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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."
However, besides that, it's a top-notch monitor that I haven't had any problems with.
- A
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.
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.
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
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Most of the measurements are fudged. Sometimes there are different end-user monitors that use the same LCD part from another company, but the two LCD's quote different specs. (eg. the Dell and Apple 20" widescreen). That's why a lot of people try to figure out who made the LCD panel itself, so they can find the published specs for that, as it's potentially less fudged.
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 --
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
http://www.behardware.com/articles/588-1/lcd-19-be linea-10-19-20-and-benq-fp91v.html
I like the new LCD tests they use - and with screenshots illustrating the pixel responses! Very nice.
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.
The refresh rate still applies to LCDs and any other display. Basically, instead of "refresh rate", think "frame rate". The best LCDs of today will only refresh at 60 to 75 times per second. For a monitor that runs at 75Hz, this means that the monitor can only display "75 frames per second".
It is all marketing and people are eating it up.
More
FTFA, the specs for this monitor are:
LCD Panel: 19" color TFT Active Matrix SXGA LCD
Contrast Ratio: 550:1 (typical)
Viewing Angle: 160 horizontal, 160 vertical
Response Time: 3ms gray-to-gray (avg.); 5ms white-black-white (typical)
Brightness: 270 cd/m2 (typical)
Native Resolution: 1280x1024
Inputs: RGB analog, DVI-D
Dimensions: 17.0" x 18.4" x 7.9" (with stand)
Weight: 14.8lbs (6.7kg) (with stand)
Warranty: Three-year limited warranty on LCD, parts and labor
VESA: 100mm compliant
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
I was thinking the same thing. Viewsonic's site conspicuously doesn't say. I'm guessing it's 6 bit, which is not such a bad thing, seeing as it's aimed at gamers. Still a shame, though.
vk.
Yes, they will. :)
The refresh rate also dictates how quickly the graphics card is outputting pixels to the monitor. If you have your card set to a 75 Hz vertical refresh rate, it'll transmit the contents of the framebuffer every 1/75 of a second. Of course, video games can render at higher than 75 fps, but that's just to the framebuffer. You don't actually get more frames than that going down the wires to the monitor. You can only drive up to a certain point because there's only so much bandwidth there, and all current monitor connection standards require sending the full frame every time.
What LCDs eliminate is flicker. Since LCDs don't use phosphors that fade between refreshes, the image is rock solid. CRTs used higher and higher refresh rates to minimize perceptible flicker.
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.
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.
You missunderstand the relationship.
With this new display the spec is intended to convey* that even under demanding circumstances a display driven at 75Hz the pixel will be the correct color at least 76 percent of the time. This would be a huge improvement over what is the current situation, which has the same flaws in your example...
at 300Hz with an ideal black to white time of 3ms by the time your pixel arives at the correct value, the value of that pixel has changed (similar to modern panels in the 10-13ms range at 75Hz. That is, your theoretical display never displays the correct color before the color changes (assuming black to white). At 300Hz you would only see a medium gray color, and it's likely that at that fast a refresh rate on a perfect panel the flickering between the two would be fast enough to appear to be a medium gray anyway. If you could comprehend changes at that rate, you would see the same problems with colors "smearing" and "ghosting" that we have on modern panels.
*It's all marketing lies. The truth is this is an improvement, but nowhere near as good as they are trying to convince you it is. I'm sure one of our favorite tech sites will have the real facts soon enough.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
I thought the Refresh Rate (Hertz) didn't apply to LCDs because the pixel on a CRT has to be constantly refreshed, where as with a LCD its only refreshes when it needs to, needs to change that is.
You have two different concepts here called the same thing.
With a CRT, the "refresh rate" means, literally, the rate at which the electron beam can scan and "refresh" all the pixels in one full screen.
The signal going into the display has its own rate, perhaps best described as the "pixel clock". If you divide the pixel clock by the resolution (plus the padding around it to allow the electron beam to move to the next line or do a vertical retrace), you get a different sort of refresh rate, also in terms of full screens per second.
With a CRT, those two different "refresh rates" almost always match or have a 2:1 ratio (in the case of an interlaced signal). You can't really avoid that tight lock, since the video signal actually acts to directly tell the electron beam what to do "now".
With an LCD, though, each pixel has a distinct value, which can update almost arbitrarily often (much faster than any video card can tell it to change, anyway). The response time of the pixel measures how long it takes to change the visiblestate of the pixel itself (think of that like a fluorescent light bulb... You can flip the light switch far faster than the light can turn on and off).
So, what does this mean in relation to the GP post?
What your video card thinks of as the "refresh rate" matters in that no individual pixel will update faster than that, whether or not they can. So, while a 3ms response time means you could change the state of a pixel 333 times per second, it will only actually change at the video card's refresh rate (rarely over 85Hz).
But I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.
Not so much wrong, as just (understandably) confusing a "rose" for a "rose".
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
Am I missing something? The link seems to go to a review article.
Yeah, because we all know nobody would want to both play games and use photoshop.
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.]
Which, if you read a lot of reviews for this monitor will tell you means absolutely nothing. Viewsonic uses a system referred to as overdrive in order to achieve these response times. What they do is when the pixel is say going from black to 50%, they just put 100% power into it for about the first milisecond (thus getting the pixel to respond much quicker, as higher voltages improve response times for the LCD) and then try to narrow it to the correct brightness. This however often causes the pixel to actually overshoot and become brighter than it's supposed to until it stabilizes. The numbers quoted there are how long it takes the pixel to first get to the correct state, but not stabilize there. Don't believe me? http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050526/ viewsonic-07.html