[Tech] Monitors

[Raygun]

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you're completely ignoring a huge swath of simple, clear, basic, factual information; this isn't one of the million arguable points of the conversation, one of those few that genuinely boils down to opinion, this is the part of the argument that comes down to objective fact, and your objective facts are completely incorrect and wildly ignorant. What am I supposed to do with that?

Well, what I'm going to try to do is not act like as much of an arrogant jerkoff as you're acting like right now. That's what I'm going to try to do. You can try to do the same.

I apologize if I offended you. I did not intend to. We clearly do some of the same things professionally and have entirely different experiences with the technology we work with, but we are clearly not communicating well. If you want to try and come to an understanding with me, great. But if you want to go down the road above with me again, we won't be going very far.

[Bonefish]

JELLO FIGHT!

[Salvation122]

I don't understand why viewing angles are at all a selling point when the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you're sitting directly perpendicular to your monitor.

I will gladly concede the issue for televisions - my dad has a big ol' DLP that looks like absolute shit at about thirty degrees off-center, and it drives me absolutely nuts. But for monitors, I don't buy it.

The resolution thing is a good argument, except that gaming (or using your monitor as a television, which: see above) is really the only reason I see to swap away from native res, and even on a budget discrete card, you can usually get to playable framerates by turning settings down that aren't resolution. Fancy shadows, fancy water, crazy amounts of particle effects, and stupid-high levels of ASF are generally the culprits, and in my experience generally cause way more slow down than running at a higher res anyway.

[3278]

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you're completely ignoring a huge swath of simple, clear, basic, factual information; this isn't one of the million arguable points of the conversation, one of those few that genuinely boils down to opinion, this is the part of the argument that comes down to objective fact, and your objective facts are completely incorrect and wildly ignorant. What am I supposed to do with that?

Well, what I'm going to try to do is not act like as much of an arrogant jerkoff as you're acting like right now. That's what I'm going to try to do. You can try to do the same.

No, you're absolutely right. Things definitely got more contentious than they needed to, and that was almost entirely my fault and not yours. Sometimes when I perceive [accurately or otherwise] that I know more about something than someone, but can't change their mind about it, I get very frustrated, far more frustrated than the situation warrants. In this case, I definitely feel like, if I were better at expressing myself, we would agree, not because you're wrong - you're not! - but because I feel like I've failed at communicating my position; otherwise, your points of disagreement would be very different.

Again, mea maxima culpa. This one's on me, not you.

[3278]

I don't understand why viewing angles are at all a selling point when the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you're sitting directly perpendicular to your monitor.

People share monitors, or need to look over and read someone else's, or need to show a customer something on their monitor, or increasingly need to watch movies together on their monitor. Plus, as monitors increase in size, viewing angle becomes significant for a single user sitting perpendicular to the screen, because of the angle between you and the edges! This wasn't so much of a problem with 17-inch 4:3 monitors, but with 27-inch 16:9s...

The resolution thing is a good argument, except that gaming (or using your monitor as a television, which: see above) is really the only reason I see to swap away from native res...

You're still young, and have good eyes. Check with your parents and grandparents.

...and even on a budget discrete card, you can usually get to playable framerates by turning settings down that aren't resolution.

You absolutely can do that, but you shouldn't have to. The flexibility granted by CRTs means you can lower resolution or lower visual quality, whichever looks best.

Fancy shadows, fancy water, crazy amounts of particle effects, and stupid-high levels of ASF are generally the culprits, and in my experience generally cause way more slow down than running at a higher res anyway.

Higher resolution is a greater limiting factor on cards with lower amounts of video RAM, but it all depends on how old the machine you're talking about is, and how new the game.

[Raygun]

Again, mea maxima culpa. This one's on me, not you.

When this kind of shit happens, it's difficult to blame one person for it. So I apologize for my part in it as well. I didn't mean to seem like I was ignoring your points, I just didn't feel like you were acknowledging mine, and the two didn't necessarily cross paths.

Where it comes to my use of the term 'color accuracy', I was parroting the one client I have (out of more than a hundred) who I know is of the belief that CRTs are superior to LCDs. At that point, I was losing interest in the argument anyway (and was being rushed out the door), so I didn't bother to investigate whether the terminology was correct or not, or I probably would have said 'color shift' instead. I don't think that's the only effect he was referring to when using the term, though.

At any rate, I think you understand what I'm trying to say, and I get what you're saying, so I think we're done with this argument.

