"Fast" 24" monitors
There are many product releases planned for the end of the year. TN monitors response times fall to 2ms, MVA stabilizes at 8ms and PVAs – which have suffered from a lack of innovation for many years – fall to 6 ms. The first monitor of this type that was tested was the 17" Samsung SyncMaster 770P. Now comes the Acer 2416W, the first supposedly fast large monitor. Here our mission is to find out if it´s as fast as the Samsung 770P, which is also equipped with a Super-PVA 6 ms panel. We have compared it to the latest Samsung of the same size, the SyncMaster 242MP, whose claimed response time is 16 ms. They could be potential contenders for the famous 24" Dell 2405FPW, which holds the title for best large monitor in our website since April. Will it keep its title?
There was one thing that surprised us. Samsung, aware of our comparison of their 24" monitor and the Acer, told us we wouldn´t find many differences, because they have the same base. The main difference would be in electronic components. We noticed, however, that they differed greatly in monitor display quality.
Our articles were becoming much too long, so we decided to change their format. We now have a section for each characteristic instead of for each monitor. This makes it easier to see differences. There is now a
Reaction Time page with a comparison of afterglow (with our monitors of reference), a page for
Color quality, etc.
Tests
Color fidelity and calibration, game reaction time, video quality, ergonomics, viewing angles, and the quality of interpolation…every aspect of each monitor is examined.
For color fidelity we use the LaCie Blue Eye Pro colorimeter, based on the Gretag tool and coupled with the new LaCie software suite. More evolved than the previous version, this helps us to compare a monitor’s display quality (color spectrum and DeltaE) in standard settings and after calibration. Results are sometimes surprising as it’s often best to take the time to manually adjust colors (or at least contrast, brightness and color temperature).
For game tests, nothing is better than a couple hours of UT 2004, (we call this work) to have a good idea of a monitor’s reaction time. We have added extracts of afterglow in two environments. The first is between bright colors and the second is for black and white (like in wire frame mode). The software used is
Pixel Persistence Analyzer (or PixPerAn for regular users). Pictures showing ghosting effects are captured with a Canon 350D at a shutter speed of 1/1000 s. We take 50 pictures in burst mode for each test to precisely measure the progression of afterglow between images.
The test computer is self-assembled and has an AMD Athlon XP3200+ processor and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT card.
