Disappointed with my second 22" LCD! Input wanted.

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desertjedi

Weaksauce
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About two weeks ago I got a 22" Samsung 2232BW at Best Buy. I ended up returning it because it had a strong blue dominance (which couldn't be corrected through LCD controls) and bad backlight bleed. It was a 'CMO' panel. While I had it, I noticed that the LCD was also way too bright. No matter how I set the brightness/contrast, I could never get a bold, clean white that wasn't a result of "over-driving" the brightness and contrast.

So next I order a 22" Viewsonic vx2240w. My current LCD is a 19" Viewsonic VP903b which, I will soon find out, is an excellent LCD. I boot the vx2240w. The colors are a little off (not that bad) but there's no horrible blue cast like there was on the Samsung. There's no backlight bleed at all on the sides, about 1/8" on top and 1/4" on bottom. Not bad except that the screen is simply too bright when I display a completely black picture. It's so bright it seems to almost have a bluish tint.

Like the Samsung, the Viewsonic is simply way too bright. I screw with the brightness/contrast and finally get something that won't burn my eyes out but the white is not "bold" and "clean" and the bottom half of the screen is brighter than the top half ever so slightly.

Next, I crank up The Witcher and load a savegame in the sewers - a dark level with light streaming in through some grates. The game now looks like the someone went nuts on the contrast. Wooden barrels no longer look like wood but more like metal that's had a welding torch applied and now has viscious highlights. Manipulating b and c controls does not help. This situation was the same with the Samsung.

Next, in a totally bizarre twist, I load up a Vietcong jungle map and its totally washed out like someone turned the contrast way down and the brightness way up. I expected it to have intense highlights like The Witcher. I think the problem is that the map is simply way too "lit up" and the blacks are just "gone".

I use an inexpensive Dell 17" LCD at work and prior to last night a 19" Viewsonic at home. Both were able to produce extremely bold colors and clean whites without over-driving the brightness/contrast. With these LCDs, the display was perfectly easy on the eyes. With the two 22"-ers I've tried, it's like someone is shining an overly bright light through a picture.

Is this just the way it is with current LCDs as brightness ratings keep going higher and higher? Why such a difference going from 19" to 22"? It would seem that I'm going to have to get involved with making profiles for all my games now. If I was using an ATI card, it'd be no biggie since Tray Tools totally rocks but I have an 8800 GTS 512 and gaming profiles have never been a strong point of Nvidia. can anyone recommend a good third-party (no CCC plz) "Nvidia" app for profiles?

One thing to note is that I have not installed the Viewsonic drivers but I seriously doubt it will make any difference.
 
I am finding the same problem. All the bigger panels are too bright, the backlights are too powerful and have limited control range.

Basically in a race to have the brightest panel, usability/sanity has gone out the window.

Don't buy any panel that is 400cd/m2 or brighter. They won't be able to turn much below 200cd/m2 and that can be way too bright.300cd/m2 or even better 250 cd/m2 max brightness will usually let your turn them down enough to use in a dim room without retina scorching.
 
desertjedi said:
About two weeks ago I got a 22" Samsung 2232BW at Best Buy. I ended up returning it because it had a strong blue dominance (which couldn't be corrected through LCD controls) and bad backlight bleed. It was a 'CMO' panel. While I had it, I noticed that the LCD was also way too bright. No matter how I set the brightness/contrast, I could never get a bold, clean white that wasn't a result of "over-driving" the brightness and contrast.

So next I order a 22" Viewsonic vx2240w. My current LCD is a 19" Viewsonic VP903b which, I will soon find out, is an excellent LCD. I boot the vx2240w. The colors are a little off (not that bad) but there's no horrible blue cast like there was on the Samsung. There's no backlight bleed at all on the sides, about 1/8" on top and 1/4" on bottom. Not bad except that the screen is simply too bright when I display a completely black picture. It's so bright it seems to almost have a bluish tint.

Like the Samsung, the Viewsonic is simply way too bright. I screw with the brightness/contrast and finally get something that won't burn my eyes out but the white is not "bold" and "clean" and the bottom half of the screen is brighter than the top half ever so slightly.