[3278]

Where it comes to my use of the term 'color accuracy', I was parroting the one client I have (out of more than a hundred) who I know is of the belief that CRTs are superior to LCDs. At that point, I was losing interest in the argument anyway (and was being rushed out the door), so I didn't bother to investigate whether the terminology was correct or not, or I probably would have said 'color shift' instead. I don't think that's the only effect he was referring to when using the term, though.

Different people mean different things when they use the term "color accuracy." Most people are talking about the host of image-related deficiencies in [TN] LCDs - many of which can be calibrated around, many of which cannot - like contrast, brightness, viewing angle, color unevenness, blah blah blah. But when a graphic designer or artist or pretentious fuck or Mac user - or some or all of the above - uses the term, they mean something really particular, and it's something I'm not sure I give a fuck about: color accuracy and gamut.

Now, every so often, yes, I'll get annoyed at some purple pallor to some piece of site imagery when I see it on a badly-calibrated monitor, or I'll think, "Uh oh, that text is completely visible on my monitor, but on this chick's laptop, I can't see it!" That absolutely happens, LCD or CRT. But the people who worry about color accuracy tend to take it like a religion: #5c7898 should be #5c7898 everywhere, and exactly #5c7898, not one bit lighter or darker, bluer, greener, or redder.

TN LCD's can't do that. I remember back in the day when it was a big deal that video cards had the power to finally push 24-bit color, every color the human eye could see. The monitors had been able to do it for a while, but the video cards couldn't handle so eight bits per pixel. TN LCDs, then, were a step back, to 18 bit color, because each pixel only takes six bits.

But I'm really not sure I care about this. This isn't one of those things like ghosting or bleeding or uneven backlighting where it's just obvious that the LCD suffers in comparison to the CRT, this is like the audiophile who insists his tube amp is somehow magically imbuing your music with magic. There's a degree beyond which most people just don't give a crap, won't ever notice, couldn't tell in an A/B comparison. And I think this gamut/accuracy thing might be one of those places where I just don't care.

It matters because the difference between an IPS LCD and a TN LCD - a decision I'll have to make, you know, someday - is largely in this color space issue. Some of my other concerns about LCDs are addressed, others not, but the big selling point is color reproduction, and I just can't know, until I sit an IPS panel next to a TN panel, how much I give a shit, you know? Now, if I put one of my 21 inch Trinitrons next to a 21 inch TN LCD, there's just no comparison: it's immediately and readily obvious to blind people that the CRT is the way to go, provided you own a forklift. But between IPS and TN? I'm just not sure I'm that much of a monitor-phile. I watch VHS transfers of The Daily Show from 2002; clearly I can't care that much about how many bits per pixel I'm getting!

[3278]

Turns out I went IPS after all.

My monitor landscape has been pretty bleak recently: all my 21" flatscreen CRTs were dead, my good 17" flatscreen CRT was dead, and I'd been relegated to a 5:4 TN 19" LCD. The latter was actually pretty decent, but my daughter needed a monitor and I wasn't going to leave her with garbage, so I gave her the 5:4 LCD and got an old 17" flatscreen CRT with about half the anti-glare coating scratched off by scrabbling cats.

Size - it's fine for me, but my daughter sits 10 feet from it when we watch something - and unwatchability finally put us over the edge, and we decided to buy a monitor. I had originally set my sights around $120, but research and some saving-up led me instead to the Dell UltraSharp U2312HM. I'd heard a lot of good things about these UltraSharp monitors, even the lower-end ones - and mine's the lowest-end one - so I decided to give IPS a try.

It's definitely not a world-shaking difference, but for $200, I think it's definitely worth it, compared to comparable-sized TN panels. Still, I wasn't blown away, particularly coming from a high-quality [if blotchy] CRT. But there are web pages that look different now, where I can see tables aren't the same color as their background. And pictures look really good. Very small text is readable from a distance. But most importantly - comparing to the 23" Asus TN I'd compare it to - the viewing angles are excellent, meaning that even if you're close to the panel, the corners of the screen don't change color, even if you're watching from off-axis, the screen doesn't get light or dark. It's, well, almost as good as a CRT.

[O-Funk!]

May be too late for this to matter, but a 32" 1920x1080 sony bravia is doing me fine. If you turn on video game mode on those tv's, you drop the Response from 4.4 to 2.2 and yowza!