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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.
"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.
I have a 19" LCD that I use everyday. Is it THAT noticeable if I have 7-10 ms instead of 3?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Nothing to see here, not even an A to FR!
Could we at least get a coupon?
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.
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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Unfortunately for you and me, that will be long after they finish fixing the response time issue, because there are a lot more gamers out there than digital photography buffs. Gaming should be fixed at 2ms response times, so they are getting close now. When every LCD maker is pumping out 2ms panels, then we can expect to see them start competing mainly on brightness, then color depth and finally color rendition.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Honestly, I have a ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT and a Samsung 912T 19" LCD cloned right now, and I was really surprised by how much whiter white is on the LCD and how much blacker black is on the LCD. I didn't think it was possible (this being my first LCD purchase ever) but the color reproduction, contrast, brightness, and sharpness are truely much better on this particular LCD. The *only* downside I can tell is that the LCD is only rated at 25ms, and I do notice slight blurring in games such as Dungeon Siege II. I don't really know how the 6-bit panels are with color and view angles, but the 8-bit panels like mine are really outstanding. I've been a firm believer in CRTs for a long time. That ViewSonic CRT is only 1 year old, but I don't think I'll ever go back now. I just wish 8-bit PVA panels where available at 8ms or better for a decent price ($300 range, not $600 range like I think they are now).
Morphing Software
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?
No, I counted them, they're all there.
-- pause for laughter --
BTW, the square root of 16,777,217 is 4,096. What does that tell you about screen resolutions needed to see all 16m colors at once?
Best regards,
7th grade math.
1600x1200 is 4:3, but 1280x1024 is 5:4. Seems like an odd choice for an aspect ratio.
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
Viewsonic has an entire range of products, from their budget line to the professional line. The professional line CRTs are great, and I'd stack them up against just about anybody elses. The budget line are... budget equipment, just as you'd expect. If all your experience with Viewsonic is what you are seeing at CompUSA, etc, you are probably just looking at thier budget line products.
Um, screen resolution has nothing to do with it. It's about the display's ability to show what colour the video controller has input to the display.
Let me change the 6-bit display to a 4-bit example:
If you have a display that is only capable of 4 bits (per channel) then each pixel can only show one of 2^4 available shades, or 16 shade (or Red, Green and Blue) = 4096 colour display. Even if it was a 4096 x 4096 sized screen, yielding 16.78 million pixels, each pixel could only display one of the 4096 colours. The issue here is that the display cannot choose 16 shades arbitrarily, they are in a fixed gradation from the factory.
This is why banding or dithering will still occur on images on a 6-bit display, as each colour can only be represented by 2^6=64 shades (262k colours), and (most) human eyes can perceive 256 shades, or 2^8, equivalent to an 8-bit display (combinations of RGB being 24.7 million colours, or 24-bit colour).
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.
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.