Originally posted by: albovin
Dear xtknight,
As you know I have been a worldwide volunteer promoter of this site for a long time.
This is not a joke.
I do review monitors myself, I support several monitor forums in two languages, and I post much. I have never been tired of repeating: this is the place where beginners must start their search.
I admire your enthusiasm.
I value the comprehensive preface to this thread and especially the Recommendations part.
The Recommendations part used to be based on clear and logical technical principles, the content regularly updated and revised.
Yes, albovin, my friend, I'm aware of that and your posts are among the most valuable here. I always appreciate your contributions. At least you don't put words in my mouth and instead provide constructive criticism. Unfortunately it can be hard to see (or maybe, acknowledge). I think some other people wouldn't even bother reading your post and actually getting the useful info out of it and instead assume you were crazy. I don't assume that. I live to respond to and reap what I can from posts like this.
Here is the preface to my thought-out reply.
First, I don't think anything I've done here is patently terrible or "breaks the camel's back". I am not a regime or oligarchy. I'm open to suggestions. I don't think anybody died because they bought a CPVA monitor. It's far more useful to look at things logically. I took awhile to write the reply because otherwise I would have replied with something angry, impulsive, and illogical too. You've got some valid points but they are shrouded by tangents of fury (I'm not really sure why). Honestly it doesn't do anything for me. I take peoples' suggestions no matter how furious they are. Just because it's in text doesn't make it invalid or null.
The first bell rang when I found a TN monitor in the PHOTO EDITING/WEB DESIGN section.
Why again about that TN (we talked already)?
There has only EVER been one eIPS panel monitor in the world. And that has been reported as discontinued and out of stock for several months. So that's not your idea of "hard to find"? Is that not true??? I'd certainly like to know if there are other eIPS monitors. Besides, not everyone wants to order from Dell and wait forever for shipping.
Let's see:
I've put cpva at the end of the query because it's recently come to my attention that a bogus Samsung TN monitor is appearing in the results. Very unfortunate.
As of writing:
http://www.google.com/products...+f2380+cpva&hl=en&aq=f
Seven on the page, as far as I'm aware "in stock" everywhere.
http://www.google.com/products...+f2080+cpva&hl=en&aq=f
Again, seven.
Here lists that there are 611 in stock. It seems like a healthy product with more merchants to come. Now I'm not sure if that's true or not, but that's the status of things *now*. I would not be surprised if that changes in a month. If I had to guess, Samsung may discontinue this and bring other cPVAs to market soon. But I cannot tell the future.
http://www.google.com/products?q=dell+2209wa&hl=en&aq=f
Available from 2 sellers new (top).
[btw, inside is only one site, and it is listed as "Sorry, this product is no longer available." It is overstock only.]
The 2209WA is actually available here:
http://search.dell.com/results...2209WA&cat=all&x=0&y=0
But it ships in 3-5 weeks....ouch! I don't want to wait that long for a monitor.
I'm fully aware Samsung hasn't revolutionized anything with CPVA (more likely, "evolutionized"). But when people look at what to buy, it sounds good, and if it persuades them to buy that over a TN then that's good. I said the same thing with the 2209WA. That doesn't hurt anybody. Haven't you realized that "Displays du Jour" is a little optimistic... not sure why this matters anyway. I guess it's fuel to add to the fire. In the stagnating market of non-TN LCDs pretty much any non-TN monitor is a revolution. Considering Samsung is a big company and PVA has always been more prevalent than IPS, I figured we could see many more CPVA monitors than eIPS. I was optimistic when I wrote it and I'm still happy it's there. Again, a couple optimistic sentences here are not invaliding the thread or the recommendations.
About TNs in photo editing:
The point of this was to provide a last resort, not a first-order recommendation. I guess this should be made even more clear. I thought it was. I guess it isn't. Let that be known.
Some people just want the best cheap monitor for photo editing. I would rather have them buy a good TN than a bad TN as they will often go and do. We're talking about dad and his kid editing family photos, not a production company. Yes, they should still have good quality, but sometimes they cannot afford it or sometimes they would just grab a random TN off the market and try to use it.
