Is this monitor good enough for watching 3D movies?

[Mephesto]

I've made a thread a while back asking about a good new LCD monitor to buy but I've decided that if I'm gonna spend money I may as well make a major upgrade like getting 3D capability.
So this one came up as the cheapest: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236262
What do you gurus think?

Would I need any additional material like a new gfx card to watch 3D movies on my PC?

[sanlyn]

Google is your friend.
http://3dvision-blog.com/7861-review-of-the-23-inch-asus-vg23ah-passive-3d-ips-display/
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1413356/asus-vg23ah-user-reviews
A dissenting opinion on uTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXM12V_EX9s

[jman98]

You don't include your PC specs in your post or profile so all I can do is guess.

By "my PC" do you mean a laptop? Because if you do then you are probably never going to be able to pull this off. Yes, you mention a "new gfx card" and one would assume that you don't mean a laptop, but I can't be sure. If you mean some kind of desktop and you are using standard video on the motherboard, then all I can tell you is that I don't personally know any motherboards that have onboard video that supports 3D without having to use an add on video card. 3D takes a lot of GPU power. And CPU power too.

You will also need some kind of software that supports 3D playback. Total Media Theater is a good choice.

[Mephesto]

Fair enough sanlyn, it sounds like it sucks.
What's a cheap 3D monitor that works really well? The second cheapest one I found is a lot better but its a passive 3D display which they say has half the vertical resolution.

jman I have a desktop i7 with a 9500 NVIDIA card.

[jman98]

I don't know anything about your video card. Arcsoft used to have a guide at their website that provided guidelines but it's gone now. Maybe this article will help you.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/3d/3370919/how-upgrade-your-pc-for-real-3d/
We have people here who know whether your card will work or not, but none of them have yet joined the thread.

Yes, passive is half the resolution, BUT... the great thing about is that you can use those cheap 3D glasses that theaters use (no batteries!) and honestly, I'd argue that maybe you really and truly can't tell the difference. My 3D TV is passive and I think it's great.

[Mephesto]

You're right, the trade-off doesn't seem worth the money. From what I understood, Active 3D is dimmer, causes eyestrain and needs glasses as expensive as the monitor to view. To hell with it.
The reason the halved-resolution thing bugged me was because when I first bought this 1440x900 monitor 5 years ago, most videos I watched were 480p and commonly less and now most are just as large or even larger than my screen. So I figured I'd regret not thinking ahead but screw it. It would be cool if the HORIZONTAL resolution would be halved instead of the vertical. Oh well.

sanlyn, the reviews for these 2 seem to be good. Which should I choose since they're the same price?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005493
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009222

[sanlyn]

I'm unfamiliar with either model (the LG is newer). Offhand I'd favor the LG, as Acer has a history of not living up to published specs. At this price and build point it's a guessing game anyway. The processor speeds are similar -- that doesn't mean that either model implements it so well, so the CPU spec alone brings you to a draw. Forget the fictional contrast ratios. You're at the low end of the 3D price-performance scale, so almost every budget build will get pretty much the same results with similar limitations. The Acer supposedly had a higher retail price, but a sale at $100 off would indicate to me that it was 30% overpriced to begin with (that's a guess on my part, but I've seen a lot of Acers and this would not be a new story to me). So all I could do is play the same lottery you'd play by buying strictly online, sight unseen. Given very little info, I'd have to go by user experience. I'd also have to consider that you can wait a while and get better performance (at a higher price) from the likes of HP, Dell, or NEC and find a good IPS display over the older TFT technology -- but of course that means spending more, even if it's true that LG makes most of the front-panel displays for all those bigger-ticket 3D items.

[yoda313]

I don't know if its been mentioned but I don't think so:

http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-3D-display-3/dp/B0050SZ49Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=13...ion+3d+monitor

Its an active glasses display fyi. And I think it only comes in the 24" size. Also don't know if its in production anymore. Worth a look though.

