First of all, you people better be happy I'm willing to stare at a text editor on this thing for this long (470 nits hurts you know). But here's my thoughts. This will be a brutal and honest review, I promise.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
This thing is quite a bit shorter than my ViewSonic VP930b 19" (by 30mm.) Very shiny though. I immediately noticed glare on the OptiClear screen, but not as much as I was expecting given all the flak this LCD has received for that very aspect. The next thing I noticed was much more screen door effect than my VP930b. The damper lines separating the pixels are apparently a lot darker on this LCD. Even with the coating, the screen door effect is pretty noticeable (only up close). When I sit back and use my glasses, I can't tell the screen door is there
at all. Colors are pure. So, I will continue and do that.
+5 MINUTES
Glare? What glare? After using it for just a bit, I don't even see how you can be bothered by it.
THE ANALYSIS
I haven't seen any stuck or dead pixels. Showing a full black screen reveals a dark faintish blue at the settings I like (brightness: 100, contrast: 40, DV mode: standard). I can't say I'm really surprised. The coating makes a full black screen worse as well (brownish tones appear). I leave advanced DV mode off. I don't care for the effect for desktop usage. Even scrolling on a website to reveal other elements of it modulates the backlight. It's just irritating. For photos however, the quality it reveals is unequivocal.
Forget looking at a full black screen to test uniformity. Pictures are simply
stunning. Better than any CRT
I've seen. Better than any LCD I've ever seen (perhaps a couple S-IPS LCD TVs are close). The black is deep. When I say deep I mean you can reach through the monitor and grab it. It's
deep and pure like you spilled some pitch black ink. Colors are extremely contrasted from each other. I don't miss my last LCD one bit.
My last monitor, a ViewSonic VP930b, in sRGB mode (yielding roughly 300 nits) bothered my eyes a lot. Turning the brightness down helped. With the 20WMGX2, since it's 470 nits, I was prepared to turn the brightness down a lot. Guess what? I left it at 100. It's not even bothering my eyes. I was joking when I said it hurt in the first paragraph (I was sure it would after a couple minutes). But nope. I don't know how to explain that (different phosphors?), but the backlight on this monitor does not bother my eyes at all despite being significantly brighter. That's a godsend. Of course, I'll have to see how it goes throughout the week. Maybe my eyes are just not sensitive today. Speaking of that, I'll definitely be reporting any oddities (such as dithering) that I notice in later posts. Let's hope I don't need to. I have not seen any dithering so far.
Ghosting is hardly even noticeable, let alone bothersome. There's a trail maybe <1 mm. tall when moving a black-on-white text document vertically. It's pretty much still readable while you move it. Well, that may be stretching it, but it really is not bad at all. If you were wondering, no, it's not as fast as a CRT.
The OptiClear coating is simply amazing. It makes it look perfect. Flawlessly, seamlessly pure and saturated colors.
Viewing angles are great. If you tilt beyond, say 30 degrees, you will notice an ever so slight fading beginning. At 60 degrees, it doesn't look
awesome like it does at zero degrees, but it's certainly usable. I'd use this thing at 60 degrees any day over my old LCD at zero degrees. At 89 degrees, there's not much difference from 60 degrees. Still perfectly usable and looks great if not awesome. Essentially, it starts fading at 30 degrees, and it fades only a tad more after that.
Overall, I'm floored, mostly by the image quality. The response time isn't
that much better than my old LCD, which was pretty fast in and of itself. I would say maybe 15 ms. actual on average, and 10 ms. on bright colors. But wow is the overdrive much more controlled. It's amazing. There's no bleeding like there was on my VP930b.
This test image used to be an absolute disaster on my VP930b. Colors would seep around everywhere and stuff would bleed. With my NEC, I don't even notice anything more than usual. I will never understand why THG rated this monitor lower than the VP930b for overdrive control. They are blatantly mistaken.
Overview:
+Pure, saturated colors with the help of the OptiClear coating
+Great viewing angle
+Amazing response time and overdrive control (much better control than my VP930b)
+No dithering; true 8-bit
+Sharpness control on DVI
+No dead pixels on my unit
+No screen door effect at ~1.5 ft. away from screen
-Uniformity isn't perfect
-Advanced DV mode is stranger than I thought (it fades in a dithery pattern)
-More screen door at close up use than anticipated
-Raising the contrast at high brightness clips the grayscale (much like the VP930b, I didn't mention this earlier)
-Only 60 Hz refresh rate at native 1680x1050
Rating: 9/10 (sounds cliche, but I mean it). The nitpicks are minor.
There are so many subtle things that make this monitor awesome, like sharpness control even on DVI. The DV modes and presets are great, and I'm not even done messing around with those. I'll try and experiment more in-depth tonight with the settings, scaling, etc. I haven't even gone into the TV tuner, PIP, or other features. I'm not done yet. I'll cover banding/gradients later on as well.