graphics, these will do what you want.
According to the product info on Newegg, the 3ms response time is grey to grey. It has a 6ms response time for white to black to white.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
It's a matter of seeing them at all. The problem with lower colour depths is that you miss midtones. You still have to go from the darkest to the brightest, there's just less steps to do it in, so you get less precise colour.
I mean sure, in theory, you need only 786k colours to have a different colour for every pixel on a 1024x768 display. That means that 20-bit would be more than enough. However what you'd have to do is have that as a palette, a lookup table, that continously changed as the old 8-bit VGA stuff did. In reality, it's terribly impractical.
For monitors it doesn't work at all, when you are talking about the bit size it's the number of levels per colour channel it can display and it's fixed. So with 6 bits per channel that 64 different levels which produces some nasty banding.
In fact, 24-bit (8-bits per channel) really isn't enough actually. 16 million colours sounds like a lot and is, but you discover that humans and percieve more than 256 shades of gray. If you draw a gray gradient in 24-bit mode on a good monitor, you will be able to see some banding. You need more like 30-bit, that's 10 per channel or 1024 grays, before it becomes totally seemless.
"Today's Fastest Retail LCD"
I tried to buy one last night, but I couldn't catch it!
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Actually, they've measured black to black as fast as 0ms in the lab, but convinced that marketing folks that nobody would believe that they could achive those numbers. Next year, they're going to release the same panels at 2ms, with 1ms in 2Q2007, then again with a 250ns spec in 2H2008. By quoting a higher-than-actual response they hope to reduce user complaints of spec-fixing, as well as provide a path to better the specs each year without any additional research expenditures.
Rumor has it they have also tested the panel at 0ms white to white, but they're not releasing any data on "lit" pixel response until the 3Q2006 panels are ready to go into the distribution chain.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I would be interested to know two things: 1. can the human eye even detect the difference of 4 MS? 2. how much of a price drop will result in older, 'slower' LCDs
My tech blog
But my brain synapses fire at slightly faster than 2ms and you need to add another couple of inches...
I'm growing a long gray beard over here, waiting a whole 3ms!!!
Where's my LQD (Liquid Quantum Display)?
I want to see the images -9 ms before they are produced...
Yep, they're real nice, but not all that new.
I've had 2 of them side-by-side on my desk since the beginning of August!
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
How freaking old is this article? The date on it is only Oct 21, so obviously it and the poster are completely misinformed. Both the ViewSonic VX924 AND the 4ms 19" Samsung 930BF have been out for months. I have a Samsung and it's great. As for the ViewSonic's 3ms response time... it's a marketing gimmick that exploits the fact that there's no standard measurement for grey-to-grey response time (ie - which shades of grey are used). It's really no faster than Samsung's model, which suffice it to say, is shockingly fast. I thought my 16ms Hitachi was great, but Samsung's 4ms panel blew me away.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php ?t=71226&highlight=lcd+monitor+guide
Check out the latency measurment comparision, only one panel holds it's latency throughout the range. Last I checked, 19" monitors with those panels go for around $350.
If you have dead pixels on your display. There is nothing more annoying than playing a game or watching a video, with (at least) one bright green pixel right in the middle of your screen that just won't go away. In such a case you'll be too distracted to even notice any ghosting your display may have.
Until someone manages to figure out a way to mass produce LCD displays with a smaller percentage of defects, LCD's still don't compare to CRT's. Unless of course they are for office use, where size is a driving factor.
The 23" Apple Cinema Display uses an LG panel - at least it did several months ago when I was looking at it.
I decided to go with the HP L2335, which has a slightly upgraded version of the same LG panel at the Apple 23", but also has an adjustable arm that allows the screen to run in landscape, DVI *and* VGA, Component, S-Video, and Composite inputs. It's an awesome display, the response time is killer, and it's a full 8-bit panel.
It's been able to display every single signal I've sent at it, including oddball 1080p signals.
