Decent IPS monitor
polycounter lvl 5
Hey there!
Ive had my pair of dell u2410's for about 3/4 years now. They both look perfect, no damage on the outside but the panel is showing signs of age. One has a dark blob on the top right, roughly 2cm in diameter. And the other monitor gets very toasty. But both still display accurate colours, which is good!
I was going to replace both monitors about half a year ago but never got round to it.
Now I'm looking for one new monitor to replace one and I'll probably end up giving one of my 2410's to my brother and keep on using the overheating one.
These are the monitors I've had a look at. Max Budget is around £450
Dell u2413, dell u2412, dell u2713h and the Asus PB278Q
I'd ideally like a 1440p IPS monitor but I can deal with 1200p as long as I don't have any backlight issues.
Please help me choose my future monitor!
Thanks guys
Ive had my pair of dell u2410's for about 3/4 years now. They both look perfect, no damage on the outside but the panel is showing signs of age. One has a dark blob on the top right, roughly 2cm in diameter. And the other monitor gets very toasty. But both still display accurate colours, which is good!
I was going to replace both monitors about half a year ago but never got round to it.
Now I'm looking for one new monitor to replace one and I'll probably end up giving one of my 2410's to my brother and keep on using the overheating one.
These are the monitors I've had a look at. Max Budget is around £450
Dell u2413, dell u2412, dell u2713h and the Asus PB278Q
I'd ideally like a 1440p IPS monitor but I can deal with 1200p as long as I don't have any backlight issues.
Please help me choose my future monitor!
Thanks guys
Replies
For game dev, a standard IPS 8-bit panel is totally fine, or rather, even if you get a wide gamut panel, you'll probably be running it in 8-bit mode on a gaming-class gpu anyway.
Saying that, the Dell U2413 is an excellent panel (8 bit + FRC = 10bit) that will be great in an 8-bit workflow, but also happens to have wide gamut support if you really need it, and should be within your budget.
The U2412M has a 6 bit panel, which means slightly less accurate colors and a bit of temporal noise to avoid banding.
The u2713h has a similar wide gamut panel to the U2413 but in a bigger size.
The asus PB278Q is a standard 8 bit IPS panel w/o FRC, so that means it will have slightly less accurate colors, but only really when you've got the proper 10-bit hardware hooked to the dell 13 models. With an 8-bit pipe there won't be a significant difference.
I would not get any wide-gamut monitor again ... even though I had some projects for print, I had zero use for it, it was more of a problem
Tbh it's more likely id have to send back a dell monitor. All dem bad revisions. At least with dell they replace it within one day.
I'm leaning towards the dell 2413 or the asus pro arts. Such a big decision haha. It's going to take a few days to decide no doubt.
Cheers everyone !
I'll take a small small sacrifice in color accuracy for a higher resolution and larger size.
Edit: Also, there's a dedicated thread for it.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1311936/official-asus-pb278q-pb278qr-thread-read-the-1st-post
That's a best site to read about monitors, if you need some in-depth info.
i chose this brand specifically after reading reports of flickering issues with some of the panels found in cheaper monitors.
had the same display/backlight-aging issue with my dell 24 inch. would not choose again. also certain colors always seemed a little off on that one. still working here but it started to display vertical lines recently... never had a TFT fall apart like that.
edit: spoke too soon regarding price. around 500 in the UK from the looks of it.
also, you might want to check out screens from NEC, too. they have good colors and the same no-frills approach to connectivity as the eizo. had them at several workplaces. good stuff!
If I was to buy this I'd have to stick to my other dell 2410 instead of replacing it.
I'll think about it a bit more. Seems like a lot of money for 1 monitor but if it has few know problems, that means a lot!
neutral colors, even backlighting (which my dell never really had) are it's strengths. it also doesn't shift colors noticeably when you move in front of it.
beware though - the 1440p resolution in a 27 inch package looks a bit small. i would not recommend for reading, coding or otherwise having to deal with lots of text. a 24 inch display has a noticably more ergonomic pixel-density to my eyes. as i assume a 30 inch at 1440p would have.
