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Budget 27" IPS Displays From Korea Are For Real
crookedvulture writes "Giant, high-resolution LCD monitors have been around for years, but they've always been prohibitively expensive. Good displays based on IPS panel technology command upwards of $700 for 27" models and closer to $1200 for 30-inchers. However, Korean vendors have started selling similar screens on eBay for roughly half the price. These off-brand models purportedly use the same panels as pricier alternatives, and in practice, they appear to be nearly as good. There are some caveats, of course. The number of inputs may small, HDCP support isn't guaranteed, and user controls can be limited. Those may be deal-breakers for some, but getting a 27", 2560x1440 IPS display for well under $400 will be a deal-maker for others."
Yeah, you'll be happy until they break after a few months and have no one to get a refund or RMA from.
lack of hdcp support sounds GREAT to me. no license fee, no contribution to the bad ways via my purchase! no supporting a bad regime (hdcp) with my dollars.
I watch using a pc and I never care about 'protected path' content. my dvd's are ripped and saved on a nas, drm-free. I could give a shit about hdcp!
sign me up!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I assume these are screens that where rejected for minor defects by their intended brand and resold. This happens a lot, even with name brand products such as CISCO network gear.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Why aren't more manufacturers directly importing a bunch to the USA and shipping/supporting from there? Sucks to have to take a risk from ebay with a giant shipping charge.
I have, more than once, ordered something cheap that turned out to be good, then ordered a 2nd or 3rd copy, only to have the later ones (branded the same) be.... different.
Latest case in point: $90 7" tablets - first one: 4.5 hour battery life, second one: 2.0 hour battery life.
For "real" 27" displays that have 2560 x 1440, and not just full-HD, the experience is really good. I first regretted shelling out for a Dell UltraSharp U2711, but after connecting it and seeing the amount of screen real estate I eventually bought another one for my second computer. 2560x1440 eliminates my need for an extra monitor completely, and by using the Windows+(left arrow|right arrow) function in Windows, or Divvy on Mac, I can easily fill the browser on one side and the application I work with on the other.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Fry's Electronics had a 23" IPS Asus display for $270 (granted it is ONLY 1920 x 1080, but it has a fab 5ms GTG response rate). I got the last one they had in the store. I wasn't sure how much of an improvement it would be, but as someone who sits in front of a screen all day for my job, it sure is a nice improvement. The 3D support built-in with polarized glasses is a bonus.
So.. my only point is you don't necessarily need to go through some nefarious eBay listing if you look hard enough for deals, and support your local economy more than sending money through PayScam and the like...
today is spelling optional day.
I'm actually looking for a good 1440p display. If the $400 ones have all the specs I need (at least two usable inputs, minimal ghosting and latency, color that isn't terrible, and at least 60Hz refresh rate), I'll probably grab two (I was already expecting to spend $900+; if I can get two for the price of one, so much the better).
PS: Does lack of HDCP support really hinder anything?
Uhm.... Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this really that good of a deal? I have a 1080p 42 inch Sharp flat screen LCD which I paid about 420 dollars for... with tax and fees and everything.
Nice try Korean eBay vendor !!!!
16:10 instead of 16:9. [/obligatory post]
Make sure you get the right display for what you want. The unfortunate reality is that all LCD panels have different drawbacks.
TN panels are typically cheaper, have worse display angles, worse bleed, lower bit depths, and worse contrast.. But they are fast! I'm aware that some newer IPS displays are getting down there in the response time, but they don't even touch a good game-oriented TN display. Blur and ghosting everywhere. I picked up a samsung 120hz display. It came with 3D glasses but that's just a gimmick. Playing games at 120hz with zero ghosting is nothing short of amazing, and as a bonus eliminates the need for display lag inducing vsync in nearly all games I've played.
That said, it can't touch a good IPS display when it comes to color accuracy, viewing angle, color uniformity, contrast, light bleed, etc.
Just get the right monitor for the right job - Until OLED screens become reasonably priced. OLED wipes the floor with LCD in all of the mentioned metrics.
Yep they are for real. Sold on Ebay mostly. You can read all about people's buying and ordering experiences at overclock.net:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1232496/crossover-27q-led-led-p-27m-led-2720mdp-gold-led-monitor-club/1800
My experience:
1) Bought a Crossover 27" IPS with swivel stand from S. Korea over ebay - $420 (Canadian) shipping included
2) Arrived in 3 days in Canada from Korea (If only Canada Post was that efficient)
3) Seller filled out customs form saying it was worth $150, I paid next to nothing in duty fees.