I'm sure this Viewsonic panel is nice, but in this day and age everyone should really be pushing widescreens. They're so much more fun for games.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I own this monitor and it's actually very nice. I needed more desk space and my old ViewSonic 17" CRT was killing that. For gaming reasons, I opted for this monitor. I've played a bit of Counter Strike: Source, but mostly Battlefield 2 and it's performance is quite exceptional. I really do not notice any "ghosting." My only complaint w/ the monitor is that you cannot adjust its height. You can tilt it back and forth, minimally at that. This is pretty annoying as it sits relatively high on its bevel. I'm used to it now, but the first few weeks really cramped my neck.
And 2^6 is only 64, which means that one gets 64 levels of red, 64 levels of green, 64 levels of blue, and 64 levels of grey.
;)
8 bits per colour yields 256 levels in each case above.
Even with 255 steps between black and white, `smooth' gradients sometimes still appear banded; with only 63, it's significantly worse.
Though, the colour-separation is probably much less noticable in anything that's in motion, with the colours shifting around like they do in most movies and video-games
This actually seems like a somewhat silly debate to be having now, since we've already been through most of the `only 6 bits/channel' experience back when the graphics cards had the same limitation--some of them were even limited to 5 bits per channel (or less!) and that was in the 1990s.
-rozzin.
More monitor news:
As many people have commented above, LCD monitor response times are like printer page print times. Manufacturers lie, and lie, and lie. Since all online and print magazines (that I know about) are corrupted by taking money for sneaky ads that are presented as reviews, it is difficult to know the truth.
Samsung is shipping new monitors: SAMSUNG Provides Computer Users With Feature-Rich 21" And 24" Large-Screen LCD Monitors. Samsung claims "The SyncMaster 214T sports an eight-millisecond response time and the SyncMaster 244T offers a 10-milliseond response time."
Samsung's public relations agency has more info: Samsung Monitor Pressroom.
Samsung is reputed to be the manufacturer of the LCD panel used in making the Dell 2405FPW, which is now on sale at Dell with a coupon for $784, if I remember correctly. Supposedly, the 2405FPW is put together by BenQ in Hong Kong. I'm using a 2405FPW as I type this, and it is the best monitor I've seen.
Dell seems to be undergoing a social breakdown. I would think very carefully before I bought something from them that they had a hand in manufacturing. See this comment: Dell has tricky prices.
My understanding is that Samsung has built a new factory to manufacture new technology in LCD monitors. People often report that the 2405FPW has no dead pixels. I haven't seen any dead pixels on mine.
(I don't have any involvement with any companies mentioned above, other than as customer.)
Thats nice that Viewsonic has a new product out. However I have bought two diffeerent items from view sonic and had problems with both of them. Not only did I have problems with thier products, thier customer service is typical of many companies today - nonexistent. It took three emails to find out that the only 'certified' repair center near me is about 95 miles away from where I live. Oh yeah, I have to drive through Los Angeles traffic to get there. This is because viewsonic products are actually considered imports and the people who repair them near me won't touch viewsonic products - even if they are under warrenty. Why? Well as one guy told me, "they're cheap and I end up losing mony on the deal. It just isn't worth my time to work on viewsonic products unless the customer is paying up front." This hasn't helped my as my product is still under warrenty and I have to use a certified repair center. Do yourself a favor and don't buy anything from viewsonic as along with your new purchase you will get a crappy product, especially if it is a first generation model, crappy service and lots of wasted time trying to get in touch with comapny representatives that can help you.
This monitor can handle 3-4 ms, but the resolution settings or whatever are maxing at like 8-10 ms? Making this pointless, right? Not to mention, we can't even see the difference, because we can't detect that quick of a change? Does this strike anyone as driving a Porsche in rush-hour traffic? I mean, if you have a Porsche or a Toyota Camry in bumper-to-bumper traffic, it'll still take just as long to get home.
Response Time: 3ms gray-to-gray (avg.); 5ms white-black-white (typical)
Seems pretty fast.
