Well, I have a Philips LED 21' monitor and today I bought a Samsung 22' LED monitor (S22C301), or should I say old LCD? Something looks wrong - the image "changes" the brightness and colors if you change your viewing angle. The brightness seems intense even if I change it to almost zero. I am considering returning the monitor, but is worth to keep it?
That sounds like typical LCD to me, all of them have viewing angle dependent color and brightness. Image gets darker when viewed below and brighter when above, and at more extreme angles some color will go negative even.
Some panel technologies have much less pronounced effect, but those tend to be much more expensive too.
Exactly. The other monitor is free of such problem. That's why I'm asking about returning it or not. I just put it at 30 degress ".\" and the image is slightly better, but still has the problem. At anyway, it's not a problem, but a feature of typical LCDs.
Zepper wrote:
Well, I have a Philips LED 21' monitor and today I bought a Samsung 22' LED monitor (S22C301), or should I say old LCD?
Except for a tiny number of OLED monitors, "LED TV" means "LED-backlit LCD" or "LED-lit DLP projector".
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Something looks wrong - the image "changes" the brightness and colors if you change your viewing angle.
Typical of TN LCD panels. My laptop is the same way: tilting the screen up and down produces a change analogous to that of the gamma control. Macs, phones, and tablets are more likely to use an IPS LCD, which has more consistent output across angles. If you'll be rotating the monitor, you'll need IPS. Did you get a Phil-IPS?
I'm of the opinion that you should always upgrade... If you personally feel that the replacement product has more flaws than advantages when compared to its predecessor, something is wrong. If you decide to keep it now you might regret in the future.
Monitors and TVs are always a surprise, so the best thing to do is check them out in person at a store (even if you don't plan on buying at that specific store) before you decide on which model to buy. The second best thing you can do is look for reviews online. If a product has serious flaws, you can bet that people will be talking about them.
My PC monitor sucks, the slightest tilting will completely mess up the colors. It doesn't bother me much because I don't do any serious visual work here.
Preface: I know jack shit about televisions. But I know way too much about computer monitors.
The problem in question sounds like standard TN panel or IPS panel bullshit. I tried googling for that model (as well as the model with "F" on the end), but I couldn't determine anything about the actual LCD panel type used -- only that it's LED backlit. Anyway, TN and IPS are LCD panel types (different types of technology used for LCDs) that are most commonly available today. In the past there were several more, but panel vendors stopped making them and consolidated to just TN and IPS. IPS is the most common, with TN coming in at a very close second.
TN panels are known for having worse colour gamut/range (though there is newer technology in them to combat that) and really bad viewing angles, but the bonus is that they have fast response times (i.e. very little ghosting). Gamers tend to like TN panels because the grey-to-grey and white-to-black response times tend to be really good.
IPS panels (all of them -- there's like 4 or 5 different sub-types of IPS now) are known for having improved colour gamut/range compared to TN and better viewing angles (but keep reading), but are plagued with "IPS glow" (not to be confused with backlighting bleed/glow -- that's a separate problem) and a myriad of other complications. Some IPS panels (in my experience, many of the newer ones (made within the past 5 years)) have viewing angle issues as well, particularly in the corners of the screens.
IPS glow (Google the term, see Youtube videos -- you'll be blown out of the water when you see it, asking "how on earth can people accept this?!?!") becomes a bigger and bigger problem the (physically) larger the monitor gets. On a small screen, say 13", it's harder to see the glow -- but on something like a 24" screen, you can sit looking at the centre but the upper left/right and lower left/right corners look like they're covered in a "white smoky haze". I've tried 4 different 24" IPS LCDs in the past few years and all of them had IPS glow so bad that I literally couldn't read the clock in the taskbar in the bottom right of the screen, or easily distinguish any of the systray icons.
There are some kinds of "AG film" (anti-glare film) that can be used to minimise (or in some cases completely get rid of) IPS glow, but most manufacturers don't bother doing this.
All of this makes shopping for a good LCD monitor tedious as hell. There's now literally 7 or 8 attributes/things you have to look for, and about half of them are never disclosed by the manufacturer.
What pisses me off the most: it's virtually impossible to find S-PVA panels any more. IMO, S-PVA was the best of the bunch -- it had amazing colour gamut, near pure black, no IPS glow (because it's S-PVA not IPS), and response times were "pretty good" (a bit slower than IPS, but not by much). Nobody ever bothered making a S-PVA panel that used decent backlighting (e.g. LED), so most S-PVA panels are backlit by CCFL, which draws a bit of power and the monitor tends to get hot.