4) Monitor is freakin' awesome in display quality
5) Had 1 red stuck pixel that shows up in black background, but that you won't even notice unless you go hunting for it.
6) Monitor has no warranty, but at less than 50% of the cost, it's a risk you take. That said, seller did say he'd take it back if there was a serious defect/damage in shipping.
7) The IPS panel is the same one they put into Apple's 27" Cinema display, but didn't make the cut for some reason. I can't see anything wrong with it.
8) WARNING: There are practically no button controls on the monitor. Only brightness up/down and on/off. That's it!
9) The build quality of the 27" Crossover casing is superior to that of even Dell (read the forums above if you don't believe me). It is solid metal (not cheap plastic), and looks very stylish. That said, a word of warning, the monitor gets almost too hot in the back during hot summer days if I don't open the office window.
For $500-$700 discount, I accept no warranty, slight overheating on hot days, 1 stuck pixel, and only 2 control buttons.
They can take their huddlecup DRM and shove it up their arse, do not want precious silicon I'm paying good money wasted on features aiming to restrict me and make the MPAA more money.
I'm glad I found this thread because I might well be going to Korea in september so I'll bring one of these monitors back with me and not pay for shipping. Once again "fuck you" to HDCP and its supporters.
There's a few of those 27" models that can be overclocked to have display refresh rates of 100 Hz+ which is great for smoothness. I just bought one at http://120hz.net/ for $555, vs buying a regular one off ebay for $400. These cheap ones come with pixel defects that might be as high as 5-15, but they're less noticable due to the pixel density. The panel themselves might also be unevenly lit or have contamination, so you get what you pay for.
The caveat is that SLI setups cannot drive them, and single cards are not powerful enough to render modern games at 2560x1440 at a smooth 120 fps.
Microcenter Specs page for the EQ276W claims it supports HDCP. The one reviewed in the article did not...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and it is every bit of awesome for the $300 I spent
But my TV has a decent scalar and can handle all sorts of input resolutions. I have a hard time believing that these handle anything but 2560x1440 without ugliness. But I guess that that's sort of irrelevant when it comes to non-PC input as it doesn't support HDCP, but it might make for some poor gaming console use.
I picked up a Yamakasi Catleap a few weeks ago. No dead pixels that I can find. Looks incredible. The chassis appears to be made from cheap plastic but it's not an eyesore or anything. So much real estate!
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
The guy bought exactly what he wanted, at a fair price, and he's completely happy with it.
I'll make this short and sweet.
I got mine here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230774446127&ssPageName=ADME:L:OC:US:3160
It is the most amazing and beautiful screen I've ever owned, and I've actively been a computer geek for 34 years. It arrived in 2 days. There are no dead pixels. I've used it for hours daily since mid-April with no problems.
Have a nice day.
Back in April I read a recommendation on a thread on here about these monitors. I wish I could find the thread to give proper credit, but I didn't do such crazy tricks as emailing myself or bookmarking it. Firefox history search needs to work more like Gmail. Whoever it was, thanks, it's a really nice monitor! Good brightness, excellent colour reproduction, decent resolution. Reasonable size too :P The only complaint I have is a slight buzzing when displaying mostly-white content (eg this thread). It's practically inaudible though.
If anyone is interested, I bought through bigclothcraft on eBay. No affiliation, just a good price and very helpful in their communications!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
You can thank Samsung for your high quality iPad display. They designed and built it.
I think I did *once* just to check the supported refresh rates.
That's what Google is for, not some piece of possibly inaccurate paper.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, it's amazing what Samsung can accomplish when they work for Apple, instead of copying them.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
We're only just now noticing these? They've been extremely popular since January or February of this year.
I bought one in April or March (can't remember).
It's been fucking amazing.
I got the Yamakasi Catleap Q270 for $345 (shipping was included in the buy it now price).
0 paperwork, completely hassle free, and it arrived in about 4 business days.
Perfect condition, no dead pixels, everything about it is awesome. It has DVI-D output only (which means less screen lag for gamers due to not including a converter for things like HDMI), brightness up/down (I keep it pretty low - IPS panels are BRIGHT!), volume up/down (it has some really basic speakers that I don't use), and power button.
Everyone needs to buy these monitors! I HIGHLY recommend it everyone that can afford it.
Yet they market it as their own invention. So who's lying to their customers?
If I could get a 23 inch display with full 2560x2400 rez, a simple power button and up/down brightness control designed for 6500K color temp, single DVI for less then $1000, I'd buy.
