I have spent a couple days trying out the 204B and L1970HR. I was planning to write more about them later and don't have as much time to do this ATM, but since people have asked I can at least jot down a few notes. My review notes will be limited by my LCD newbiness, since I am a CRT holdout and have only used LCDs here and there until now.
Samsung 204B
- ERGONOMICS: excellent, much better than the LG -- solid feel, better adjustments, easy to use OSD with excellent software based monitor adjustment tool, and attractive base and general design to my eyes.
- IMAGE: extraordinary brightness and contrast, quite vivid colors, no in your face color inaccuracies that I noticed though I wasn't looking for them or using monitor tools to test them; I was quite surprised to notice more vivid colours than on my outgoing CRT (Samsung 900IFT); possibly a bit of blending of some blue-grey tones that I noticed while playing UT2004 but I would need to look a little more and maybe play with brightness/contrast controls some more. No banding when I tried the Checkmon test image and some other utilities.
- TEXT: I wish more people commented on text sharpness since most people probably read text (web, email, word pro) more than they play games or watch movies on their monitors and I have seen pretty significant differences between text clarity even on LCDs. Anyway, the 204B has very sharp text and excellent scaling of text at different resolutions, though in some cases black text on white when very small or interpolated could be a bit darker/fuller (could be just Firefox's scaled text, don't remember).
- GHOSTING/BLUR/LAG: suprisingly even with the fastest game modes of the fastest games I have played, including UT2004 and Quake3, I found no perceptible ghosting and minimal if any blur. Handling of fast moving images was truly impressive, as good as or better than the LG (more testing needed). Now for the big BUT: without vsync tearing is a real problem, and with vsync the problems are WORSE. Lag is a serious problem on this model and makes more-than-casual fast FPS gaming IMO pointless. Playing offline was like playing on a 60-70 ping server. On most games the 204B is quite incredible, but if you are a hardcore FPS player, beware.
- SCALING/INTERPOLATION: exceptional! quite a suprise to me since I thought all LCDs suffered major deterioration of image and text quality at non-native resolutions, but this Samsung was more than decent, to the point of even rendering text and windows almost better than some CRT's I've seen when running Windows at 1024x (maybe an exaggeration).
- VIEWING ANGLES: rather decent IMO in the sense of being fairly readable at somewhat sharp angles, but unfortunately even subtle changes of viewing position DO affect readability to some extent. In other words, a basic standard of viewability is maintained at major angles (sharper than I expected) but at least some degredation is evident even at very minor angles. Most important to me, color shift is somewhat evident even when panning the large screen from proper sitting position (as others have mentioned).
- OVERALL: very, very impressive in many respects, but for me fundamentally flawed due to its input lag problem with high-intensity FPS games and prevalent color shifting which affects ease of viewing even with text.
LG L1970HR
- ERGONOMICS: a bit clunky, insufficient height adjustment, PITA OSD controls.
- IMAGE: even MORE extraordinary brightness and contrast; rather black blacks (chip.de review also noted very black blacks and actually measured 2148:1 contrast at one point on the L1970H!); colors may have been a bit more accurate and greys more distinguishable than on the 204B since the scenes that looked a bit washed out on the 204B were better on the L1970HR -- calibration might have made the difference though; there may be a bit of banding evident under the scrutiny of the Checkmon image and other test utilities, though I noticed no banding whatsoever in any practical game or application and would need to play with color settings more before saying for sure.
- TEXT: extremely sharp as well, probably as good or better than the 204B despite the latter's higher resolution. The only qualification is that text reproduction at non-standard resolutions may be sub-par, or at least far inferior to the 204B.
- GHOSTING/BLUR/LAG: also excellent with no perceived ghosting, minimal if any blur (more testing needed) and no lag whatsoever. I can actually play UT2004 and other fast paced FPS games without major disadvantage, though the 60 frames cap with vsync on and the generally reduced fast image responsiveness does still make this very fast LCD a clearly less effective gaming monitor than my CRT. Of course this is not news to anyone here. What was news to me, however, was that the L1970HR, even if I don't keep the model, proved to me an LCD could meet some basic gaming standards while bringing the general advantages of LCDs in terms of text clarity, reduced eye strain, etc.