Next, I crank up The Witcher and load a savegame in the sewers - a dark level with light streaming in through some grates. The game now looks like the someone went nuts on the contrast. Wooden barrels no longer look like wood but more like metal that's had a welding torch applied and now has viscious highlights. Manipulating b and c controls does not help. This situation was the same with the Samsung.

Next, in a totally bizarre twist, I load up a Vietcong jungle map and its totally washed out like someone turned the contrast way down and the brightness way up. I expected it to have intense highlights like The Witcher. I think the problem is that the map is simply way too "lit up" and the blacks are just "gone".

I use an inexpensive Dell 17" LCD at work and prior to last night a 19" Viewsonic at home. Both were able to produce extremely bold colors and clean whites without over-driving the brightness/contrast. With these LCDs, the display was perfectly easy on the eyes. With the two 22"-ers I've tried, it's like someone is shining an overly bright light through a picture.

Is this just the way it is with current LCDs as brightness ratings keep going higher and higher? Why such a difference going from 19" to 22"? It would seem that I'm going to have to get involved with making profiles for all my games now. If I was using an ATI card, it'd be no biggie since Tray Tools totally rocks but I have an 8800 GTS 512 and gaming profiles have never been a strong point of Nvidia. can anyone recommend a good third-party (no CCC plz) "Nvidia" app for profiles?

One thing to note is that I have not installed the Viewsonic drivers but I seriously doubt it will make any difference.
Click to expand...

I have the exact same LCD (Viewsonic VX2240w) and I'm pretty sure you have dynamic contrast enabled. This feature changes the contrast settings based on the image on the screen. I hate the way it makes the screen look and keep it disabled.

The problem is, this monitor has a glitch where everytime you turn it off or switch to a different input, the dynamic contrast settings is set back to ON even though when you check the settings, it says OFF. So basically, everytime i turn it on, I have to go into the "Manual Image Adjust" settings and turn it ON and then OFF. Make sure you do this before you try and calibrate the monitor also.

If you go to Newegg, and read the customer reviews for this LCD, you will see people mentioning this problem. That is where I learned about it.
 
JVOBIKER said:
I have the exact same LCD (Viewsonic VX2240w) and I'm pretty sure you have dynamic contrast enabled. This feature changes the contrast settings based on the image on the screen.
Click to expand...
Dynamic fraud doesn't change contrast but backlight brightness.
And it can result everything from brightness pumping constantly up and down to high contrast scenes whose small highlights look dirty grey.
 
E.T said:
Dynamic fraud doesn't change contrast but backlight brightness.
And it can result everything from brightness pumping constantly up and down to high contrast scenes whose small highlights look dirty grey.
Click to expand...

lol, clever. whatever it does, it makes my picture look like crap so i turn it off. it sucks that i have to do this every single time i turn on the computer.
 
JVOBIKER said:
lol, clever. whatever it does, it makes my picture look like crap so i turn it off. it sucks that i have to do this every single time i turn on the computer.
Click to expand...
And then we have those same marketing clowns who devised it at first for deceiving consumers advertising it as some Jesus feature...
Would be fun to have those marketing clowns as "stress toy", don't you think?
(same goes for advertisers of "eyeballs smoking in their sockets" brightness levels)
 
JVOBiker, I'd heard of that bug with dynamic contrast on this LCD but of course, forgot it about. I will give that a try when I get home. I have never touched the Dynamic Contrast setting since I had heard it blew chunks. So, it indeed, may be stuck in the wrong setting.

My old VP930b was 250 cd/m2 and my new vx2240w is 300cd/m2. I'm also wondering if maybe my VP930b might not have been a TN panel where my new LCD is. If that's the case, I think we need to get away from TN panels.