What I get a damn kick out of is everyone things that an IPS display is going to be anymore color accurate (6bit color depth) then what a good CRT gave us (32bit color depth). Personally, the only reason I even need a damn brightness control is that the Gamma Control on my video card doesn't do enough when the display's backlight is to bright. Otherwise I use the tools of the OS/Video Card to adjust the damn color with a Spyder 4 Pro so things at least look as good as possible and for those in the states, check out Newegg. The unit is less then $200, thus a damn good deal if you do any digital work at all.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Saying that a monitor is "IPS" these days is such a loose term.
Are we talking E-IPS or S-IPS or one of the other flavours of IPS?
E-IPS screens are generally cheap and use 6-bit channels with that high speed dithering trick to get close to a full range of colour.
Which is what I am guessing we are atalking about with "cheap" IPS displays.
How is that prohibitively expensive? Large TV screens have always been in that price range.
Apple picked their hardware from a list. They are not "working for Apple", they are selling their own hardware to Apple.
ok. can i suggest that you actually get three 1280x1024 4:3 aspect ratio monitors instead? if you don't like 3, get 4 instead. the reason is very simple: after working constantly at my usual 10-12 hours per day in front of an apple 22in 1920x1200 LCD for 18 months, i now have severe "prism" on my eyes. that means that in the dark if i look at a point of light more than 2 metres away i *cannot* bring it into focus: i see 2 dots about 4 inches apart (at 2 metres).
my eyes have always "adjusted" to the LCDs/CRTs that i use (25 years so far), and so i was quite pissed off to learn 10 years ago - a long while before computer usage was as common as it is now - that opticians go "oh we hear that people with short-sighted glasses tend to be used to having clear vision, so we always add -0.25 diopters on just to be cautious" and fuck me if the fucking morons didn't make my eyes *worse* by 0.25 diopters every time i got new glasses.
why is that? well it's quite simple: looking at the screens, my eyes adjust to look at the screens. then the moronic opticians slap another -0.25 diopters on the prescription and my eyes... adjust accordingly. by age 36 i had -4.0 in both eyes, put on the new glasses and drove at night to where i was staying, and they were so bad that i had an instant headache that lasted for something like a day and a half. that was money well spent: i had to use the older glasses.
so the same thing has happened here, with this 22in mac (which is of course running debian gnu/linux, what else would it be running, duh??) - because i have been sitting in front of it for 18 months at a distance of only about 15in. my eyes can perfectly well flick to the left corner or the right, and get the correct focus instantaneously.
but if i put my glasses on and look out the window into the distance, and roll my head one way and then the other, still looking straight out the window, you can literally see my eyes "jump" as one of them moves faster than the other, and i cannot pull them together into focus. the reason is because my eyes were *expecting* to be focussing (at 45 degrees or so) on something at only about 16-18 in away, but i asked them to look instead (at 45 degrees or so) at something 20 metres away: they can't do it. it also turns out that it's not just the muscles / reflexes that have adjusted, it's the actual shape of my eye lenses. they literally point sideways (inwards - aka "prism") now, not straight ahead.
the bottom line is that you really REALLY have to watch out for these kinds of effects which _are_ reversible... you just have to quit your job as a highly-paid computer professional and go do something like work behind a cash register, or go be a farmer or a common labourer or god forbid a politician - *anything* but stare at screens from a distance of under 2 metres, and you'll get your eyesight back to normal after a couple of years.
when did cables got so retarded?
And you're gonna trust some random ad in ebay? what's next? you will believe they will send you a $700 monitor for $200?
about 1 minute after cables were invented and the person realized they could use either the same or different cables for different things, depending on how cheap or specific they wanted the cable to be to their application
To answer your followup question, regarding connectors, see my answer for cables.
I especially love how my APC BX1300G UPS is described as having an "Interface Port USB", which in reality, the device has an Ethernet connector [but does not support any networking protocol], with a cable that has a ethernet plug on one end and a USB plug on the other. I'm sure to be able to run down to the local store and replace it if this one ever gets damaged or lost.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Idiots like you who refuse to read the manual. High-rez monitors require dual link DVI. You used old single link DVI cables instead of the supplied dual link cable.
Rather then just think or do some research, you cost the company support costs that everyone has to pay for even if they are not as stupid as you.
I really wish support costs were simply done through the costs of the phone call or paid for emails, so people who can read don't have to pay for the terminally stupid.
It is the main reason Dell isn't really cheap, all the support costs people generate is what separates hardware costs from the selling price. Yes, your printer doesn't work? Did you plug in the power? No? That will be ten dollars please to pay the poor guy having to deal with it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm your biggest fan Luke!
The above only goes when you're short-sighted, right?
