This Industry Needs An Ene...Err I Mean Better Reviews

Currently looking at LCD panels to purchase for home use. Would actually like to get a good non-Trinitron 21" monitor, but those are becoming hard to come by.

Anyhow, the dilemma is this. What LCD panel out there is 19" or larger, not too expensive (within $550-750), is good at displaying blacks (the Dell 1901FP 19" panel that I'm working on right now for instance looks washed out when it's displaying mostly white backgrounds with black text) and is good at displaying motion.

Of course the problem is that LCD panels are not very good at displaying blacks and not typically good at displaying motion.

From the scant reviews that I've seen, it sounds like the Dell 2001FP is a good choice for motion, but I don't want to spend $800-900 for a monitor and the fact that it has a resolution of 1600x1200 means that it's not great for games either (most modern games (City of Heroes or Doom 3) are only playable with decent framerates of 30-60 at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 and that's if you have an ultra-fast PC). LCD panels do not downscale resolutions very well (try viewing 1024x768 on a 1280x1024 panel and you'll see what I mean, gets fuzzy in a hurry).

So that's my quandary. To make things worse, there are not a lot of good sources for reviews on the subject, at least that I have found. This is the type of search that just totally kills engines like Google as the top 100-200 items if you search for LCD reviews are bloated with sites selling LCD panels, which is totally NOT what I want when I search for LCD reviews.

The LCD makers totally are not helping the situation either as they all inflate their numbers or use irrelevant measurements when giving specs for their monitors or just leave out important specs altogether. For instance, brightness rating is meaningless as a brighter monitor is not better, the measurement they use for latency is meaningless as they don't tell you the worse transition latency (usually grey to grey) they give you what is typically the best measurement and doesn't have much to do with real world use (off to on to off) and they don't even tell you whether the pixels are full 256 bit color or if they are using lower bit color + dithering to try to fool you into thinking your monitor can display 16 million colors at once, when it can't.

Oh and then there's the problem of getting a monitor with dead pixels. This is one area where I can totally endorse the Dell 1901FP. I have 40 of them here at the office and so far only one of them had issues with a dead column of pixels, but that was replaced next day. Just about every review I've read for an NEC, Samsung or other LCD panel talks about how there are 1-4 dead pixels on arrival. And of course they don't replace for that few dead pixels, typically policy is 8 pixels is minimum to replace.

So you have all of these specs that you have to research while trying to figure out the other hidden reasons why one monitor is $100 more than another. It's enough to drive you a little nutsola.

Anyhow, as a customer looking to shell out money, I find the situation a bit unacceptable. So if you know of a good review site that covers all of the ground mentioned above (oh and I didn't even get into the subject of ergonomics, another area where the current crop of Dell panels excel) let me know.

Comments

[Jim]

I've been trolling the sites too and have heard good things about the Dell and the 12ms 17" Samsung 172x (http://www.pcextreme.net/samsung172X.php). However, they both miss on one or more of your features.

I'm going to just wait with my current 19" old school CRT monitor. Your wish list is similar to mine:
- ideally 19",
- around 1280x1024 res so I can actually read text and play games w/o resizing to blurry settings,
- fast refresh to avoid artifacts in moving video,
- good color
- good ergonomics
- reasonable price
I haven't seen anything that meets all these requirements. However a 19" CRT display that do these is a steal these days. Except for size/weight/heat output , that seems like a safe bet while the quality, flexibility and price of LCDs continue to improve.

- Jim

[carlos]

I use 2 ViewSonic VP191b LCDs (http://www.viewsonic.com/products/desktopdisplays/lcddisplays/proseries/vp191b/) at work I'm very pleased with them. I haven't tested it with video games since they are work only but you might want to check them out regardless.

[Alex Scoble]

The ViewSonic VP912B sounds pretty good. Rated at 12ms response time and there's a review for it at gamepc.com (http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=vp912b&page=1). Don't know how objective it is, as that is a site that sells the same hardware that they rate.

Will have to look around locally to see if I can see a demo model as the coating on the panel sounds counter-productive. One of the nice things about LCD panels is that they are coated to be very glare resistant. The Dell 1901FPs that we have here can be used in a room where bright direct sunlight hits the face of the panel. Can't do that with any CRT.

Other nice thing about LCDs is that they never lose convergence. The geometry of the display doesn't degrade over time like it does with a CRT, especially a large CRT like a 21". Always found it pretty annoying that you'd buy a brand new CRT and the electron beam would be misconverging at the edges of the monitor.