Monitor Question

[hollywoody]

Hi, I need to ask you guys your opinions before I take the plunge in a new monitor. I would like to keep it under $500 otd

 

1. LED or LCD pros and cons?

1. can you really see the differance between a 2ms and 5ms rated monitor ?

2. Other than reflection glare of a glossy screen.. which is most preferred within the sim world glossy or non glare? I do notice that the glossy screens sure seems to bring out the clarity and vibrance on pictures but not sure if it will make the cockpit and gages and game look strange? my last monitor had anti glare screen.

 

Thanks guys!

[CAT_101st]

I have the non glossy screen and like it much better. I have a 22" LCD 5ms KDS. I only paid $169 shuld of bought 3 of them.

I had a 2ms and don't realy see a diffrance betwean the 2.

[topdog]

LED, unless it's OLED (typically rare for large displays at this time and used more commonly on smaller electronic display panels) is just a reference to the backlighting of the LCD monitors. Which are pretty much all LED backlit anyway. Those branded/sold as 'LED monitors' usually mean they're just using a newer and higher quality design pattern for how they're doing it.

 

For general use, you'd not really notice much of a difference if at all between traditional LCD backlit and 'LED' branded ones, so long as the monitor itself is a reasonable build quality in the first place anyway.

 

2ms vs. 5ms = marketing terms. No real difference since the way they do the measurements aren't standardized anyway (it may be 2ms to go from a bright red to a slightly less bright red, or it may be 8ms to go from distinctly different shades of grey, or it might be anything inbetween). Just avoid anything that's even daring to report anything higher than 8ms (commonly you'll see the values 12, 15-16, and 25 used). Those ones are typically cheaper/older tech and did genuinely suffer noticably more from 'ghosting artifacts' with fast moving objects. Even grabbing an open folder or empty web browser window on the desktop with the mouse and moving it rapidly around the screen would produce quite undesirable ghosting with these older monitors (and usually a good test to do since the contrast of a white folder window against the typically darker background wallpaper makes the LCD work a bit to keep up). Fine having something like this for bashing out Word documents though of course, but not multimedia/games.

 

The only glossy screen I have (out of 5) is on my netbook. Doesn't cause any problems there for me if I'm honest, but looking at it and using that at different angles, I think for a main desktop usage the reflections it catches would tick me off (I can see some that stand out more than I'd like), but it's up to the environment you use it in.

 

At your stage I would actually best suggest you to get down to a store or two and do some 'window shopping' just to see how they are when on display. Usually stores setup the monitors for 'display conditions' (that means max brightness settings and slightly oversaturated colours for vividness) to catch the eye, but for the comparisons you're after it'll work if they have demo systems setup you can try different things on. Try playing back movies / videoclips or a game if you can, as plain Windows Desktop usage with a mostly static non-moving screen will only give you one perspective. Compare glossy vs. non-glossy ones that way.