... is this a GTG (grey-to-grey) latency measurement or a true latency measurement from black and white?
Nothing like a 8ms lcd performing a true b/w switch turning up to be 20ms.
Shadus
There IS no spoon.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming...
All of you fellow Geeks out there who have LCD monitors, could you please let me know what is a decent LCD display for my PC. My nVidia GeForce FX 5600 w/256MB DDR-RAM has a DVI connector right next to the S-Video and standard VGA connectors. I'm a hard-core gamer (despite the fact that I have a vision handicap), A+ Certified Tech, web designer, and a writer (Anime fan fiction for now but I'm getting into writing for teens professionally). I need a good display to replace my aging, yet still working, Envision 19" monitor. Its not that I don't like my monitor its that its so BIG and my desk is so SMALL. The display has to work well with games and DVD video and has to be at least 19" or bigger in size because of my limited vision. It also has be affordable. I can't spend over $1,000 or even $500. Please point me to a good brand and model. Email me. - Michael "TheZorch" Haney thezorch@gmail.com
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Actually, you can get a really decent high dynamic range image by extending only the luminance channel. We distinguish between bright and dark a lot more precisely than between colors; do a CMYK separation on a JPEG image and compare the Y and K channels if you don't believe me. The Radiance HDR format uses this trick; the only extended channel is an 8-bit luminance exponent; aside from that, it uses regular 24-bit RGB.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Im not eye expert, but I'm pretty sure there is a limit as to how much of a difference the human eye can detect. I am pretty sure that anything below 20ms cannot be distiguished by the human eye. In other words, what is the big deal with having such a quick refresh rate? Does anyone ever bother to find out the limitations of the human body and make things designed around those? Just because it is technically faster, does not mean it is going to make a lick of difference for you. In other words, who cares? (Besides the people that think they know something about technology that don't)
What about the LCDs that Apple sells? They must think that they are at least really close otherwise they wouldn't be moving to all LCDs. Has anyone compared it side by side with a CRT, LCD and printed photo?
... when they have 200 to 300dpi displays. I want my vector desktop looking nice.
(Do we have a vector desktop yet? I know the newest GTK uses Cairo...)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yeah, but while I wouldn't buy a product based on a slashdot headline, I might *not* buy a product based on the comments. You'll notice a lot of people above pointing out why the listed stats are bunk and where the screen falls short. It gives me more I can check with in regards to the product mentioned, and other similar products.
The ASUS PM17TU Monitor will also offer 3ms response time. More specifically this is gray to gray (Just like the Viewsonic). But the I don't think the viewsonic nor the ASUS is anything "revolutionary". Besides the contrast ratio's aren't that good... The Asus is 600:1 and the Viewsonic is 550:1 There are more important things than just response time. I do though like thier zero dead pixel policy, I'm glad to see more manufacturers offering this as a standard.
This EIZO has very accurate colour rendition. What I like about EIZO is that they not try to cheat their customers with the latency specs. They give the average latency not the ISO latency which would have been considerable better. Unfortunatly its a bit expensive
While you are at tomshardware page, you might find this latency graph of the viewsonic VX924 interesting.
Start gimp, create a 1024x1024 image.
Select gradient tool, disable dithering/sampling
Draw black->white gradient top to bottom of image
Zoom in a bunch.
You should see a band every 4 "gimp pixels" since 1024 / (2^8) == 4.
If you only have 6-bit color you'll get a band every 1024 / (2^6) == 16 pixels.
Anybody know it that's correct or not? Is it that 6 bits of the color settle in 8ms/3ms/whatever and the other 2 bits settle later, or is it just 6bits per color no matter what?
what's going to your (computer) monitor is RGB not some form of YUV.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
It's still only using a 550:1 contrast ratio, and that's how you get black, well... shades of grey. CRT's still have a hudge edge over the LCD world. At least DLP technology is steadily changing that. I'm sorry, but I can't sit down and watch Episode III on this monitor and lie to myself the entire time, trying to convince myself that space really is just a shade of grey.