- SCALING/INTERPOLATION: more testing required, but interpolation is not nearly as good as the 204B, though I haven't seen enough LCDs yet to say whether this is due to the 5:4 native pixel config of this and all 19" monitors, whether this LG model is bad at scaling, or whether the 204B is just especially good (I have read Samsung is known for good scaling). It may not be a deal breaker but it is definitely a downer to notice the much less legible text at lower resolutions and the reduced image clarity at long distances in UT2004 at 1024x resolution. (QUESTION: I would love to hear from people here whether there are major differences among 19" models. I have thought about trying out a VX922 or VP930. Or is it the case that a 1600x1200 20" will almost always scale to lower 4:3 resolutions better than even the best scaling 19" LCDs?)
- VIEWING ANGLES: quite decent in my estimation and without the color shifting due to minor changes of position that plagues the 204B.
- OVERALL: a very impressive new from LG as well. The brightness and contrast are mind blowing, text sharp, colors vibrant (despite whatever limits of TN panel accuracy), and gaming qualities apart from scaling very impressive. I am looking for professional reviews in english and some clarification of the specs of this unit: someone claimed somewhere that this unit is not even using overdrive type technology but this must be false for LG to claim (however exaggerated) the 2ms response time.
I am tempted by the L1970HR but after trying the two TN panels I would love to see a fast MVA or even more so a fast 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 IPS model for comparison. After my 204B experience I fear input lag on the 2030B but the VP930 is of interest. As for IPS, I wish there were more choices of non-widescreen models. With the Dell 2007FP on sale at $399 CDN I am not sure I can resist, even with the banding problems (some units don't look that bad after calibration). What about new IPS models? The forthcoming NEC LCD2090SXi with 8ms IPS will probably be extremely expensive, but the 12ms IPS BenQ FP2092 and 8ms FP91R models might be worth waiting for... Decisions, decisions.
[edit: corrected model number on my LG unit is L1970HR]
Samsung 204B
- ERGONOMICS: excellent, much better than the LG -- solid feel, better adjustments, easy to use OSD with excellent software based monitor adjustment tool, and attractive base and general design to my eyes.
- IMAGE: extraordinary brightness and contrast, quite vivid colors, no in your face color inaccuracies that I noticed though I wasn't looking for them or using monitor tools to test them; I was quite surprised to notice more vivid colours than on my outgoing CRT (Samsung 900IFT); possibly a bit of blending of some blue-grey tones that I noticed while playing UT2004 but I would need to look a little more and maybe play with brightness/contrast controls some more. No banding when I tried the Checkmon test image and some other utilities.
- TEXT: I wish more people commented on text sharpness since most people probably read text (web, email, word pro) more than they play games or watch movies on their monitors and I have seen pretty significant differences between text clarity even on LCDs. Anyway, the 204B has very sharp text and excellent scaling of text at different resolutions, though in some cases black text on white when very small or interpolated could be a bit darker/fuller (could be just Firefox's scaled text, don't remember).
- GHOSTING/BLUR/LAG: suprisingly even with the fastest game modes of the fastest games I have played, including UT2004 and Quake3, I found no perceptible ghosting and minimal if any blur. Handling of fast moving images was truly impressive, as good as or better than the LG (more testing needed). Now for the big BUT: without vsync tearing is a real problem, and with vsync the problems are WORSE. Lag is a serious problem on this model and makes more-than-casual fast FPS gaming IMO pointless. Playing offline was like playing on a 60-70 ping server. On most games the 204B is quite incredible, but if you are a hardcore FPS player, beware.
- SCALING/INTERPOLATION: exceptional! quite a suprise to me since I thought all LCDs suffered major deterioration of image and text quality at non-native resolutions, but this Samsung was more than decent, to the point of even rendering text and windows almost better than some CRT's I've seen when running Windows at 1024x (maybe an exaggeration).