[Mephesto]

I'm unfamiliar with either model (the LG is newer). Offhand I'd favor the LG, as Acer has a history of not living up to published specs. At this price and build point it's a guessing game anyway. The processor speeds are similar -- that doesn't mean that either model implements it so well, so the CPU spec alone brings you to a draw. Forget the fictional contrast ratios. You're at the low end of the 3D price-performance scale, so almost every budget build will get pretty much the same results with similar limitations. The Acer supposedly had a higher retail price, but a sale at $100 off would indicate to me that it was 30% overpriced to begin with (that's a guess on my part, but I've seen a lot of Acers and this would not be a new story to me). So all I could do is play the same lottery you'd play by buying strictly online, sight unseen. Given very little info, I'd have to go by user experience. I'd also have to consider that you can wait a while and get better performance (at a higher price) from the likes of HP, Dell, or NEC and find a good IPS display over the older TFT technology -- but of course that means spending more, even if it's true that LG makes most of the front-panel displays for all those bigger-ticket 3D items.

LG it is. Are there specific video cards that only work with this monitor? I had a hard time choosing the right new gfx card to buy. I wanted to get a low-power but high gflops/watt which is mostly the Radeon cards but there was one NVIDIA card that ranked exceptionally well in this department but I couldn't find it anywhere online: GeForce GT 630 Rev. 2. 25W and 675 GFLOPS. My current card is twice the power and 5 times less powerful. Can't believe I paid $100+ for this piece of shit.

There was GT 630 but no rev. 2 brands anywhere.

Will I also need software like 3D Vision to watch 3D movies or is that just for games?

[jman98]

You will need a software 3D player. Arcsoft Total Media Theater can play 3D BluRay discs and 3D files.

I have no idea if your video card is powerful enough or not for 3D. I found a website that suggests that it may be powerful enough, but you'll just have to try it.

[Mephesto]

I've bought the monitor and had it for a few weeks so here are some observations.

The contrast ratio is better than my previous 2007 monitor. I can discern all the black shades on that lagom.nl calibration site now and the viewing angle is much better.

The dark levels are brightened on the far left or right sides of the monitor but at least they don't mutate into weird colors or bright gray like on my last one. This is the major improvement I've noticed.

The monitor is way too bright even though I read white text on a black background, it hurts my eyes. I have my brightness turned all the way down and I only turn it all the way up to 100 (default) when watching movies or playing games. The 3D glasses darken a movie anyway.

Its hardware-acceleration for zooming/viewing upscaled is not the common bilinear/bicubic interpolation but those fancy SuperSai or whatever you call those newer algorithms that attempt to discern curves. This makes upscaled stuff look oversharpened and ugly. I prefer the simpler, neutral, blurred interpolation and use other algorithms at my own will when I see fit.

The response time might be slower but I can't tell. Scrolling down fast reveals interlacing artifacts and there is noticeably input lag especially on old 2D games that have no fixed resolution (I can see half the entire overworld in one view now on some games, god damn does everything look tiny).

The monitor is low power (26W) despite being bigger and cold to the touch (**** YEAH!) though I haven't been able to verify its wattage because of the weird-shaped outlet that wouldn't allow room for both the computer and monitor to be plugged in if I had my watt-hour meter plugged in there.
The last monitor was 35W and heated up pretty good.

The 1920x1080 monitor does sort of make the text tiny and I think now is the time when my usage of one-pixel-thick fonts and sizes must come to an end. I have perfect 20/20 vision, nobody in my immediate family wears glasses and I wanna keep it that way. It hurts reading tiny fonts.

The 16:9 widescreen is a little too wide and necessitates swerving my head to see things on the far ends, though it doesn't suck as much as I thought it would. I thought the same when I first got my 16:10 screen. 16:9 is really pushing it unfortunately and I'm sticking with 16:10 if possible. There's even an option on the monitor settings for WIDE / ORIGINAL but it's greyed out. I came across it once when it wasn't greyed out and wish I knew how I did that so I can set the ratio to 16:10.

3D mode is pretty cool. I don't need a software 3D player like jman98 said or a special video card. I just play the 3D video like normal which displays two adjacent videos and then press 3D mode on the monitor which interlaces them together and put on the 3D glasses to see the stereoscopic effect.

It's far less impressive than what I remember seeing at the movie theater though, but I understand stereoscopic video to not be the same thing as 3D like we see in reality. They just designate certain objects in the video to the front or back layer so people look like paper cut-outs on a painted background. Not impressed at all. If 3D software or a special video card will significantly improve this I'll be willing to try it out.

That's all I can think of for now.

If anyone is bright enough to figure out who I originally am on this forum then you'll know I'm on the same wavelength as sanlyn and we're both staunch LCD-haters.

This LCD ain't perfect, obviously, but I gotta say I'm impressed at the progress. The only remaining problem is the black levels and how they distort at an angle as well as the input lag problem but I gotta say that there's no way a CRT can now realistically compete at this screen size. For the first time, I don't miss my 1024x768 perfect-quality, low-power CRT.