What I really want is a 17" LCD that will do 1600x1200. Who cares about response time? I need a monitor that will give me the most desktop space for the least desktop space.
Is it even possible for a human to perceive the difference between, say, 3ms and 6ms?
Proverbs 21:19
In the days of CRT monitors the only thing that mattered was the size ... and so manufacturers lied about it, and eventually there were lawsuits, and now we have the crazy "19 inch (17.5 inch viewable)" way to describe how big the screen is on a CRT. Thankfully this didn't infect LCD advertizing copy-writers, so when they say "19 inch", it really is that big.
But they have to fudge something. There's no storage in a monitor, so they can't fall back on the old and trusted "100 GB" which is based on 10^9 bytes in a gigabyte, and is the pre-formatted size. Only a few LCD monitors have built-in speakers, so usually they don't have the option to use TMPO watts @ 1KHz rather than RMS across 20Hz-20Khz. So being creative types, they've found that "contrast ratio", and "response time" aren't specified very well, giving plenty of room to put impressive numbers in big type next to the picture in the ad.
-1 blatant advert
:)
-1 lies on specs
-256 6bit color, that's crap.
Keeping my CRT thanks very much
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If this is such a gaming LCD, why doesn't it support a higher resolution? Granted, with LCD's, either you get resolution or a nicer "refresh rate," but AFAIK, most game enthusiasts who go out and get the blazing hot, fast LCD's don't want the be bottlenecked by a fixed native resolution of 1280x1024 or the hindrance of ghosting.
Until gamers can get both "3ms" and higher resolutions, I don't see the market for gaming LCD's going too, too far. I've been looking at these things for weeks as a serious purchase (and have been watching them over the years), and I like Dell's 2001FP, but I just don't know about how it will match up to my five year old Sony E400 19" CRT that can do the same resolution at a crisp 75Hz. Plus, if my CRT evar goes bad, I can replace it with a better one at about a tenth of the cost of a "decent" LCD.
I have a samsung 930 b monitor that has a max refressh rate of 75 and a response time of 8ms
I dont see any ghosting or any problems with it while playing games. Serious sam 2 atleast.
Why would i want another lcd lol
Wow... never seen this old "news" on slashdot...
TomsHardware even had a review (not the best of grades either) about this display in June, and it has been available from retailers all through the summer, even in a backwater country such as Sweden.
They only have colour channels. In the case of a digital LCD the graphics card simply specifies the value of red, blue, and green, each with an 8-bit number. I am aware of no monitor that has an internal YPrPb conversion, which wouldn't make much sense since the actual elements are RGB anyhow.
Maybe in the future we get monitors developed that work in a Luma/Chroma colourspace, but for now they work in RGB.
Actually, more likely we'll just increase the resolution in the future. Today's 3d card can process internally at 16 or 32-bits per colour channel, and they do that FP. So probably what will happen it output will just become 16-bit fixed per channel. The display will then make use of as much of that detail as it can. It'll be overkill but why not? Works nice n' easy that way.
To increase the response rate they sacrafice other things like the view angles and the colour depth (6bit with dithering). So isn't this purely for games and not really for watching movies (esp. as its not widescreen).
last night i was playing quake4 with a friend and we only managed from about 6pm to ~8:50 .. when he clearly said "you know this means we've got to stay up all night until we finish this thing". and his stated reason was that he was feeling dizzy. we were playing on a lcd, running at a normally acceptible 60hz. (thats all it can do at native res)
my theory is that somepeople release too much seritonin(to inhibit the intense brain activity resulting from over stimulation) when exposed to smooth motion, and i think blur also accentuates the release. leading eventually to nausea and motion sickness, be it from being in a car or watching a LCD.
I've been reading through the discussion, and I've been thinking of responses, but it's all a muddied mess out there. so, I've decided to lay out the basic discussion points and my thoughts as one post.
First of all, why do we need faster-response LCD screens, when we already have 4ms?
