Flat Panel Suggestions

Dave Baumann

Gamerscore Wh...
Moderator
Legend
OK, I'm looking to move from my CRT to a flat panel - requirements are:

- DVI
- 1280x1024 (or better)
- 19" +
- Must not suck too much for games playing.

Anyone got any suggestions?
 
I dig my Planar 19" LCD. It's old/ancient technology by today's standards, but it doesn't suck for gaming even if running at 1024x768 instead of its native 1280x1024 on an ATI 9800 nonPro. Even though it's only rated as 25ms response time, it looks much better than the Dell UltraSharp 18" I had previously when gaming. I dont notice any ghosting on it.

If you're using a high-end video card, you might want to have a look at the Dell 2001 20" LCD [1600x1200 DVI 16ms response].
 
DaveBaumann said:
OK, I'm looking to move from my CRT to a flat panel - requirements are:

- DVI
- 1280x1024 (or better)
- 19" +
- Must not suck too much for games playing.

Anyone got any suggestions?

I'm running on 24" widescreen - though CRT - for years now adn I'm telling you: I never will go 'down', under 23" again.

You can't go wrong:
- HP's newest multimedia 24" LCD - that's AWESOME!
- HP's pro series L2335 - even pivot...
- Sony's latest 23" LCD

I'm planning to buy a L2335 from HP... ;) these HP's have plenty of inputs, even regular HD component, everything.

Don't buy:

- new Apple Cinema Display (famous pink-problem almost always)
- original Apple clear Cinema Display: perfect picture but hard to check which one is actually the speedy (16ms) and whichone is the slower (20+ms) version AFAIK...[/i]
 
I'm on a 21" CRT at the moment, but LCD's are measured from the viewable area, IIRC, whic means that a 19" LCD would come close to what I'm already using.
 
The 17" LCD I use at home has almost exactly the same screen area as the 19" CRT I use at work. It's pretty good for motion (16ms) but the colour reproduction is pretty crappy unfortunately.

If I were you, I'd check out as many reviews as you can and make sure that the panel you get is an 8-bit one as you can notice a difference in colour reproduction with the 6-bit interpolated ones such as the one I have.
 
The Dell 2001FP is nice. 16x12, 16ms response time, generally looks really good. Dual inputs, IIRC.
 
DaveBaumann said:
OK, I'm looking to move from my CRT to a flat panel - requirements are:

- DVI
- 1280x1024 (or better)
- 19" +
- Must not suck too much for games playing.

Anyone got any suggestions?

A lot of it depends on your budget. The dell monitors aren't the very best, but typically you can get them for a steal if you wait until they have a 20% off sale or something. Otherwise there are many expensive LCDs out there that are very nice. I'm personally very happy with my samsung SyncMaster 191t, (19" 1280x1024) but the pixel response is a bit slow for certain color transitions.

Nite_Hawk
 
1.
The Baron said:
The Dell 2001FP is nice. 16x12, 16ms response time, generally looks really good. Dual inputs, IIRC.

Actually that's a cool one but then I'd go for the widescreen 20" : surprisingly Dell priced the same as the regular 4:3 20"... :oops:

Check that out, Dave, that's a good one.

2. HP has a trade-in (if you have an old monitor laying around) program - check out the details here: http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/promo/monitor/faq.html#faq2
 
T2k said:
1.
The Baron said:
The Dell 2001FP is nice. 16x12, 16ms response time, generally looks really good. Dual inputs, IIRC.

Actually that's a cool one but then I'd go for the widescreen 20" : surprisingly Dell priced the same as the regular 4:3 20"... :oops:

Not in this country.
 
DaveBaumann said:
So, is a 25ms response time really not good for playing games?

depends on you . My 18ms response time nec 17 inch lcd screen gives me no problems , but my sister says its a ghosting mess . She has a 14ms screen and that doens't give her problems.

Go to best buy or some where and look at the screens and see what bothers u
 
DaveBaumann said:
So, is a 25ms response time really not good for playing games?

For fast paced games (FPS;)), no. Do you like 40 fps max, ghosting, etc?
But other genres are OK.
 
Dave, I have a friend that has 2 of the Dell 2001FP, and they work great. But, I reciently picked up a 19" 25ms flatscreen for a non gaming friend - and the gohosting on it - I had to check it out, you know - was terrible! In fact, it actually made me sick to my stomach just looking at it for a minute or 2......
 
DaveBaumann said:
So, is a 25ms response time really not good for playing games?