Much of my hatred for the technology has cooled but I still await the OLED monitors which will bury this technology.

[sanlyn]

The 1920x1080 monitor does sort of make the text tiny and I think now is the time when my usage of one-pixel-thick fonts and sizes must come to an end. I have perfect 20/20 vision, nobody in my immediate family wears glasses and I wanna keep it that way. It hurts reading tiny fonts.

Some monitors are better at small fonts than others. Monitors that are better usually cost more. Soft-looking fonts are also associated with graphics card performance. I find ATI cards do a better job. You might want to check the Windows desktop personalization settings: I don't think ClearType is enabled by default. You can slightly enlarge the fonts (which makes desktop icons and everything else slightly bigger as well) with the desktop settings. Again, some monitors and graphics cards handle this enlargement better than others.

The 16:9 widescreen is a little too wide and necessitates swerving my head to see things on the far ends, though it doesn't suck as much as I thought it would. I thought the same when I first got my 16:10 screen. 16:9 is really pushing it unfortunately and I'm sticking with 16:10 if possible. There's even an option on the monitor settings for WIDE / ORIGINAL but it's greyed out. I came across it once when it wasn't greyed out and wish I knew how I did that so I can set the ratio to 16:10.

Most IPS monitor wouldn't have that problem. Again, they cost more.

Much of my hatred for the technology has cooled but I still await the OLED monitors which will bury this technology.

I'm afraid OLED is up to SONY. I understand they own the world patents on that technology. Problem: OLED would cut into LCD sales, and tooling is still expensive. I've seen it reported that on a mass-production basis equivalent to today's LCD output, OLED's would be cheaper to make. I suppose that once the LCD market gets completely stuffed, OLED might show up. It's being used now in medical/science setups, at considerable cost.

[usually_quiet]

The 16:9 widescreen is a little too wide and necessitates swerving my head to see things on the far ends, though it doesn't suck as much as I thought it would. I thought the same when I first got my 16:10 screen. 16:9 is really pushing it unfortunately and I'm sticking with 16:10 if possible. There's even an option on the monitor settings for WIDE / ORIGINAL but it's greyed out. I came across it once when it wasn't greyed out and wish I knew how I did that so I can set the ratio to 16:10.

Monitors with a native 16:10 aspect ratio aren't made in 1920 x 1080 resolution. Their native resolution is generally 1920 x 1200 instead. When using an LCD monitor, you need to set your graphics card to the screen's native resolution in order to avoid fuzzy text, so that is likely why there is no 16:10 option available. Your brain will eventually adjust to a different aspect ratio.

When I switched from a 4:3 CRT to a 1920x1080 widescreen LCD monitor enlarging fonts and icons eased eyestrain, and sitting further away from the screen eliminated head turning.

[Mephesto]

sanlyn, I know what ClearType is and I never liked it that much. I have it off. When I said I use pixel-thick text, I meant exactly that. Here's a screenshot to show what this page looks like on my PC. I can increase the font size on my web browser by Ctrl+mousewheel but then graphics won't be at their native resolution such as the emoticons. As I said, these traditional habits of mine must soon come to an end.

This IS an IPS monitor btw. I'll probably turn to looking furhter away from the screen to adjust. I really wish there was a way to make the sides pillarboxed so I can have 16:10 resolution or even 4:3 for old games at that ratio which currently stretch to fill up the whole screen and feel extremely unnatural. And By 16:10 I mean 1728x1080 not 1920x1200.

We'll see. When I got my LCD monitor in early 2008, I still kept going back and forth between this one and my CRT until late 2008 when I switched permanently, not because I liked it but because I was accustomed enough. It did make compression artifacts more visible which prompted my higher standard for quality when I did encoding/processing.

This monitor's idiotic use of exotic superscalers to upscale when watching lower res stuff in fullscreen also accentuates the artifacts like blocking. Sigh...

[sanlyn]

Your posted image is apparently a screen capture, as opposed to a photograph made by a camera (and thank goodness you didn't submit the latter!). I copied the pic and displayed it at full size in Photoshop Pro. I see nothing amiss with the clarity of the text, and personally I don't think the fonts are too small. True, what's in the screen capture doesn't necessarily reflect the way the fonts are actually diplayed. As I said, some monitors are better at dithering objects on the screen (including resized objects such as display fonts), and some have more even illumination across the panel.

