Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
[Error 407: No signature found]
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 19" LCD that I use everyday. Is it THAT noticeable if I have 7-10 ms instead of 3?
No, with the condition that the stated time actually measures the real response time (ie, the worst case from any state to any other state). Humans cannot resolve different colors or brightnesses that change faster than roughly 15ms (most people don't even notice changes under 25-30ms, but for some reason, geeks as a group tend to notice flicker far more than the general population).
As my main display, I currently use a 19in DVI panel with a "mere" 12ms response time (note that the "DVI" part of that makes a HUGE difference - Most of the artifacts people blame on poor response time actually come from doing an unnecessary D2A2D conversion). And it looks simply beautiful, even for action movies... No muddiness or ghosting whatsoever.
That said, I don't think any manufacturers measure their response time as a worst-case. So currently, the only real test of how well it will look playing movies or games - Try one out. Go into Best Buy or CC or even Wallyworld, pick out a few models you like based on appearance, then go home and buy your favorite for half the price online.
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.