- VIEWING ANGLES: rather decent IMO in the sense of being fairly readable at somewhat sharp angles, but unfortunately even subtle changes of viewing position DO affect readability to some extent. In other words, a basic standard of viewability is maintained at major angles (sharper than I expected) but at least some degredation is evident even at very minor angles. Most important to me, color shift is somewhat evident even when panning the large screen from proper sitting position (as others have mentioned).
- OVERALL: very, very impressive in many respects, but for me fundamentally flawed due to its input lag problem with high-intensity FPS games and prevalent color shifting which affects ease of viewing even with text.
LG L1970HR
- ERGONOMICS: a bit clunky, insufficient height adjustment, PITA OSD controls.
- IMAGE: even MORE extraordinary brightness and contrast; rather black blacks (chip.de review also noted very black blacks and actually measured 2148:1 contrast at one point on the L1970H!); colors may have been a bit more accurate and greys more distinguishable than on the 204B since the scenes that looked a bit washed out on the 204B were better on the L1970HR -- calibration might have made the difference though; there may be a bit of banding evident under the scrutiny of the Checkmon image and other test utilities, though I noticed no banding whatsoever in any practical game or application and would need to play with color settings more before saying for sure.
- TEXT: extremely sharp as well, probably as good or better than the 204B despite the latter's higher resolution. The only qualification is that text reproduction at non-standard resolutions may be sub-par, or at least far inferior to the 204B.
- GHOSTING/BLUR/LAG: also excellent with no perceived ghosting, minimal if any blur (more testing needed) and no lag whatsoever. I can actually play UT2004 and other fast paced FPS games without major disadvantage, though the 60 frames cap with vsync on and the generally reduced fast image responsiveness does still make this very fast LCD a clearly less effective gaming monitor than my CRT. Of course this is not news to anyone here. What was news to me, however, was that the L1970HR, even if I don't keep the model, proved to me an LCD could meet some basic gaming standards while bringing the general advantages of LCDs in terms of text clarity, reduced eye strain, etc.
- SCALING/INTERPOLATION: more testing required, but interpolation is not nearly as good as the 204B, though I haven't seen enough LCDs yet to say whether this is due to the 5:4 native pixel config of this and all 19" monitors, whether this LG model is bad at scaling, or whether the 204B is just especially good (I have read Samsung is known for good scaling). It may not be a deal breaker but it is definitely a downer to notice the much less legible text at lower resolutions and the reduced image clarity at long distances in UT2004 at 1024x resolution. (QUESTION: I would love to hear from people here whether there are major differences among 19" models. I have thought about trying out a VX922 or VP930. Or is it the case that a 1600x1200 20" will almost always scale to lower 4:3 resolutions better than even the best scaling 19" LCDs?)
- VIEWING ANGLES: quite decent in my estimation and without the color shifting due to minor changes of position that plagues the 204B.
- OVERALL: a very impressive new from LG as well. The brightness and contrast are mind blowing, text sharp, colors vibrant (despite whatever limits of TN panel accuracy), and gaming qualities apart from scaling very impressive. I am looking for professional reviews in english and some clarification of the specs of this unit: someone claimed somewhere that this unit is not even using overdrive type technology but this must be false for LG to claim (however exaggerated) the 2ms response time.
I am tempted by the L1970HR but after trying the two TN panels I would love to see a fast MVA or even more so a fast 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 IPS model for comparison. After my 204B experience I fear input lag on the 2030B but the VP930 is of interest. As for IPS, I wish there were more choices of non-widescreen models. With the Dell 2007FP on sale at $399 CDN I am not sure I can resist, even with the banding problems (some units don't look that bad after calibration). What about new IPS models? The forthcoming NEC LCD2090SXi with 8ms IPS will probably be extremely expensive, but the 12ms IPS BenQ FP2092 and 8ms FP91R models might be worth waiting for... Decisions, decisions.
[edit: corrected model number on my LG unit is L1970HR]