At lunch, I went home and did a sort-of side-by-side comparison of The Witcher on my old LCD and my new one by swapping the D-SUB connector between LCDs. The game image was definitely better on the old LCD. From playing around, I realized that there was no way I could get the image on the new LCD to look as good as the old one. The old image is perfect with pleasing colors and subtle detail. The new one is like "scorched" with too much contrast causing unnatural darks but at the same time too bright allowing me to see stuff in textures that I shouldn't really see - fine details that only work when at a lower brightness. It's like someone took a texture and shone a blazing light on it and it "ruins" the effect of the texture.

JVO, can you tell me why I was able to adjust the Sharpness setting at one point but now it's grayed out? Thanks.

Thanks for sharing my pain - this has got me bummed. I also made the mistake of buying the new LCD at newegg whose return policy on LCDs is useless.
 
desertjedi said:
My old VP930b was 250 cd/m2 and my new vx2240w is 300cd/m2. I'm also wondering if maybe my VP930b might not have been a TN panel where my new LCD is. If that's the case, I think we need to get away from TN panels.
Click to expand...
Diagnosis you made about panels is right, VP930 is MVA:
http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=41&mo1=302&p1=2920&ma2=41&mo2=67&p2=730&ph=8
You can always tell TN from non TN by lack of vertical viewing angle. (+upper edge of image is darker even when looked from center)
Also TN's having 6-bit colours (64 values of RGB colour channels) doesn't help in getting good colours.
 
you could have fixed the blue dominance on the Samsung with the profile found here.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I know all about that profile and that site but it's not my job to "fix" an inadequte LCD. Plus the backlight bleed on it was really bad. But thanks for the suggestion.

Diagnosis you made about panels is right, VP930 is MVA:
Click to expand...
Thanks for the confirmation, E.T.

I tested the "Dynamic Contrast being stuck on" theory and it didn't pan out. I did enough testing and powering off the LCD to determine that I am not running with Dynamic Contrast on and I don't have the problem of it coming on after a power off/on.

The best way to describe the differences between my older Viewsonic VP903b and both the Samsung 2232BW and Viewsonic vx2240w is this...

the VP903b displayed like it was backlit with a very soft light. The two 22" TN LCDs display like they're backlit with a very harsh light. That seems to encapsulate the difference to a tee.
 
Having owned a 22" before, I did not like it. At first, I thought it was good. But later notice more and more that the color wasn't as vivid and the backlighting isn't even. When I got a 24" S-PVA lcd, HUGE difference in image quality. If you want to upgrade a monitor, get a good one that will last you a long time, Most likely, you won't upgrade a monitor as much as a pc. So... might as well spend the extra dough for a good one that will last.
 
So... might as well spend the extra dough for a good one that will last.
Click to expand...
Wow - I was just thinking this before I came back to this thread.

I guess I was embarrassed to mention this but I do about 10 hours of photo editing for my online store every week. I just finished about two hours of photo editing on this 22" Viewsonic vx2240w and I think I've screwed up my eyes (for the rest of the evening anyway).

I'm not sure I can put my finger on it but something just isn't right. I think the consistency of the brightness is so poor compared to my previous VP930b that after two hours of editing I simply can't seem to focus right. It's weird...one minute I'll think the screen is too dim and I'll brighten it. The next minute, I'll think it's too bright and turn down the settings. And this happens over and over. I guess I simply didn't do all my homework on this one.

Apparently, if one is going to do this kind of work, spending $250-300 on an LCD just isn't going to cut it. Since I can't return the vx2240w to Newegg, I'm going to put it upstairs on our "occasional e-mail and surfing" PC and reinstate my VP930b for editing.

If I ever need to upgrade, I'll contact some graphics professionals (and come here too) to see what people recommend and I will spare no expense - especially since my business would be paying for it anyway.

I really like these forums - I think there's a lot of hardware die-hards here like myself. I've never seen PC forums that have so much activity in such a short time - great for getting quick replies.

Hey Hardware-Guru, I really don't need a 24" LCD or heck even a 22" LCD for photo editing. Do they make 19" S-PVA LCD monitors? And how do you find out what type panel an LCD has? I don't think any of the descriptions at Newegg, for example, tell you.
 