That my friend, is a very loaded question, and the answer is that it really depends. I would actually suggest doing a search on this forum for LCD, and you'll probably come up with some discussion of this topic. I guess I'll repeat some of it though since it's christmas. :D

Basically, there is no specific ways manufacturers are required to list their pixel response times for the LCDs they produce. Most manufacturers these days though, have adopted a method where they measure the time it takes to go from white to black, and back to white, or black to white and back to black. Usually a number like "25ms" is the sum of these two numbers. You also must keep in mind that they usually have some kind of threshold they use to claim that it has finished a transition. Some manufacturers play games with this. So one manufacturer may claim that once a LCD element is within 10% of it's target voltage it has successfully completed a transition, others may decide that 15% is a valid threshold.

There is another problem. Generally going from white to black, or from black to white is a very easy transition. You can either min or max the voltage and you very quickly will get to the target voltage. Stablizing on intermediate voltages though is much slower because extra time is needed to slow down and stablize on a specific voltage (within whatever tolerance the manufacturer specifies). In this case, everything depends on how quickly the electronics in the display can stablize on intermediate voltages, and the pixel response time published by manufacturers doesn't tell you this at all because their tests don't measure it, they just measure how quickly the min and max voltages can be reached!

So basically, a display with a published 16ms response time will be able to complete both a white to black and black to white transition in 16ms (though again, to within whatever tolerance the manufacturer uses) but will usually be much slower for certain color transitions. because publishers don't tell you about the other color transitions, you really have no idea if a display with a 16ms response time is actually any faster than a display with a published 25ms response time for anything but black to white or white to black.

There is an article over at extremetech which is pretty old now that talks about a technology mitsubishi is working on that is designed to make intermediate color transitions faster. It's pretty interesting, but the thing that is really interesting is that they have a chart showing gray level transitions to and from values ranging from 0 to 255. In it, you can see that going from white to black only takes 8ms, and going from black to white only takes 17, (so they measure it as a 25ms display), but most transitions are actually taking closer to 40ms, and one over 50ms!

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,10085,00.asp

Honestly, if I was in the market for and LCD, I would rely more based on word of mouth and high speed photographs of games in motion on the display than the published pixel response. You might want to try reading through this thread at arstechnica (warning, it's 214 pages long):

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=4190936913
 
darling, what is the res on the 2005FPW? 1680x1050. now, my dear friends, how is he going to do 1600x1200 on that? answer: he's not.

not everything supports widescreen yet.
 
The Baron said:
darling, what is the res on the 2005FPW? 1680x1050. now, my dear friends, how is he going to do 1600x1200 on that? answer: he's not.

not everything supports widescreen yet.

Everything supports widescreen since long time ago.

Few games need to be andjusted manually but that's all. I play everything in 1920x1200 for months now (since I've upgraded from my former 9700 Pro)..
 
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/monitors/tft/l2335.html

Panel Type 23-inch Active Matrix TFT (thin film transistor)
Viewable Image Area (diagonal) 23 in (58.4 cm)
Screen Opening
(W x H) 19.53 x 12.24 in (49.6 x 31.1 cm)
Viewing Angle (typical)* Up to 170° H/ 170° V (10:1 minimum contrast ratio)
Brightness (typical)* Up to 250 nits (cd/m2)
Contrast Ratio (typical)* Up to 500:1
Response Rate (typical)* 16 ms (typical, rise + fall)
Pixel Pitch 0.258 mm
Colour Depth Support 16.7 million colours

Input Signal Five connectors, including one 15-pin mini D-sub VGA, one DVI-I (VGA analog and digital input), one composite video, one s-video, component video


I love it. Cheaper the the apple displays, and it seems more feature full.
If I could buy two more, (And ATI or Nvidia would buy the tripple head output from Matrox) I would be in paradise.
 
Two weeks ago my brave Ilyama 19" CRT died after 5 years of extensive usage.

I've seen several TFT's at my friends houses and I took a good look at a variety of displays at LAN parties, or at shops where you are allowed to try them with more than "swirling-the-mouse-over-the-desktop", but I never was quite satisfied with the response times.

As NiteHawk explained, don't trust the pixel response time of the manufacturer as an absolute criteria. I've played on a Fujitsu Siemens 19" with 25ms and it looked great, minimal ghosting, great colors (it was an S-IPS panel) but it was simply a ugly MF. I've also played extensively on a Samsung Syncmaster 710T with 12ms and ghosting was quite visible.

After lots of reading on www.prad.de i've decided on the Hyundai L90D+ with 8ms response time. (The BenQ FP937S+, which has about the same panel but is a bit cheaper, was not available)
http://www.geizhals.at/eu/a127359.html

Honestly this thing is good enough for me.
I've played HL2, Doom3, NFSU, and watched tons of demoscene stuff and most of the time ghosting is a non-problem.

Really I thought I was picky, but there is simply no going back for me.
I highly recommend this display. (And with ~500€ with shipping it is affordable)
 
Back
Top