Let's pit this $330 cPVA against
a random TN monitor at a lower price and see the results. Yes, they should be buying a $530 H-IPS (LP2475w) with the slight possibility of uniformity issues. OR maybe even a $800+ NEC 90 series. And I
tell them they should be. Notice how the CPVA monitors are
below the IPS ones and above the TN ones. It's not like I just deployed a CPVA payload into the Photo Editing section, only to land in some random place because I thought it was cool. I imagine maybe a thought process went into it, which admittedly isn't the case for everything I do.
What do you think is the better deal? A CPVA at $330 or TN at $220? I don't know, actually. I don't think anyone's going to question that the CPVA provides better overall performance after seeing it. It has nice contrast, generally wider viewing angles (with color shift on some dark scenes), and it's nice and bright. It's kind of cool it has two DVI-D inputs, of which you have been extolling the virtues, instead of more analog inputs like component and composite.
This is a short story related to my
Samsung F2380 review.
I happened to work on that review on a TN monitor. The task was to choose a couple of colors to match my usual blog template. This is an elementary "web design" task.
And that was funny. It wasn't possible just because the page element and the color palette were in different parts of the screen. The "right" color from the palette turned wrong when applied to the page element. After dancing in front of the monitor catching more or less appropriate viewing angle, I finally put two windows one (working window) over another (an older blog page) to physically match two pictures. Then I was trying "wrong" colors from the palette until they happened to be "right" on the page element.
After that ridiculous exercise I decided: no more TN. I will never pass by the recommendation like this even if it's supplied with an innocent remark "for leisurely/recreational work only". I will protest.
Back to the topic.
By no means I want to bash xbitlabs here although I don't share your "gold" impression of their "standards". Those reviews are translations of their russian home resource based on the internet&retail store called fcenter. We usually put a strict border between their "theoretical summary" articles that are awesome and their monitor reviews that are not "that awesome". I would stop here to be politically correct.
Much more realistic
review by ToastyX from Hardforum.
Samsung's new C-PVA technology has revolutionized the low-end, economical market and offers an alternative to the harder-to-find eIPS panel type.
Excuse me, we've had the HP 2275w 22" PVA (~$330) available for at least one year and the Dell 2209WA e-IPS (~$290).
The Samsung F2380 is available for ~$320 (who-said-it's-easier-to-find?) - it's too little for "revolution"..
With a lower response time on darker tones but otherwise great performance, the F2380 should deliver for most needs, including office work, multimedia, and photo editing.
I am speechless.
Two reviews (with measurements and
illustrations) are saying: colorshift on the Samsung F2380 is horrible! To make it minimally photo-editing-worthy you'll have to calibrate it. $320+$150=$470
How can we recommend it for photo editing?
Multimedia. Called High Definition monitor, it provides Half Definition on some videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOkGjFru4x0
Yes, it is a nice compact monitor for the office use.
But its vertical resolution is low.
This is an unbelievable monitor.
It seems that someone
deliberately limited its potential in every aspect.
It has no wide gamut - a chance for PVA to return to the real world of images...
Nope! They made colorshift worse than ever before and killed the screen.
Same for movies.
They fixed fuzzy text on PVA. Great, give us a good screen for the office..
Nope. They cut resolution.
It's not necessary to mention that the Samsung F2380 response time is slow for games.
Is it cheap?
24"TN 16:9 can be found for ~$100 cheaper.
The real value of this monitor is that it's not a TN. That's its only
real value.
Is it enough to be listed as recommended?
I don't think so.
Anyway I am not sure where we disagree. Mostly, we are exchanging factoids both of us already know in the interest of finding that out.
Here comes an exception. The video is the cliffhanger.
Why don't you do the same viewing angle video with a TN? Then maybe I would agree with your arguments. Please also do the same thing with a Dell 2408WFP if you don't mind. I want to see a difference between C-PVA and S-PVA. I'm generally not afraid to always recommend S-PVA above TN. Maybe the color shift is actually worse on the PVA than it is on the TN. I'd wager the horizontal shift is probably worse for cases like that. I don't know, because I don't have a source of information for that.
Anyway, by no means do I think that S-PVA monitors are bad for Multimedia. Are C-PVA ones technologically worse?
A lot of people watch movies on their cell phones, ipods, laptops, and inbuilt horrible TN panels in "portable DVD players". Some of them don't even have basic viewing angle compensation film! Tons of people watch them on regular TN+Film monitors. Now please tell me the CPVA panel is a bad idea for watching movies. There's people that would
die to see that kind of quality on most motion pictures. I'd imagine about 95% of HD images look great on the monitor.
