30" monitor question - follow-up report

[Peter Huebner]

After gathering as much info as I could and scratching my head a lot
about how much money might be worth spending I decided to get the new
Samsung 26" panel. I ordered one the day they were to become available
here in NZ only to have delivery date first go to TBA and then put
back 5 weeks. Meh.
So I increased my bet by 150% and rang Dell & ordered the 3008
monitor. After a week and a half, the new beast finally got delivered
today.
First impressions: installation was flawless, except the included
cables are damn short. Wouldn't have worked with my desk. Fortunately
I had a 5m USB and a 5m DVI cable in the drawer. Plugged it in, turned
it on, changed input from vga to dvi and away it went. Boot screen
displays just fine. So does windows desktop. Windows suddenly decided
that my video card is capable of 2560x1600 after all, so that's all
good.

I've settled for the monitor to display at 1920x1200, increased the
dpi to 115% in windows settings and moved the monitor back about 40cm
from where the old monitor used to sit. This works well for me - I no
longer need the reading glasses and I can read the text and see
desktop icons just fine. There is no visible stepping or fuzzyness
that I can perceive. The icons look fine (WinXP Pro, Sp1) unlike some
of the scaling I've seen in the past.
Out of the box the colours of the display were garish, and I am having
some problems figuring out how to achieve something that works well
for me. Contrast and saturation seem to do much the same thing, as do
brightness and gamma, and I think I will have to play with this many
more times until I get it right.
When I set the screen to blank(black) I can see that the backlight
bleeds some in the bottom right corner and in the centre of the top
edge, but this is only just noticable and doesn't show up when
anything is being displayed. No bright or dead pixels that I have
found and that's all good. The blue LED in the power button is a bit
too bright. I think I shall have to set a jar of pencils or something
similar in front of it. Fortunately it's in the bottom right right
corner, nearly at the outside of the bezel.

I've taken the display through a number of resolutions, from 1280x1024
which was the original setting of my windows (19" HP monitor) to
1680x1050 to 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 and it looks very good in all of
them. The 2560 is too fine for my eyes, and I can't use it for the
desktop. But I have fired up a couple of games in that resolution and
the result is very very pleasing.

I was apprehensive when I placed the order, and I must say on the
whole I am happy with what I got. It's not going back in the box and
home to Dell ... unless it blows up some time the next 2 weeks.

-Peter

 

[Peter Huebner]

I was apprehensive when I placed the order, and I must say on the
whole I am happy with what I got. It's not going back in the box and
home to Dell ... unless it blows up some time the next 2 weeks.

-Peter

And by now I have managed to stuff everything up so badly, trying to
get powerdvd to look half way right, that the even text is blurry with
hard white shadows.
Ye gods.

-P.

 

[aku ankka]

And by now I have managed to stuff everything up so badly, trying to
get powerdvd to look half way right, that the even text is blurry with
hard white shadows.
Ye gods.

-P.

Try to use the display with it's native resolution, should be
2560x1600. Increase the font size so that the text is more readable,
the higher resolution should make the fonts easier to read as there
are more pixels to render more detail.

If you don't use the display at native resolution, scaling is done.
The scaling factor for 1920x1200 would be 3/4 (0.75), how well this is
scaled depends on the quality of the scaler. Depending on your
graphics card and driver, you can let the panel do the scaling or the
graphics card will do the scaling. It depends on the filter they use,
bilinear, bicubic, or something else, how good quality scaling you
going to get. But what matters is that when you have the software
rendering your fonts or video, each pixel that is renderer cannot be
accurately presented to you on the display because every pixel on the
display will have color blended from multiple pixels in the memory of
your graphics card's framebuffer.

From my experience, text looks pretty awful on non-native resolutions
because of aliasing and/or other filtering artifacts. Just use the
native resolution and if text is too small, make the font bigger. You
will still have big fonts, just more detail. This makes the text
*easier* to read for most human beings. Good luck with the monitor, I
got older 2006 vintage model of the 30" dell, and I ain't trading it
away as it's a great display (cons: I don't have HDCP so no pressure
to upgrade to Blu-Ray or soon-to-be-dead HD-DVD, but hey, maybe that
saved me a lot of pain so that's great LOL)

 

[chrisv]

(e-mail address removed) says...

