Discussion Forums > Technology
Advice about buying monitors
nstgc:
I'm currently bouncing around on whether I should buy the LP2465. The big advantage is the price for $250 (that inludes service plan and shipping) I should get a nice monitor. My current monitor's back light is slowly dying (every 3 days I have to decrease the brightness setting by 2 or it just flickers off and on). It currently can take 35 and 0 isn't completely dark. I will need a new monitor. Do I need an IPS monitor with 2.3 Mpix and 500 cd/m^s? Hell no.
I know I can't afford an HD monitor that costs over $300 because to maintain my computer's ability to use that screen for games, I'll need a new graphics card. Actaully I can't truly afford that. Anything more than a $150 monitor and no new gfx card is both reckless and selfish given the economy. Fortunately I don't have any dependents, I don't eat out, and I don't have a real life (all of which save money).
I'm going to take some screen shots of some dark areas in games and videos to see if they show any artifacting on an iMac. That will likely be the deciding factor. That will tell me with a high degree of certainty if TN panels are good enough with their 262k colors (2^18, 6b per channel). Actually, is that number right? if a TN panel only displayed 18b color I would think it would be more noticeable. Any way we'll (meaning me) see.
[edit] Actually I should be able to do 2 things. One is take said image and use Gimp to see if those areas are indeed the samew color. Second I'm sure I can find a test pattern (color wheel won't work though due to my personal ability to distinguish colors).
[edit2] I could also change my gamma curve. Not the number, but actual curve. shift all colors up by a constant so dark areas aren't dark.
xShadow:
Well, I received my monitor yesterday.
So, it has a tiny crack on the corner and a few smudges on the frame, but outside of this I would actually say that mine shipped relatively well. The picture quality is great, too.
On the other hand, it has 2 dead pixels.
I'm kind of considering whether or not returning it would be the right thing to do. I know I said originally that I wanted to avoid dead pixels like the plague to be to be honest the only way I managed to find them was to put a completely white (full screen) image up. Even then, I had to look pretty hard. One is in the upper right, one is in the upper left (not quite in the corner, just in that general area). Since I can't possibly tell that they're there unless I put the white image up in fullscreen, I'm seriously considering whether they're that big of a deal. Outside of those dead pixels, it has 22.6k hours on it, but only 1.3k of those are backlight hours (not sure how much that is).
The reason I'm not just returning it is because these tend to come so badly shipped that the shape mine is in happens to be somewhat of a miracle, and (like I said) I can't really tell that those dead pixels are there, because they're so tiny, and hard to locate.
Other than the dead pixels, I don't really regret this purchase at all. Quite frankly, the screen space I now have is absolutely insane, the picture quality is great (albeit a little weird; I notice that there's some kind of minor... "rainbow effect"; I can't really say what it is, but it kinda looks... like there are small octagons everywhere? I can't place my finger on it. It's not a con, but it's something I'll have to get used to, as I have not seen it on any other monitors I've had thus far).
Oh, and I also had a few gray stuck pixels in the lower left, but some light rapping with the knuckle got those working.
So, whaddaya guys think, return it or not? I'm leaning towards keeping it, simply because I can't really tell that they're there in any normal operation, but I dunno. TBH the gray stuck pixels that I fixed bothered me a LOT more than those dead pixels ever would, prolly. *Shrug*
nstgc:
how do you know how many hours a monitor has. I'd like to check mine.
fohfoh:
Your monitor sounds like it's 2nd hand. At least in the way that you describe it.
pietra:
I also am a bit wondering what monitor to get since this CRT just doesn't cut it. I would like to know how good LG is?
I was looking at something like this: http://www.lg.com/uk/it-products/monitors/LG-led-monitor-W2486L.jsp
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