Best widescreen 20" LCD for image quality and gaming performance?

I've found my 2005FPW and 2405FPW to be very good with games other than Doom3-like color pallettes. LCDs can't do black points very well cuz of the nature of having a big backlight in there, and you also get some banding in the dark shadows when my Dells are blending greys and black. It's analogous to running like 16-bit color instead of 32-bit IMO. It only affects very dark areas where you are seeing varying shadowing levels, nothing else looks bad at all.

In other games the brightness, contrast, color quality have all been extremely beneficial and the sheer size of the 2405 is utterly mind blowing for gaming. I've done some experimentation with gamma correction of grey and colors and I've found the LCDs to be darn near spot on by default. I've played probably 50 different games on these screens over the past 9 months or so and it has been a complete pleasure. My only qualm would be that 1920x1200 is really too much for video cards in games. Believe it or not, if there were quality problems I would still buy it because gaming is so incredibly much more immersive on a big screen.

BTW, the screens look a lot better than any laptop LCD I've had over the past few years and they are also a lot better looking than my old Samsung Syncmaster 950p 19" CRT that was one of the best CRTs I've personally ever seen. I tried running the 2005FPW side by side with the 950p for multimonitor but it was just laughable how bad the LCD made the dimmer and washed out CRT look. My CRT is probably suffering a bit from age though.

Biggest prob with LCDs and games IMO is the darn 60 Hz refresh. It's such a tough trade off to go w/ or w/o Vsync. Tearing or framerate halving issues. Triple buffering is usually not an option in D3D games either. I've played with the ATI Tray Tools flip queue size tweak and it usually don't work very reliably.

I'm not sure if there are still LCDs out there with bad ghosting probs or not, but I have not seen one in years. Even my laptops have not perceptively ghosted in games like UT2004 even along with high framerates (I have a 6800Go in my current note). The last time I saw horrid ghosting was back in 2001 or so on an obviously older 15" analog desktop LCD. My friend was playing UT on it and it was blurring out a bit. Do not buy analog LCDs, btw. But I also used to play Descent multiplayer on Kali with a 486 notebook that had a dual scan LCD, so what do I know. Yeah it ghosted but I don't remember hating the universe cuz of it.

 

And now he tells me not to buy analog LCDs...where were you 2 years ago when I got mine? Seriously, to anyone around, heed that warning. Analog LCDs are unbearable...unless you`re god, good luck finding an adequate clock/phase combination. I know I haven`t been able to. End of rant

 

Something entirely different:

I decided to go for image quality first because I'm into photography and gaming second. This Eizo is only 19" but a really great LCD. As far as gaming goes, I have been playing Oblivion for hours on end without any noticable problems.

http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review_eizo_s1910-k.html

This Eizo 21" looks pretty damn sweet too:

http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review-eizo-s2110w-k.html

 

I also go for IQ first. After all, if it seems too small, you can move it closer, but if it looks bad there's not much you can do. But I just can't stand 5:4, it looks so narrow and weird to me.

Actually, as far as display area goes, 19" 5:4 and 20" 16:10 are very close. They can be considered the same size.

BeHardware shows a quite different picture. Otherwise I would probably have bought it.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/587-1/eizo-s2110w-the-big-come-back.html

 

That is really bad, 7 is a huge number for any display nowdays. I got 3 2005fpws and none had a single dead pixel.

Who did you buy the NEC from? It sounds like a second.

 

guys, any PC screen with 16:9 and HDMI ?



im afraid of connecting a console (the new ones.... ok, ps3 ) to a pc screen and not having the correct aspect ratio! so that leaves me with 16:9 screens only (and hdmi)


thanks in advance

 

You get correct aspect ratio with 4:3, I can't see any reason why 16:9 would be different. And 16:10 is just nicer for general PC usage anyway.

But I have a big gripe with not using the whole screen when it's trivial to do. So I'm not buying any console unless the interesting games support 16:10.

Oh, and do you really need HDMI? There are HDMI->DVI adapters, should work just fine.

 

I just got a vx2025wm. It's great. Amazingly bright, good contrast, no banding and close to color accurate. I got mine for $350, and I've seen it even cheaper around the web.

I upgraded from a 3 year old sony G410R 19" CRT. It's so much brighter and clearer than my old montor that I can't imagine going back to CRT, and I thought I'd be the last one to change over.