And by now I have managed to stuff everything up so badly, trying to
get powerdvd to look half way right, that the even text is blurry with
hard white shadows.
Ye gods.

Aren't computers fun? 8)

 

[Peter Huebner]

So I increased my bet by 150% and rang Dell & ordered the 3008
monitor. After a week and a half, the new beast finally got delivered
today.
First impressions: installation was flawless, except the included
cables are damn short. Wouldn't have worked with my desk. Fortunately
I had a 5m USB and a 5m DVI cable in the drawer. Plugged it in, turned
it on, changed input from vga to dvi and away it went. Boot screen
displays just fine. So does windows desktop. Windows suddenly decided
that my video card is capable of 2560x1600 after all, so that's all
good.

I've settled for the monitor to display at 1920x1200, increased the
dpi to 115% in windows settings and moved the monitor back about 40cm
from where the old monitor used to sit. This works well for me - I no
longer need the reading glasses and I can read the text and see
desktop icons just fine. There is no visible stepping or fuzzyness
that I can perceive. The icons look fine (WinXP Pro, Sp1) unlike some
of the scaling I've seen in the past.
Out of the box the colours of the display were garish, and I am having
some problems figuring out how to achieve something that works well
for me. Contrast and saturation seem to do much the same thing, as do
brightness and gamma, and I think I will have to play with this many
more times until I get it right.
When I set the screen to blank(black) I can see that the backlight
bleeds some in the bottom right corner and in the centre of the top
edge, but this is only just noticable and doesn't show up when
anything is being displayed. No bright or dead pixels that I have
found and that's all good. The blue LED in the power button is a bit
too bright. I think I shall have to set a jar of pencils or something
similar in front of it. Fortunately it's in the bottom right right
corner, nearly at the outside of the bezel.

I've taken the display through a number of resolutions, from 1280x1024
which was the original setting of my windows (19" HP monitor) to
1680x1050 to 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 and it looks very good in all of
them. The 2560 is too fine for my eyes, and I can't use it for the
desktop. But I have fired up a couple of games in that resolution and
the result is very very pleasing.

I was apprehensive when I placed the order, and I must say on the
whole I am happy with what I got. It's not going back in the box and
home to Dell ... unless it blows up some time the next 2 weeks.

-Peter

As it turns out, things did blow up. I had not yet tried to
play videos on the Dell when I posted the above. Now, don't get
me wrong, you can play videos just fine, the problem lay with
the colour balance: Either I'd get colors on my videos
(Powerdvd seems to use the desktop colour settings, rather than
the NVidia Control Panel discrete video colour settings) but
the desktop would look garish enough to make your eyes bleed.
Or I would beat the desktop colours into submission and the
video would look like aquarell-tinted black and white (e.g.
faded, very faded colours). I finally managed to find a medium,
albeit not a very happy one.

Even after about a week the colours still looked garish to me,
and even after toning things down as much as I could I still
had that gritty feeling in my eyes after a few hours of use.

The rot set in when the monitor started developing a green
tinge in the top right corner, and the bottom left corner
started to look warmer than the rest of the screen. At that
point I did decide to return the monitor for a refund.

Have had a HP LP3065 sitting here for the last couple of days
instead.
No issues with the colour rendition, or balance between video
and desktop settings so far. This monitor clearly looks better
when set to the full 2560x1600, (where I could run the Dell at
1920x1200 without apparent loss of picture clarity) and I am
using other methods, like the EyeRelief utility and a different
dpi setting to increase icon and font size. With that, I'd say
the picture clarity is easily equal to the Dell at 1920x1200,
and I don't so far seem to have the eye-strain issues that I
had with the Dell. So far, so good.

-Peter