I write all of this on a Dell 2407WFP monitor -- S-PVA panel, and no longer made/supported. When this thing goes out, I'm almost certainly (no joke) going to start crying. It's utterly ridiculous how awful present-day LCD panels are, and it's worsened by the fact that all the idiot panel manufacturers are consolidating into two common resolutions: 1366x768 (regardless of monitor size -- I have seen 16" screens using that resolution, which is ridiculous -- the pixels look awful. 12" or 13" it might be better) and 1920x1080 (all of this is caused by the idiotic "I want 16:9 everywhere" belief, because 16:10 (e.g. 1920x1200) apparently just makes too much sense, or too many people are bothered by two thin black strips across the bottom and top of the screen when watching 16:9 content).
And don't even get me started on dead or lit pixel policies -- I could rant about that for a decade. It's really simple: the goal of a display device is to display every single (visual) piece of data transmit across the wire (especially for digital mediums like DVI or HDMI). If you've got a dead or lit pixel, you obviously can't display the data you received, which means the device fails to do what is single intended goal is. There is really no other way to look at it.
I find it completely hilarious that these type of problems plague televisions. Televisions have even more needy requirements, such as the ability to see the picture clearly from any viewing angle (this is more negotiable on computer monitors), yet it seems the manufacturers don't care. At my previous job we used plasma displays -- and while they had none of the nonsense LCD did, they weighed an insane amount, and they also suffered from burn-in (yes really -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I always thought burn-in was specific to classic CRT and that alone -- boy was I wrong).
I was going to include a little "yay! Go OLED!" lecture, but as it turns out OLED monitors are all curved (by design, but nobody seems to be actually providing the reason WHY they have to be curved), they can suffer from burn-in, and they're bloody expensive (Samsung's 55" OLED TV costs US$9000. Yes you heard me right).
Honestly, you know what I'd love? Mainstream displays using whatever Apple Retina uses. Those screens are small -- 15.1" -- but they sport a resolution of 2880x1800 (that's 220 pixels per inch). My work sent me an Apple MacBook Pro at one point, and while I hated everything else about it, the screen was mindblowingly gorgeous -- I seriously could not see the edges of a pixel without shoving my eyeball right up against the screen -- and they had no viewing angle problems or glow issues that I could find. That is the kind of beauty I'd love to have on a desktop display. And I just read that the new iMac Retina 5K -- are you ready -- uses a resolution of 5120x2880 at 27" (that's 218ppi). Yup. So where is this technology for mainstream desktop displays and TVs? It obviously exists, and is in the market, yet........
Rant over.
koitsu wrote:
it's worsened by the fact that all the idiot panel manufacturers are consolidating into two common resolutions: 1366x768 (regardless of monitor size -- I have seen 16" screens using that resolution, which is ridiculous -- the pixels look awful. 12" or 13" it might be better)
The "standard" pixel density for a desktop monitor 28 inches away from the eyes is 96 dpi. At this pixel density, a 768p monitor should have a diagonal image size of (1366^2+768^2)^.5/96 = 16.3 inches., and a 1440p monitor should be (2560^2+1440^2)^.5/96 = 30.6 inches. It's worsened by the fact that you run Windows XP, which isn't known for its strong support of high-density monitors. But the monitor can be proportionally smaller with the same angular density if it's closer to you, such as a laptop's built-in monitor.
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and 1920x1080 (all of this is caused by the idiotic "I want 16:9 everywhere" belief, because 16:10 (e.g. 1920x1200) apparently just makes too much sense, or too many people are bothered by two thin black strips across the bottom and top of the screen when watching 16:9 content).
That's because economies of scale make it more profitable to repurpose TV panels for computer monitors.
koitsu wrote:
the idiotic "I want 16:9 everywhere" belief
I take faint consolation by putting one above the other,giving me an 8:9 aspect ratio.
It's odd that I used to dualhead at 8:3, 2304x864 but find a single 16:9 1920x1080 monitor too small.Quote:
Mainstream displays using whatever Apple Retina uses. Those screens are small -- 15.1" -- but they sport a resolution of 2880x1800 (that's 220 pixels per inch).
Have you seen the DisplayPort-to-iPadscreen adapters? e.g.
http://www.adafruit.com/product/1652 If I had a computer that supported the relevant interface I'd probably be using them.
You can spend a nice $60 for a used 1600x1200 panel. Just about all of the ~20" ones are nice IPS or PVA panels, and will be better in every category except for response times.