Thanks for the warning.
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Giant and TV screen no matter the kind is in the 120 inch range less than 70 normal less than 42 small.
this sound like a RJ45 serial port with a USB cable that contains an RS232 UART. or god knows what it is but that's no ethernet.
That's not an ethernet port then, it's an RJ45 plug on the end of a USB cable. Which is pretty insane, but, eh.
Applications other than ethernet sometimes use RJ45. I know some audio systems use RJ45
You could give anything you have, really, so why is it worth mentioning that one of the things you could give is "a shit"?
I've gone to see 3-d movies ; nothing worth seeing. I know that it's heretical, and that people who work in TV factories will be selling their babies to fricassee because of me ; that doesn't make me feel guilty enough to care about the technology. ... allegedly wonderful, so I asked my buddy to show me the difference on his several thousand $CURRENCY$ system. Things were different, certainly ; "better" ... well, not worth several thousand $CURRENCY$ of "different".
... Why?
... there are logos for "HD", "SRS" and "DOLBY" on the front of the telly. Does that mean that I'd actually got a HD TV and not known about it? Well, even less reason to change.
Ditto for stereo sound - I can barely tell whether the sound from anything is in mono or stereo, and bitterly resent the wasted speakers. (In any case, isn't "live" meant to be so much better than "stored", whatever the technology?)
HD, be it with TV or that $COLOUR$-Ray disc thing
No doubt, when the current TV gets broken, I'll have no choice but to replace it with a HD one. But change every other component of the system ?
Oh, I just thought I'd better check
Are we really expected to care about this? Isn't good content much more important than the box you replay it on? And the desperate shortage of good quality content is the real problem. (Fast-forwarding through the adverts is taken as a given.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If you read my post like SUPER carefully you may note I said "Microcenter". Not Ebay.
If you even RTFA you would have seen the Microcenter link they posted (which was to a slightly more expensive display with a different model designation, and one that also seemed to support HDCP) .
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They didn't used to do that. My first APC UPS had a standard B USB port on it to take a standard cord.
If you are observant the cable is a keyed RJ-45, so you couldn't plug it into an ethernet port (an ethernet RJ-45 will plug into the UPS though), and if you are really observant it is a 10 conductor RJ-45 end where ethernet is 8. I haven't decided if they are trying to be extra cheap or make it so that one cable has a USB A port on the other end and a different one has a RS-232, with each uses different contacts on the UPS side. Then again if they were trying to support RS-232 and UPS then the older UPSes would be the ones that might need it not the newer ones.
The lame part is my second UPS came from the store as a bundle, the UPS, a separate power strip, and an extra long USB A to B cord which I was planning to use to put the UPS further away from the computer, imagine my surprise when I got the bundle and found there was no way that was going to plug in to the UPS.
This is Slashdot, News for nerds, as it says on the top. I'm afraid you're in the minority here. I'd assume that most /.ers either know what single link vs dual link DVI is, or would be interested to learn.
(Wife and step-daughter insisted on getting a telly when we got married.)
I gave away my music collection about a year after moving in. I was always much more interested in the politics in the lyrics than in the sounds themselves.
I'm still not even sure if I've got a device - TV, laptop or whatever - which has a DVI connector - that's the ones with the two blocks of pins on a square grid? (Wikis ; yes, thought so.) So it's all utterly academic. Oddly, though I do have a DVI cable floating around in the mound of stuff - don't know where that appeared from.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
err, i'm flattered, i think :) i'd send you some warm fuzzy feelings of gratitude but you chose to remain anonymous, so anonymous gets the credit :)
The above only goes when you're short-sighted, right?
actually it applies regardless. your eyes are surrounded by muscles, and the shape of the lense is determined by both your overall health and how you use your eyes. they're the fastest-healing organ in the body, which is pretty amazing.
if you're really interested, there's a book around which has a series of exercises that you can do to *completely* correct *any* vision "deficiency". for example: there's a pattern that you can print out, and follow the exercise by looking at the pattern very close-up for 3 minutes a day, and it will correct minor astigmatism within under a week. major astigmatism takes a bit longer. all it is doing is exercising your eyes and your eye muscles in ways that you are *not* doing as part of your "normal" day-to-day life. that's all.
bottom line: our eyes are like any part of our body. use it or lose it applies just as well. i find it amazing that people even consider our eyes to be "static" and something that we cannot take control or responsibility for keeping healthy.
Thanks, great info. Due to prolonged use of soft contacts, I have a mild case of corneal neovascularization so I'm really scared of other bad stuff happening to my eyes.
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