You seem to believe that I'm only here to recommend monitors to high demanding professionals like you and I, but that's simply not the case. That's why you and I use H-IPS monitors on a daily basis and the rest of the world doesn't. For the chief reason that "we give a crap". If I get people to start caring just a little and drastically increase the number of PVA and IPS monitors on the market, then I've reached my goal. What you need to realize is that the CPVA monitors actually are not high on my lists. So fine, maybe they're not as good of a deal as I say they are. But they sure as hell are better than TN panels in a lot of cases, and the contrast is amazing. Maybe you forgot how bad TN panels were for certain activities (somehow people get by with those too).
As far as X-Bit Labs goes, I trust them more than anyone else and still do. Their reviews are uncannily comprehensive. I don't even know who makes response time graphs anymore besides them. Perhaps some foreign site I cannot find, or Tom's Hardware Guide a long time ago. Anyway, very interesting about fcenter. I did not know that, probably because I don't know Russian nor do I visit foreign sites regularly.
The LP2275w has many reports of poor quality control. Just look at Newegg's comments section. So that one was out. Has that one been fixed? I don't know. If it has, I would recommend it just like I recommend the LP2475w. I've got nothing against it and
I would love to know the answer. I guess I need to search the dark annals of HardForum some more.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...6824176098&Tpk=LP2275w
Next, the 2209WA, whose eIPS panel I regard higher than C-PVA: several people reported that the monitor was out of stock for months and that it had been discontinued. That doesn't look like a keeper, but it's still up there just in case the situation changes.
Unfortunately this is not a world where everyone & their mother can have IPS panels.
You go on crusades against the 2408WFP and about how bad its color shifting is, and people come back here and say it's the best monitor they've ever used. So I should take it off my list because you think it has bad color shifting? Come on man...answer me this, if you were me would you remove it from the lists? And remove all the TNs from Multimedia too? Maybe only have TNs under Gaming or hypothetical Value sections? Honestly I
still have not found a "best" way to organize my list, but this has been working pretty well so far. Again open to suggestions and I've said that countless times. I might disagree with their merits but I don't ignore them. I am sure I have implemented at least half of the (reasonable) suggestions that come here within my abilities, maybe if not all of them.
I've been told many times I should have more value LCDs on my list, and that's what I'm trying to do. But when I'm told the opposite thing, then what am I supposed to do? I decided to have a few of them up there where I can. There's only one TN in the Photo Editing category right now, and also that's because it does quite well with color accuracy. It's also under a "Great Wall" barrier, which might need to be exaggerated even more so that people take heed to it. Or maybe it needs to be changed to a "last resort" style of wording. I need not only criticism here but suggestions.
Samsung F2080.
A 20" 16:9 PVA dwarf with 160ox900(!) resolution is recommended for photo editing/web design(?)
Do we edit photos at supermarket check-out stands?
Please pardon my emotions.
But these three straws have broken camel's back.
Looking forward to seeing more solid nominees in your Recommendations list.
With all the respect.
albovin
[/quote]
1600x900 (16:9) isn't that much different than 1680x1050 (16:10). The latter is perfectly fine IMO for editing and viewing websites.
I don't understand why the vertical resolution is a big deal. 900 pixels tall is not much different from 768, 960, and 1024, all common vertical resolutions on the web. Websites don't stretch like videos do. If you think it's too small, then don't buy it I guess. Buy the 23" version that's very tall. No reason to take it off the recommendations on this basis.
About PVAs and blurry text: (never mind, this is about S-PVAs and not C-PVAs then. you said C-PVAs fixed it. I see there is a slight pixel structure difference between the two.)
I don't know about this. I've used many PVAs and I don't see it. I also don't see why exactly the pixel structure would contribute to it that much. Therefore I still think PVAs are great for office work. They don't have screen door issues like some IPS panels and bad viewing angle issues like TNs. Yeah, they do have color shift, but that's not nearly as bad as the TN problems in most cases. Again, most people won't notice. And, yes, this thread is about
most people, not only enthusiasts. I try to serve both by ranking LCDs properly. I think we agree my rankings are correct as they stand, although we may disagree on whether the scale is linear or logarithmic, so to speak. I can only indicate scale by putting things in the Notes for each entry or by demarcating them with barriers.