If you want a good lcd and 22" or 24" is not needed, get a good 20". The 20" will give you a higher resolution at 1600 x 1200 Non WS or 1680 x 1050 WS than a 19" LCD. Some of the 20" you can find are IPS or S-PVA type panels which does not suffer from color shifts due to poor viewing angles on TN lcds such as 22" and some of the 24" panels that are common nowdays. Since you do alot of photo editing, this lcd size and type would be more ideal. The pixel pitch on 20" lcds is also smaller as oppose to a 22". A good 20" for example would be a Dell 2007WFP LCD.

http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/dell-ultrasharp-2007wfp/4505-3174_7-31783769.html
 
desertjedi said:
Hey Hardware-Guru, I really don't need a 24" LCD or heck even a 22" LCD for photo editing. Do they make 19" S-PVA LCD monitors? And how do you find out what type panel an LCD has? I don't think any of the descriptions at Newegg, for example, tell you.
Click to expand...
Look up models here:
http://www.prad.de/en/guide/hersteller_start.html
and here:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/search.php?query=&select=model
and here:
http://www.flatpanels.dk/panels.php

Compare at:
http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=88&mo1=106&p1=1042&ma2=52&mo2=103&p2=1026&ph=1

For starters, good photo editing in the 19" - 20" range:
HP LP1965 - S-MVA
HP LP2065 - IPS or MVA panel lottery
Dell 2007 - IPS or MVA panel lottery
NEC LCD2170NX - S-PVA panel
ViewSonic VP930 - MVA panel (You might have heard of this one)

Pro level:
NEC 1990SXi - IPS
NEC 2090UXi - IPS

Maybe next time you could go IPS, not TN.
 
ViewSonic VP930 - MVA panel (You might have heard of this one)
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Ouch!! That's the LCD I used before I "upgraded" to 22"!!!

Somebody please bodyslam me!!

Thanks for the great info guys.
 
I finally tracked down a non-TN LCD of good size, good price, good rep., etc. I was even able to test-drive it as they had one at my workplace - go figure.

It's the Planar PL2010M 20" 1600x1200 8ms(GTG) response MVA-panel LCD. When I tested it (at home over lunch), it had the crispest text and graphics of any LCD I'd ever seen -period. The visible detail was simply amazing.

What I don't understand is that I use a Dell 17" TN-panel at work and the boldness of the whites and colors is fine, making reading and working very easy on the eyes. But the two 22" TN panels I bought (Samsung and Viewsonic) were horrible for viewing text and for intensive work. Is it possible that TN-panel technology is not scaling well in 22" and larger LCDs?

BTW, the 8ms GTG response time is the same as the LCD I game on now and I do okay with it regarding ghosting even though its nowhere's near as good as other LCDs with faster response times.
 
You did turn the brightness down on your new panels? To zero if necessary.

I have dell 17" TN that I think looks fantastic except for the standard TN faults: Vertical viewing angles issues (turns dark from below, pale from above) and has some slight banding on gradients. Other than that it looks great, colors always look spot on (better than my 21" Philips Trinitron I have next to it). Just as good as the big PVA that I got rid of. (which was too bright as well).

One thing though is the smaller panels tend to have weaker backlights are easier on the eyes. At maximum it might not be as bright as some of the current monster on minimum. There is essentially a race to produce brighter and brighter displays and default levels are brighter to look better than the competition in store under store lighting. That often translates into too bright for home use.
 
A lot of panels are way too bright. Ironically, some LCD TVs can now go darker than some dedicated computer displays, which was one reason I started looking at TVs vs. a 27" monitor...

However, some brands, like Eizo, apparently have computer displays that can go very dark...their new 22" comes to mind, but they are more expensive...
 
SH1 said:
A lot of panels are way too bright. Ironically, some LCD TVs can now go darker than some dedicated computer displays, which was one reason I started looking at TVs vs. a 27" monitor...

However, some brands, like Eizo, apparently have computer displays that can go very dark...their new 22" comes to mind, but they are more expensive...
Click to expand...


