"Fast" 20" monitors
The 17", 19" and 24" now feature fast panels. The only one left was the 20" category, which was a generation behind. The two monitors introduced in this micro-survey change this situation.
The very much anticipated Belinea 10 20 35W is the forerunner of a new generation of 20" monitors and is the first to include the more than famous AU-Optronics second edition Premium MVA 8 ms. It’s comparable to the one featured in the 19"
Belinea 10 19 20 and
ViewSonic VP930 (which has the same panel as the 10 19 20, but 200 € more expensive and sometimes even as expensive as the Belinea 10 20 35W).
As for LG, they introduce the Flatron L2040P, which is like a Super IPS. It’s much more interesting than we first thought, and its product characteristics do not at all correspond to what the really monitor is. It’s stated that it has a 16 ms response time. This would normally be quite undesireable, especially from what we’ve seen during the past five years, however, the panel actually behaves differently from what we’re used to. And surprisingly, LG doesn´t mention anything about this. The monitor is much faster and different than the previous IPS tested, and its black is much deeper.
To be sure of the value of these two monitors (which we like alot) we included the test results of a TN, the previous MVA 8ms and PVA 6ms, and a CRT.
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, after developing a response time measure procedure last year with a
probe and an oscilloscope, we eventually came to the conclusion that that the measurements weren’t representative of what we actually saw on the screen. The results for example were that a ViewSonic VP191b was much faster than the Hyundaï L90D+ TN 8 ms. After playing a game and watching a movie for five minutes with these monitors you realize that the opposite is true. We then developed a new test procedure in the summer of 2005, based on pictures of images on the monitor. In this way we can capture 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 these 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. This time results are consistant with what we see in games. Finally, practical tests are the same in games, HD and DVD video, web surf etc.
The test computer is self-assembled and has an AMD Athlon XP3200+ processor and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT card.