Ya I suppose 16:9 1600x900 is a little strange for office work. But if that's the aspect and size you're looking for, then get it. I think it's that simple. If you don't realize what you're getting, that is not my fault. I would be recommending 19" and 17" widescreens too, I just can't find decent ones. I try to put all the sizes up there that I can. In the past I did omit the smaller widescreens, but now I see no reason to. Someone asked me why I did that and I didn't have a good answer other than that "they were too small for my taste". It's "notes" material I guess, but not a grounds for demotion.
Now I have to decide what to do with the barrier in Photo Editing. Other than that, my tentative plans are to not change anything else until we clarify further why, or if, you think CPVAs are a bad idea in the other places, as I do value your opinions, reviews, and research. And I will add your review to the notes of the F2380.
Some people do edit photos at kiosks. There are many stations here that allow you to do that last time I checked. Although maybe that's not what you meant. People edit them on laptops a lot too with poorly connected VGA interfaces to an external TN monitor.
Also I am glad these LCDs are not wide gamut because most people don't use it properly. Chalk that up as an advantage. Imagine if someone bought the LP2475w, didn't use it properly, and would have been better off with a CPVA.
Now as an amendment to this I have read about CPVA being a little worse at the blackness issue which you show in the video, perhaps because it has one less zone (and four less domains total) than S-PVA. Again though for my recommendations I am most interested about CPVAs in relativity to TNs. I previously wasn't aware CPVAs had a different structure than S-PVAs, such that they are more like original PVAs now (a la 2405FPW), but still not bad. Although I love learning technical material, I have not had valuable time to tirelessly obsess over technical differences. Many people loved the original PVA monitors. In a way CPVAs are an antidote that cannot wait to be administered to the snake poison of TN monitors on the market right now. You think they are not much better, but I do. Only you have used a CPVA so only you can tell me that (at least your opinion of it) for sure I guess.
I hope this has addressed or even "answered" all your concerns. Let me know if I missed something. I'm trying to make the LCD market "better", not "perfect". It is a very incremental process. Simply having $800 LCDs up on the list is not going to be very convincing. I need a midrange, and CPVAs/eIPS are those midrange.
You will continue to see solid recommendations, as I believe everything currently up there is. And OLEDs when they come out, too. This thread is a way for me to channel my obsessions about monitors and helping others. No it's not always going to be perfect though, that doesn't need to be said.
I think that is enough for me for tonight. I'll think about the barrier in Photo Editing and maybe some other things.
Please continue to contribute.
Thank you.
P.S. I think this is better wording, is it not?
Samsung's new C-PVA technology has revived the midrange market by restoring the traditional PVA panel and offers an alternative to the harder-to-find eIPS panel. With a lower response time on darker tones but otherwise great performance, the F2380 should deliver for most needs, including office work, multimedia, and photo editing. It is not recommended for hardcore gaming.
And yes, maybe the barrier for Photo Editing should be less innocent-sounding or maybe I should branch off the "value" photo editing LCDs altogether. I may do the latter.
I've noticed a stark difference between ToastyX's gamma results and X-Bit Labs:
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/m...-sm-f2080-f2380_6.html
vs
http://www.hardforum.com/showp...034329391&postcount=34
What's up with that? Even your review says dE 0.7 is possible, although I am not sure what gamma curves you ended up with. Can you look into it, perhaps?
Then we can determine if it should be recommended for Photo Editing at all.
Still, I don't think X-Bit Labs is wrong. There are probably different settings yielding these gamma curves. Let's face it, even the NEC 20WMGX2 was bad in some cases.
Also, I think that there is a fundamental problem with the way you guys are reviewing this LCD.
Picking the worst pixel transition to test response time, testing it, and extrapolating the poor results to include every multimedia activity is asinine. This monitor is no worse than most PVAs or P-MVAs, which in themselves have been decent monitors.
Yes, 16-19 ms on the other tones isn't really that fast and these definitely aren't gaming monitors. Nor are they worse than a lot of older TNs for many transitions.
To obtain reliable display of 24 fps you would need at least 41.66 ms response time. The monitor far exceeds that speed in most transitions. If you're watching 30 fps, you need 33.33 ms response time. Same deal here, it's far exceeded. Even at 60 fps it does not fare all that badly, needing to reach 16.66 ms.
I've played with a P-MVA. I did not like it for gaming because of the dark transition problem. Although, the problem rarely if ever cropped up during movies or general use.