Iv been thinking at doing the same, I have a 2232BW and at 50 it looks the same as 100 and at 25 it looks about the same as 50 lol. Any LCD I have had has been too bright and with too much brightness comes BBL. I was thinking about going back to my Trinitron but I need DVI for my PS3, but I don't thing its safe to travel with a 78lb monitor in the back of the car lol. (also don't want to pay $150 for the HDFury)

The one monitor I have used that was OK, was a Westinghouse MVA. But I had to get rid of it due to input lag, Witch is all too common on LCDs these days.
 
Halfdead said:
get a CRT :D
Click to expand...

Don't laugh.

After my CRT died and I went to a Dell 2405 that scorched my retinas, sold it and bought another CRT (refurb 2"1 Trinitron). I have never experienced eye strain or pain on CRT in my life, my only experience with eye issues was that uber backlight Dell 2405. I couldn't last more than 15 minutes on it, even at brightness zero.

Today I use the CRT and a cheap 17" TN screen that is easy on the eyes. I think this has much more to do with the insane backlights in the bigger screens than the screen type.
 
Snowdog said:
Today I use the CRT and a cheap 17" TN screen that is easy on the eyes. I think this has much more to do with the insane backlights in the bigger screens than the screen type.
Click to expand...
Exactly, marketing departments can put overbright backlight behind any LCD matrix.

Also bigger screen sizes make problem worse: Brightness values aren't some absolute numbers telling how much light monitor can produce but brightness per surface area. Meaning when size increases so does overall amount of produced light even if claimed and measured brightness is same.
And moving screen farther away doesn't really help if picture itself is too bright. For point light source radiation flux per area drops to one fourths when distance is doubled but in case of wide light source it doesn't work that way because while light intensity drops with distance that light is focused to smaller area of retina. (chapter 5.6.1.3)
 
You did turn the brightness down on your new panels? To zero if necessary.
Click to expand...
I did but there was no setting that yielded a quality, readable display that was easy on the eyes. Lowering the settings made it too dingy looking. The only way to get a true white which makes reading easy was to up the settings to retina-scorching levels - and that was intolerable.

I couldn't last more than 15 minutes on it, even at brightness zero.
Click to expand...
Wow - that's jacked up!

I'm wondering if anything over 250 cd/m2 isn't simply too much brightness.
 
desertjedi said:
I'm wondering if anything over 250 cd/m2 isn't simply too much brightness.
Click to expand...
For normal room/office lighting something like 150 cd/m2 is enough.

Eizo advertises the brightness of the S2231W as 250 cd/m². In fact, at 100 % brightness, we measured a value of 236 cd/m², which does not quite reach the value mentioned by the manufacturer. At 0 % brightness and 100 % for the RGB colours, the value is 30 cd/m².
Fundamentally, the brightness values should be sufficient for any user. The brightness level of 140 cd/m² that we recommend...
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review/2008/review-eizo-s2231w-part8.html#Image
Click to expand...
So IMO any marketing clown demanding 400 cd/m² (or higher) maximum brightness should be put to front of firing squad.
 
E.T said:
For normal room/office lighting something like 150 cd/m2 is enough.
Click to expand...

For a long time professional calibrations were recommended at 100cd/m2 or 120cd/m2. The nice thing about CRT in a dim home environment was you had essentially infinite control over brightness, you could always make it darker.

Now with the UBER backlights in LCDs, the minimum brightness is often higher than recommended calibration levels. If you have a dim room they can be painful to look at. I have seen several people adding more lights to the computer room to balance out the powerful backlights. Hardly eco-friendly.

I mean we could have senible 250cd/m2 max backlights that can go lower for dim rooms and use less power, or we can have the UBER backlights that use more power and need extra room lighting (requiring even more power). Totally Dense.

This is the reason I am hesitent to get another big LCD. My last 24" LCD was a retina toaster (sold it and currently have a 17" LCD + 21" Trinitron), now I would like to buy the NEC 2490, but with a 400 cd/m2 backlight it seems like another retina toaster.
 
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