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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."
Most of the super fast LCD's are 6-bit, which kind of sucks.
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 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.
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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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.