All monitors that are "digital" and all monitors that have IPS panels are not equal. Neither are graphics cards. Therev are sites that go through some rather thorough calibration and testing procedures, one of those sites being http://www.tftcentral.co.uk . They suually test font dithering with these 6-bit IPS screens. I don';t know why they repeatedly change the way they photo these displays, but here are some results from previous tests (I use a couple of these products):

LG IPS231p http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/lg_ips231p.htm

[Attachment 19839 - Click to enlarge]

hp_zr2240w http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/hp_zr2240w.htm

[Attachment 19840 - Click to enlarge]

dell_u2212hm http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_u2212hm.htm

[Attachment 19841 - Click to enlarge]

asus_pa248q http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_pa248q.htm

[Attachment 19842 - Click to enlarge]

More thorugh calibration with hardware and software designed for the task can yield remarkable results in most vareas, including the way fonts are perceived. As your screen capture shows, white fonts on black can be difficult to read, and dark blue on black is a real chore. My monitors and TV have been calibrated with XRite software and an EyeOne D2 colorimeter (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/eye_one_display2.htm). But lately the old D2 has been replaced, so I recently saveed my dimes and quarters and got a budget version of the new I1 Pro outfit, which I've used once so far and IMO seemed a bit more able with the dark end of the spectrum (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/i1_pro.htm). Nut I intend to keep my old D2 until it starts giving up and making errors (the software includes a validation utility).

The OEM database at tftcental site can likely tell you who made the display panel on most of the monitors they have or have not tested.

[Mephesto]

Thanks for the info sanlyn, I don't see a need for hardware calibration right now, I've already visited the lagom.nl site and this monitor passed all the tests. Reading white on black is a lot easier for me than black on blinding white and the blue is actually regular blue, not dark but yes it can be hard to read, I could change it to aqua in browser settings or windows settings but then it will be hard to read on the light grey backgrounds of many windows. Before you bitch about me still using XP, be aware Windows7 allows less customization freedom in this department.

Anyway, update: I measured my monitor's wattage with my watt hour meter and it displays 11W with a completely black screen and 14W with a completely white screen. The advertised power consumption is 26W. Wtf...

It can't be my watt hour meter because it correctly measured my last monitor at 35W which was also the advertised number of that one. Oh well, I'm not complaining. For once my monitor doesn't burn my damn face in the summer. I hated that piece of beetle shit.

[Mephesto]

DERRP! I had my brightness lowered as much as possible this entire time and I forgot about it, that's why the wattage is so low. On the default setting with brightness increased to max, pure white takes the advertised 26W and pure black 22.

What can I say, I can't stand the default brightness setting, it violates my eyes.

[sanlyn]

All monitors are not alike. In many cases their low-power ratings are the equivalent of fantasy, and they are measured differently from product to product. Tests prove this time and time again.

[usually_quiet]

DERRP! I had my brightness lowered as much as possible this entire time and I forgot about it, that's why the wattage is so low. On the default setting with brightness increased to max, pure white takes the advertised 26W and pure black 22.

What can I say, I can't stand the default brightness setting, it violates my eyes.

A monitor's default brightness should probably be reserved for brightly-lit rooms, like modern commercial office space or retail stores with overhead fluorescent lighting, not typical home settings. The darker the room, the less back light is needed.

[Mephesto]

All monitors are not alike. In many cases their low-power ratings are the equivalent of fantasy, and they are measured differently from product to product. Tests prove this time and time again.

Maybe but for this monitor and my last one the results were thankfully consistent.

A monitor's default brightness should probably be reserved for brightly-lit rooms, like modern commercial office space or retail stores with overhead fluorescent lighting, not typical home settings. The darker the room, the less back light is needed.

Makes sense, though I believe this monitor's lowest brightness is equivalent to my previous monitor's maximum brightness. I guess LED-lighted LCD monitors emit light more directly and are thus brighter.

I have some more observations about this monitor that I didn't properly notice before.

When looking at it from any angle but dead center I notice a faint diagonal pattern on uniform backgrounds. I'm guessing this is due to the weird-shaped IPS pixels.

Also during movement of pixels there are sharpening artifacts on the edges of the moving object. This is most noticeable when scrolling in 2D games when the pixels of the moving object have a brightness greatly different than the background they're on. This doesn't happen when watching movies though. For the most part, it's not really annoying.