Color accuracy is dependent on color calibration (which is dependent on external factors, like ambient light), so if you're comparing a calibrated Eizo to an off the shelf Dell and coming to the conclusion that the fact that it's a 10-bit panel means it has more accurate color, you've got a faulty conclusion. Eizo monitors tend to come well calibrated from the factory, and some have built in or come with hardware calibration tools, which is the main reason they are typically more expensive.
So, to compare like to like, you need to get a colorimeter to calibrate the panel you're comparing it to. With a decent 8-bit IPS, the differences between that and the nicest 10-bit panel you can find are going to be fairly small after both are calibrated. Probably somewhere in the range of 95% sRGB vs 99% sRGB on the Eizo. Does that difference matter to your typical game artist? No, only someone doing super color-critical work like professional print media would even be able to tell the difference, let alone care about it.
So, the second thing is color gamut, or how many colors your screen can actually display. This has little to do with color accuracy, other than the fact that a low-gamut monitor can't display enough of the sRGB range to be reasonably accurate. Now, if you're running a 10-bit panel through an 8-bit pipe, the maximum amount of color you can display is ~16m, same as a decent 8-bit panel. Those extra bits don't do anything for you if you can't actually display them.
tft central does a good job measuring all of this stuff: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/
i noticed in this review: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/eizo_ev2736w.htm my point about the 27 inch screens being a bit packed pixel-density-wise mentioned:
"The EV2736W feature a large 2560 x 1440 WQHD resolution which is only just a little bit less vertically than a 30" screen. The pixel pitch of 0.231mm is very small as a result, and by comparison a standard 16:10 format 24" model has a pixel pitch of 0.270mm and a 30" model has 0.250mm. These ultra-high resolution 27" models offer the tightest pixel pitch and therefore the smallest text as well. We found it quite a change originally coming from 21.5 - 24" sized screens, even those offering quite high resolutions and small pixel pitches. Some users may find the small text a little too small to read comfortably, and we'd advise caution if you are coming from a 19" or 22" screen for instance where the pixel pitch and text are much larger. The extra screen size takes some getting used to over a few days as there really is a lot of room to work with but once you do, it's excellent."
When you get to 30", its so big that you either sort of look at it almost like two monitors, or you have to move pretty far back from it, at which point you have a similar problem with small text.
So having wide gamut monitor in its native mode definitely means oversaturated colors in games and 3d soft.
I.e. you would switch it into narrow sRGB gamut nevertheless.
So why would anyone need a wide gamut monitor? Could somebody explain please? What is the advantages?
Because it could theoretically simulate more precise 100% sRGB than native sRGB ones which usually 95% or something? I have never been able to distinguish any difference in such case
I used the Eizo ColorEdge as a "ground truth" for the color reproduction (which you're right does come calibrated well from the factory and has hardware calibration capabilities that recal the monitor after every 200hrs of use) and doing side-by-side visual comparisons, the wide-gamut IPS was extremely close to the Eizo after calibration, and the standard-gamut IPS had obvious visual differences in color reproduction.
Hence my suggestion that a wide-gamut panel is likely going to give more accurate / better color reproduction.
I think its safe to say that a 10-bit panel is likely going to be of very high quality, and in all likelihood will be capable of more accurate color reproduction than a lower end panel. You'll get no argument from me there.
However, beyond that, we get into the subjective realm of how big the difference actually is, and when that level of accuracy is needed/how much of a difference in use the deviation makes. For your average artist, I'll stick to my stance that a 10-bit panel isn't necessary.
If you're doing color-critical work like print media, definitely go for the most accurate panel you can possible afford. There are probably a couple fields inside games that would really benefit from it as well, such as anyone who does a lot of post fx/color grading work.
So the difference is not gamut difference actually?
