AG Neovo AGM CW-19 :: How is it?

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thisismyusername

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I'm shopping around now for a new monitor and I'm curious if anyone purchased an AG Neovo AGM CW-19. Apparently they're a well known European company, and just started selling internationally.

It's listed on pricewatch for having one of the lowest prices for a 19" wide screen LCD. I originally decided this would be my best bet because the response time is supposedly 4ms, in addition to being about $250 shipped from newegg (after rebate).

So I have some questions...

If you have this thing, is it really 4ms, because newegg and other places have it down at 8ms. Almost every review on newegg said it was fantastic for games (no ghosting, etc.) and looked great.

Another more generic widescreen LCD question (I've never used one, nor an LCD for that matter)...

If let's say I want to run a game at 640x480 full screen and this monitor is 14XXx900 what exactly is going to happen? Will it just fill up a 640x480 section in the middle of the monitor and fill the remaining space with blackess, or stretch it vertically and cap off the sides with blackness (sort of like how a movie usually has black bars on top if you're watching a wide screen format on a non-wide screen display).

Thanks.
 
At best, it is 8ms grey-to-grey and 4ms from one shade of grey to the next.

Anyone who claims they have a true 4ms widescreen 19" LCD for $250 is either smoking Snapple Crack or selling them out of the back of a van.
 
Here are the full specs from their site, sorry for not including it.

http://www.agneovo.com/agm/content/cw-19.htm

They list it as 4ms (GTG). I'm guessing Grey To Grey? I'm not sure how that translates into real world performance though.

The only negative thing I see is the estimated life-time of the thing is 40,000 hours. If you divide that into 24, you get 1,666.666^6 days of usage.

Crack? Nope
Back of Van? Nope
Directly from Satan? Maybe
 
Excuse me for the bump. :)

I'm thinking of buying this TFT because I need a new monitor soon (my old TFT is moving to my sister) and my budget is tight. I'm tired of my old 17" TFT (40ms!) and i want to try something new, so a 19" widescreen TFT sounds interesting. I found a store which sells the monitor for €252.28 (~304.718$), seems like a good price to me.

I searched google and couldn't find any decent reviews, except for some user reviews which are all quite positive. I also took a look at the Acer AL1916Ws but the reviews aren't all that positive.

Some friends of me have Neovo/AGM TFT's and they're quite happy with it, so my hopes are on this one. I'm not expecting miracles, just a decent monitor for watching movies, surfing the net and playing some games. Maybe someone who can tell me more about this monitor or has any suggestions? :)
 
NjO,

I did a lot of research today about LCDs in general. From what I gathered here's what we should expect from this monitor:

This isn't just going by reviews, it's going by what I read about various different types of LCD panels, and how they operate. Hopefully everything is accurate.

- Still images should look great, but this monitor is probably not your best bet for professional image editing (then again, neither are most LCDs).
- DVDs should run very nicely and look good enough where you won't notice many flaws, if any.
- Games should run flawlessly (minimal / no ghosting) even at non-native resolutions.
- Text will be uber sharp (if you're using a CRT now, compared to an LCD).

Oh, and the lack of the DVI adapter seems pretty trivial for this specific monitor. Almost everything I read said that DVI is only important in an LCD if the resolution being ran is really high. Say 1600x1200 or more. VGA (D-Sub) will be noticibly worse in those cases.

But since this monitor runs 1440x900, it shouldn't be an issue at all. The resolution isn't high enough to push VGA past its max.

If you want some quick pointers to still shop around, here's some basic info I picked up along the way.

1) If the monitor is reported as 16.2 million colors, it's using a 6 bit type. If it's 16.7 million colors, it's using an 8 bit type.

6 bit types actually only support roughly 256,000 colors, and it uses a dithering algorithm to display the colors it can't render. The upside is the response times on these types of panels are much faster than the 8 bit types.

The downside is, you might have some issues with color profiling if you're a professional image editor. There is another upside though, there's absolutely no way you will notice the difference just by looking at it.

The dithering algorithm will present the colors in such a way that it'll look (visually, on the monitor) identical to an 8 bit panel. The only shades it can't draw are RGB values 253/254/255. Those 3 specific shades are white.

I have perfect vision 20/20 (with contacts :(), and when I open photoshop and create a 600x600 image, if I switch the RGB values from 255/255/255 to 254/254/254 I can't notice the difference.

When I switch between 253/253/253 to 255/255/255 it makes the ever so slightest difference. If my brain suddenly didn't know that 255 was the max RGB value, I wouldn't in any way be disappointed with 253. The difference is basically non-existant, and in theory this will be the only difference we'll see, since the dithering algorithm covers every other shade.

There are many other factors that control how well the monitor itself will display colors. It's very possible a 6 bit display will have richer colors than an 8 bit display. I didn't dive too deep into this research but I imagine the brightness/contrast, and overall worksmanship of the monitor will play a role in how it looks.

As for gaming and ghosting, and how they are related to response times...

Apparently 8ms is fast enough to redraw at a constant 125 frames per second. I am fairly sure now that our monitor is 8ms (white to black), but they list it as 4ms (grey to grey).

I'm assuming ghosting would occur on an 8ms display if you happened to get more than 125 frames per second. I can't think of any game that would play better at say 200 frames per second, rather than 125.

Granted I don't play many games now, but I was quite involved with Quake 3 back in its prime, and the magic number for that game was 120 FPS, and it's probably a safe bet most of the newer games like Quake 4 probably run much much lower, maybe 60 -- I dunno.

It also explains why some people get ghosting on a specific LCD while others don't, or only do in some cases.

If you have an insane computer capable of running the latest game at 150 frames per second, and your FPS isn't capped, you'll get ghosting -- even with a 8ms display. If you only break 125 FPS in some areas, that would explain cases of ghosting, but not constant ghosting.

People who are trying to play games at the native resolution with a normal computer (nothing insane), won't probably ever come close to reaching their max threshold, thus they don't get ghosting.

I have a feeling most people report ghosting when they drop down to a lower resolution or play older games because the game runs quicker, since the resolution is lower. It really makes a lot of sense that way. So in theory, if you played Quake 3 at 640x480, and capped your FPS to 125, it wouldn't ghost at all.

The picture might look worse (since LCDs aren't "beamed" onto the screen, the pixels simply exist) since the image needs to be blended so to speak, but every LCD will need to do this, even the ones that cost thousands of dollars.

Hopefully all that helps heh. Ended up being longer than what I expected.

Btw I did order this monitor the other day, it should arrive on Wednesday, I'll let you know how things go once it gets here.
 
Big thanks for the usefull info thisismyusername. :)

I'm not a professional designer so the colors aren't a big problem. I do play some fast FPS games once in a while but this monitor will surely be a big improvement over my slow (40ms) TFT. Ghosting won't be an issue as my machine (p4 2.53Ghz, 1GB ram, Geforce 6800 unlocked/oced) won't get me that much FPS in recent games at the native resolution.

I'm almost sure i'll order one this week. I'm looking forward to your impressions. :)
 
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