There are a few key reasons for this. For starters, the 4ms number doesn't mean much. It is the time the panel takes to turn a pixel from black to white, then back to black. In a traditional panel, this is usually the fastest transition possible...and all other tranitions (Grey to Grey) are MUCH slower. Sometimes GTG transitions can be as much as 3x slower than the Black-White-Black number.
The industry has concocted a possible solution to this called Overdrive.
Overdrive takes advantage of the fast transition in Black-White-Black. Every time an input pixel changes color, the pixel on-screen is bootsted up to white, and allowd to fall back down to the new color.
This is slightly slower than the Black-White-Black transition time, but it's much faster than going Grey-to-Grey.
Unfortunately, Overdrive has a drawback that is DIRECTLY tied to the response time. Every time a pixel changes, it is overdriven WHITE for a fraction of a second, until it settles down to the target color. In darker scenes, or in cases where where colors are almost uniform, as pixels change these white pixels are painfully obvious. Better response times are the only thing that can remove this annoying artifacting.
Read about these artifacts at Tom's, who did the first review ever on Overdrive panels in May.
This link to Tom's also addresses the other issue discussed in this thread:
What's wrong with 18-bit color?
The dithering algorithms used by panels to simulate 24-bit color are not all that bad, but they have a serious drawback:
Dithering yields poor quality in scenes which require high contrast. Foggy, smoky or dark scenes, which tend to have subtlte color transitions, look like crap on an 18-bit panel. The panel is constantly changing pixels that are VERY close to each other in color, resulting in a muddy image. Unfortunately, the only way to avoid such artifacts it to buy an MVA panel with true 24-bit color (and sacrifice response time).
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000483064834/ [Viewsonic announces 2ms 19" lcd.]
I purchased a VX924 last month ($440 shipped from Newegg). I was happy with its performance, but one thing I overlooked was pixel size. The pixels on this and most 19 LCD's are .294mm, which makes for very blocky images and text. So bit mappy that I couldn't live with it. I returned it and got a Dell 2005FPWS 20" widescreen with a pixel size of .258mm for the same price ($445 shipped). Dell was having a "sale." It makes a huge difference. I couldn't be happier with the smaller pixels, the picture is much sharper, and for gaming I see no difference in performance. Plus the wide aspect makes it great for audio editing and DVD playback as opposed to the "giant square" effect you get with the VX924.
-not a Dell salesman
You can learn from behardware.com/
p anels-a-carte-mura-components-dead-pixels.html
I just recomend it to anyone, and *no*, I have no affiliation.
Example of a great article is the "Mura effect":http://www.behardware.com/articles/589-1/
You can learn from http://behardware.com/ I just recomend it to anyone, and *no*, I have no affiliation. Example of a great article is the "Mura effect "http://www.behardware.com/articles/589-1/panels-a -carte-mura-components-dead-pixels.html
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
As has been noticed by another poster, typical slow-response LCDs have HUGE problems with high-contrast scrolling text.
...but what's happening is that for a split second when the screen is updating, the pixels are turning a dull shade of gray, and the total light output of the monitor is lower. You can test this by not even looking at the screen, and just aiming the monitor at the floor or something and looking at the total reflected light. It will strobe. The faster the response time of your monitor, the shorter the "dark" periods will be, and the strobing effect will lessen.
Try this. Open up a textmode display (just black and white text) and open up your favorite console text editor. Make a file that has a solid line of big letters (capital Ms work well) every other line. Then scroll so that you're alternating between odd and even rows having the line of characters.
If you want, write a program to do this for you.
What you wind up with is a STROBE effect.
Theoretically the screen should only be putting out the same amount of light per frame. The number of white pixels onscreen is exactly the same every frame.
CRTs do this too, but the phosphors continue to glow during the refresh, and this glow time is carefully tuned to match typical refresh rates. This is why televisions seem to flicker less at 60Hz interlaced compared to monitors -- the phosphors are tuned for slower response.
