Monitors

I’m one of those people who wishes CRTs were still in production. I like my monitors bright as hell with good color reproduction. I also loved having monitors with no “native” resolution.

Until recently I had a Hannspree 28″ LCD. It was a moderate-quality panel with a moderate-quality backlight, and it had a shitty pixel pitch (will explain what that is later). The backlight on the left side died, and instead of trying to fix it I decided to get a newer, better monitor.

I researched some monitors that I’d seen at CompUSA and had picked out the AOC 21.5″ LED LCD monitor. I bought it, and when I started to use it realized immediately that it had some kind of filthy film on the monitor’s surface. I tried to return it but found out we had to wait 10 days for a check to clear. In the meantime, I was told that the likely source of this effect was color dithering of a low-quality 6-bit panel to an 8-bit or higher palette.

The same people recommended the Dell Ultrasharp series (which has a higher quality IPS panel, as opposed to the usual TN panels), so I picked out the 21.5″ in that lineup and ordered it. It arrived only a day or two later, and the stand was gorgeous (tilt/swivel/height adj.).. The panel was too, but when I hooked it up, it had the same horrible gunk on the screen but SEVERAL TIMES WORSE. This screen was unusable, and I had to know why.

I had the revelation that it might be the anti-glare filter, and started searching for people complaining about it – there were many. I still had the AOC monitor, so I set it up next to the Dell for comparison. The AOC monitor was much brighter, and had less of the gunk, but it’s color reproduction was clearly inferior and it had some defects (bright spot in the bottom left, colors lighter when objects are further down on the screen tint-wise). I packed that one back up.

My options at this point were to either try to adjust to the screen “coating” or locate a different monitor. I chose the latter, and found a handful of suitable monitors. Eventually I found a monitor that was identical to the Ultrasharp 21.5″ but with a glossy screen – because it was a touchscreen, and the anti-glare coating wouldn’t work out on one of those. Lucky me!

This monitor is built on-demand so it won’t be here until the end of the month – I have no doubt it will be just like the Ultrasharp 21.5″ but without any of the problems, so it should suit my needs quite well. The only unfortunate thing is that these monitors don’t come in an LED variety, but getting an IPS panel without crap on it took priority.

Here’s a link to the monitor I ordered.

It’s a multitouch glossy IPS LCD with built-in speakers and HDMI/VGA/DVI as well as three USB ports. Should be quite nice. I really didn’t care that it was multitouch but that will be nice for Galcon Fusion, Photoshop, and some other things I’m sure. 😀