That really depends on the software you are using. Most games are not fully color managed so your target color space ends up being larger than sRGB and as a result over saturated. Color gamut is largely a function of the back lighting, and there is no standardization for how large wide gamut color spaces are so you end up introducing a lot of variation between different models of displays. It is true that most standard/srgb gamut monitors are not quite capable of producing the full srgb color space, but they are very close.
At this point there is no really good solution since so many consumers have displays with greater the sRGB color space coverage and those products vary hugely in the size of their color spaces.
OP: Buy a quality IPS or VA panel and a consumer grade colorimeter. The Colormunki display is a really good value and you will be able to profile your monitor to a much greater tolerance than anything comes from the factory.
Also, I have to post the obligatory display porn shot from my current office. 50" 4k super MVA. It is standard gamut and capable of 10-bit precision if I had the hardware for it:
4k displays are getting more affordable and at the larger sizes the pixel pitch is easy to read. The extra working space is really nice.
Agree, especially cheap TVs and TN monitors which often have their green gamut corner way beyond sRGB coverage , while red and blue ones deep inside. And nothing would fix it for non color aware applications like games
That taught me to always desaturate greens a bit
Another way to think about it is 4 25" 1080p displays as one continuous surface.
If I want to look at reference material or watch something wile I work I use the windows key + arrows for tile management and keep 3dsmax on just half the screen.
It has scaling and 1:1 mapping so you can play console games on it without any stretching, heaps of inputs (2x DVI, HDMI, Display Port, Component, Composite), game mode (bypasses a load of internal processing for lower latency) HDMI audio passthrough, memory card slots. Really great all-round monitor, you can't buy them new anymore, but I've seen them on ebay for around £200.
sorry, had to be that guy. nice monitor btw. although my feeling is always that having more than one display is preferable to separate CG app from reference, browser, explorer, etc. and not having to do the dance with hot corners - or what ever they are called in windows.
Yeah, I removed it so I would stop using it. It was contributing to RSI.
FWIW I did not pay for this monitor, it was a product sample from work. It isn't even a retail product and I have no idea what it would cost if you actually managed to buy one. It also weighs 75lb because it's constructed from 18 gauge steel.
The Samsung JU6500 is about the same price as 30" monitors were a few years ago.
The only thing I dislike about the monitor has to be the buttons on the front. I would much prefer they used the same idea as the dell u2413/2713/2410. Apart from that all is good!
AlecMoody- That looks like a nice relaxing workspace!
I use a 42 inch 4k samsung display at work. It's really nice. I wish it was a 46inch though because it would be the same pixel density as my 27 inch 1440p monitors.
Also, Windows 7 sucks at 4k.
BTW, what brand monitor is that?
I have thought about getting some tile management software. If windows just expanded the windows key + arrow key functionality so that you could configure your own zones it would work a lot better.
Currently looking at the BenQ BL3200PT - 32" IPS, which is big but only with a 76 Hz refresh rate, kinda wanted one with higher refresh rate, but the review of it at Toms Hardware is pretty good. It's not an IPS, however from the review, it's actually was performing better then the IPS screens (at the time it was written).
Anyone got any experience with this screen?
And @AlecMoody, that is just ... yeah got no words.
More detailed reviews about that monitor here:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/benq_bl3200pt.htm
Its a 10-bit panel supposedly, but only 79% sRGB which isn't very good if you're doing color critical work.
Also, lolol, 10-bit panel with worse color accuracy than a decent 8-bit Dell IPS. - Just for you Sneddon :poly124:
Currently researching other options, such as Acer S277HK - 27" which looks pretty good from what I can see.
Yeah I heard the same about Asus, and am looking at some of them. I really want to get a screen now, but I don't want to go too fast and get the wrong one (as my first option clearly indicated was a bad idea). My roommate is trying to push me to buy a new 144Hz Acer monitor that comes out today, but it's about £180 above my budget sooo....