Originally posted by: farp96
Ok after messing around with my new vp930b this is what I have observed. Played Bf2 last night for about 3 hours. With vsync off, forget it. The ghosting and blurring and tearing is way to much for me. I find it very very hard to play and do well. If I turn vsync on with triple buffering, than its ok. I notice almost no blurring ghosting or tearing. But that comes at a price. With vsync off I get like 100 frames all the time, so slow downs what so ever. With it on, well it goes between 60 and 30 frames a second and it gets choppy at times. So for me its a mixed bag. My crt was certainly alot better than the vp930b in games. Now I have to decide weather to get used to the drop in frames rates or not. As for the desktop. At 1280x1024 I have to set the dpi of the fonts to large, because when its at standard I can't really see them that well. I actually had to wear my glasses last night when viewing the lcd, which I have never done before when using my crt. Colors I think I ned to get some good settings for that, because as it stands right now, I think my crt looked better color wise. Everything looks so washed out on the lcd. The green start button in windows xp is a nice dark green on my crt while the lcd is a faded green. Its hard to explain but the colors on my crt just seem more alive than the lcd. I also have to increase the text size when surfing the internet, because at normal size I really can't see it too well. So to sum it up, to me the only thing that a lcd has over a crt is, it takes up less deskspace and uses less power and that's about it. Now maybe I have some settings wrong I don't know but right now my crt clearly is better in almost everything. Oh and people say lcd's are better for your eyes than crt's, well I don't know but I was getting a nice headache from the lcd one which I never got with my crt. 85hz seems alot better to me than 60hz. I'm going to wait another couple of days before I decide weather to keep this lcd or not. But as it stands now, I certainly like my crt alot better.
Ahh...
Yeah the VP930b definitely is bright. Damn right, it takes a lot of adjusting to get the colors right on this thing. My old Samsung was good (for a 6-bit) at a linear gamma. This thing at gamma 1.0 is quite washed out. I'm wondering if the Samsung 970P is any better in this regard. If the 970P was $100 cheaper I'd probably give it a try. Maybe I'll go check it out at a store some time.
This monitor (VP930b) definitely has more problems than my 17" Samsung 710T did. I'll go with Samsung in the future most likely, and I may change my recommendations. Though it's hard to say, because I personally don't know if the Samsung 970P is any better, or maybe it's worse.
I am surprised the ghosting on the VP930b bothered you though. In most cases, I can't even
see it. Then again that just proves different people have different sensitivities. They focused so much on that part that they went cheap on the scaler, the OSD, and the backlight tweaking. That's where the problem lies I think.
There is also the minor issue of text. ClearType seems to induce annoying color fringing, but maybe this happens on all monitors with this huge dot pitch. I wish I could see how standard font smoothing looks on this LCD. For some reason, I can only get the ClearType option to do anything. It's probably not the LCD's fault though. ClearType does add the color fringing and you have to adjust the gamma to remove it. For black non-Cleartype text, this monitor is just fine. But do you see a white shadow around some of the black text like I do? Not sure what's going on here. It's particularly noticeable on light gray objects.
Otherwise though, the colors on this monitor are very pleasing to me after they're tweaked. It definitely displays a better range than my 710T would ever do. My 710T was washed out compared to the CRT in a lot of conditions, but man, this one can really display the colors. I'll learn to live past the inperfections of this monitor because otherwise I think it's great.
Let's just say the panel is great anyway. Certainly isn't AUO's fault here. Everything ViewSonic had control of though (including default settings and backlight leaking), for the most part, went to crap here, that is something we agree on. But, they are probably selling it at a loss so I can't blame them (I guess). It wouldn't have been that hard to put good controls, and a good input system on this monitor, it really wouldn't have been! In addition they could definitely have better default colors. The default colors are DeltaE 5, which is quite awful. After they're adjusted, they're at DeltaE 0.6, which is a lot better. Still, and like I said, the default settings lie on ViewSonic. I would definitely recommend another monitor with the same panel. I'm still convinced there's a holy grail.
I think I'm just seeing things, but do you notice the backlight very subtly fluctuate at all on your VP930b? Probably just the placebo effect after reading about what they do to reduce response time (turn off the backlight very briefly). I thought it might be related though.
Despite its vast amount of minor (IMO) flaws, I still like the VP930b from a perspective. Its simply amazing colors and furiously fast response time have won me over.
I have to say my old Samsung was nothing crappy at all though (except the 6-bit colors), definitely. What they do, they do very well, compared to ViewSonic.
Edit: hmm...wtf.. I just noticed something weird.
Do you see moving video noise (even just leaving it still) anywhere in the upper part of this image? Look very carefully and close. 1280x1024x75 Hz mode. In the topmost middle part...this shouldn't be happening in DVI.
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/Leopard.jpg