Anyway, that's an example of where a faster response time helps on an LCD display. It's not just gaming, folks. It's any case where you have to read a lot of scrolling text. I get headaches from scrolling text on slow-response LCDs.
"the word on the street is that Samsung will have a 4ms display available this year"
0 726&type=product&productCategoryId=cat01011&id=112 4432188195
I just saw a Samsung LCD at Best Buy ratd at 4 ms, so I guess the word on the street is a little slow.
See: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=744
Stats can be faked. There's really only one way to check whether or not an LCD is good enough for you; scroll down a few webpages.
I have a friend whose monitor can't handle scrolling slashdot. When you scroll down the page, all the dark green boxes become a bluish light green temporarily. It's very distracting.
Oh yeah.. and if you're going to be playing games on it too, make sure and give one or two of them a spin. Especially if it's something really murky like Doom III; you want to know for sure that the monitor can handle those really low grey levels, even when it's tossing out a good 6 bits on ya for some dithering algorithm..
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-Inigo Montoya
this is exactly what I was going to respond with, gray to gray is much slower than black to white, etc
333.3_ fps. Isn't that overkill?
Before you answer, I am aware that there is some stretching of the truth which occurs in marketing the response time. Mathematically, 16ms should be sufficient for running 60fps, which is faster than most people can see anyways. But the 16ms only applies to a specific intensity of white and black under certain circumstances, and it's worse than that for colors so you get ghosting. But surely 3ms is overkill, no?
17" is more than big enough for that resolution. I would like a 19" 1600 x 1200 display but alas I have to buy a CRT for that, or 20.1" LCD for $600 or more.
I do wish I could buy a desktop LCD made of the same stuff my $1,000 15.4" 1920 x 1200 laptop is made off.
Anyone know why I can't?
Better flight searching coming soon.
Yo, yo, word.
Aside from being a blatant ad (as many other posters have pointed out), the thing I really love about this sort of article lead-in is the use of phrases like 'word on the street' to describe things of interest to cubicle- and parents'-basement-dwellers everywhere. Like hoi polloi are hanging out in back alleys swapping vital info on monitor refresh times...
I suppose it sounds a lot better than 'some nerd said so in the Inquirer forum'.
the display is part of ViewSonic's X series which tries to comnbine performance with style.
Me: I thought you guys said you had performance and style?!?
ViewSonic: We never said that.. we said the comnbine them. Comnbine is a word we invented which most closely means "eliminate."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You might want to factor in the power cost, especially if you run the monitor 8 hours per day or more. My 21" CRT pulled 350W+. My 30" LCD is rated at 100W max. A 21" LCD can get down around 50W. That means, at $0.15/kWH, the 21" CRT cost $0.0525/hour to run while the LCD costs $0.0075/hour.
At 8 hours/day 5 days/week for 52 weeks that's $109.20 for the CRT versus $15.60 for the LCD. It doesn't take too many years at a savings of $93/year for the LCD to pay for the additional up-front cost.
everything in moderation
On my 2405 fps's either have a laggy mouse with vsync on, or the screen tears with vsync off. Is there any work around/fix for this?
Personally I don't see the big deal of having 3ms refresh rates. 10 ms is good enough for me, I don't understand why a pixel needs to be able to refresh 333 times per second. I respect the advance in technology, but I would rather see advances in screen resolution. The thing I truly don't understand is how laptop LCD's can have a screen resolution of 1920x1200 on a 17" screen(such as the Dell Inspiron XPS I am using) yet the biggest resolution on a 17" desktop display that I have seen so far is 1280x1024. Why is that? I would really like someone to explain this to me. At any rate, 3ms is ridiculous and if the resolution ever improves, I will be making a purchse on one of those puppies for all of my gaming goodness!
http://www.denialofreality.com/
This product or service is exceptionally good. I got one and it was superb value for money and very high quality. The customer service was also excellent. Plus I have got laid a lot more since I got it. I would recommend it to everyone!
Interesting. How to verify that?