Allen Posted July 27, 2006 Share Posted July 27, 2006 LCD all the way. We're going through the same decision here at work. Although the old LCDs didn't match colors well at all - the new ones are very close. The main issue to switch for me is the ease that LCDs are on my eyes. I stare at monitors for more than 12 hours each day. The CRTs here at work don't offer nearly the crispness and brightness than do the LCDs I've worked with and frequently give me headaches from the refresh competing with the overhead lights. Love going home to work on my Dell 24" - best money i've spent on a computer component. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 Thanks for your replies. I think I am leaning in the direction of getting some lcd's. Now I just have to figure out which ones to buy. Budget, of course, is always a concern. I don't think we should pay more than 300-400 per monitor, since we are going to be replacing a lot of them all at the same time. I think we may go for something like dual 19's or 20's. The Viewsonic VP930b looks nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moshenko Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 One idea to consider: spend more money on a primary monitor that has great colour quality and purchase some cheap secondary monitors where accurate colour is not necessarily an issue. You might find that the overall cost is fairly similar (or at least close enough to make a compelling choice). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 Hmm, that is an interesting idea. I will have to think about that! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoffc Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 I think this was the thread that led me to buy the viewsonic for the price/value over the others. http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/27/the_spring_2006_lcd_collection/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 Thanks for the link. The Samsung looked good too, but it is only a 6 bit monitor so I'm surprised it scored such good color fidelity. The Viewsonic does seem to be the better choice in that price range. Maybe I will buy one of each at first and see how they compare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gfa2 Posted July 29, 2006 Share Posted July 29, 2006 I just got 2 of these and I have been very happy with them. http://www.planar.com/environments/business/graphics/productLayout_2_7643_944.cfm?comparator=2037 From what I'm told there are only 3 or 4 manufacturers that actually make LCD monitors and Planar is one of them. Everyone else is buying them from these 3 or 4 companies and putting thier label on. I took these things out of the box and plugged them in and they were awesome, I haven't even changed any of the default settings. Our corporate office told me that we have been having problems with Viewsonic (which is actually what I requested) so they wanted me to get Planar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 29, 2006 Author Share Posted July 29, 2006 Thanks for the link. The Samsung looked good too, but it is only a 6 bit monitor so I'm surprised it scored such good color fidelity. The Viewsonic does seem to be the better choice in that price range. Maybe I will buy one of each at first and see how they compare. careful with the samsungs. all of the samsung monitors i have used or tested had software controlled RGB values, or only factory presets for the color intensity levels. the software controlled rgb is problematic in my opinon when it comes to calibrating the monitors using a spectrometer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 31, 2006 Share Posted July 31, 2006 I just got 2 of these and I have been very happy with them. http://www.planar.com/environments/business/graphics/productLayout_2_7643_944.cfm?comparator=2037 From what I'm told there are only 3 or 4 manufacturers that actually make LCD monitors and Planar is one of them. Everyone else is buying them from these 3 or 4 companies and putting thier label on. I took these things out of the box and plugged them in and they were awesome, I haven't even changed any of the default settings. Our corporate office told me that we have been having problems with Viewsonic (which is actually what I requested) so they wanted me to get Planar. Yike, those are expensive. And the smaller 19" monitors don't seem to be available any more. The downside to those is that the analog performance got poor ratings. We would be using all digital if possible, but most of us have 2 computers each so we are using kvm switches, which are all analog. The dual dvi switches are extremely expensive and hard to find, so for now we do not have plans to upgrade those. So hopefully whatever monitor we end up using will have reasonable performance with analog input. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allen Posted July 31, 2006 Share Posted July 31, 2006 One of the benefits of buying digital LCDs is that they (in my experience) also have analog inputs and buttons on the front to switch from one to the other - so the KVM switch may not be necessary for the monitor - just connect the analog to one computer - the digital to the other. Worked great on both the Dell 19s and the Viewsonic 17s I've worked with. Also, if you're looking for 1600 x 1200, you'll likely have to buy a 20" or above - worth the money for the extra pixels IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 31, 2006 Share Posted July 31, 2006 One of the benefits of buying digital LCDs is that they (in my experience) also have analog inputs and buttons on the front to switch from one to the other - so the KVM switch may not be necessary for the monitor - just connect the analog to one computer - the digital to the other. Worked great on both the Dell 19s and the Viewsonic 17s I've worked with. Hey that sounds like a great idea. That would be even better than our current setup too, because the KVM switches we have only support one monitor. So one computer can use both monitors and the other computer can only use one. Thanks for the tip! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 So we bought a couple of Viewsonic VP930b's to test them out. One thing I have noticed is that if you draw a simple gradient from white to black in Photoshop, you notice some heavy banding on the monitor. This doesn't happen with crt monitors, and even not as badly on my old Sony 15" lcd - although still a little bit. Does anybody know if there are any display settings to help out with this? Or is this something we should just expect with all lcd monitors? We want to be able to go with all lcd's but if we can't see gradients correctly, then we might have to stick with crt's for now. The sad thing, though, is that crt monitors are getting extremely hard to find because of the popularity of lcd's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moshenko Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 So we bought a couple of Viewsonic VP930b's to test them out. One thing I have noticed is that if you draw a simple gradient from white to black in Photoshop, you notice some heavy banding on the monitor. This doesn't happen with crt monitors, and even not as badly on my old Sony 15" lcd - although still a little bit. Does anybody know if there are any display settings to help out with this? Or is this something we should just expect with all lcd monitors? We want to be able to go with all lcd's but if we can't see gradients correctly, then we might have to stick with crt's for now. The sad thing, though, is that crt monitors are getting extremely hard to find because of the popularity of lcd's. I bought a bunch of these as secondary monitors and they are typical of today's LCD's: fast motion response at the cost of colour depth and quality. There are no settings that will improve this, unfortunately. I think I mentioned it before, but it's worth saying again: consider getting really cheap secondary monitors and spending money on something with a 10-bit gamma such as Eizo, Lacie, etc. I haven't followed LCD developments in recent months so I may be missing some. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 I have a Viewsonic VA912b 19" LCD with DVI and a Quadro 1500 at work (actually it's not a very good monitor) and I tried a test - make a 1000x1000 Photoshop file and put a black-to-white gradient from the lower left corner to the upper right. It's got nasty banding - not just getting lighter at each gray shade, which I would expect, but going dark-light-dark-light in a way I wouldn't expect. It's more pronouced in RGB than grayscale but there in both. On my Macbook Pro (Apple's LCD with an ATI x1600) under MacOSX I also see the effect, but it's less noticeable. Under Windows on the Mac (with my FireGL hack) the effect doesn't appear. I think this all has something to do with something Photoshop's color space is doing that I don't understand. For example, if I do it in grayscale and bring up the Info panel, and move the cursor up the gradient or across the gradient, the gray value is decreasing or staying the same as expected but the CMYK is jumpy, and there's definitely some color in the banding. If I convert the grayscale gradient to CMYK mode and then mess with the contrast, color bands become quite visible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 Interesting...I think since we don't really have a huge budget for monitors (we need to pretty much replace all of them too), we may just use a viewsonic crt for the main display and an lcd on the side. Not the most glamorous setup, but I think it will work. That way we don't have to sink a ton of money into displays right now and would feel better about upgrading again once the color fidelity for lcd's has improved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moshenko Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 I keep hearing stories from people that have larger Dell and Apple Cinema displays. The reports sound like some of these displays have great colour representation, but I've never used one of them personally. It may be worth looking at if you know someone that has one (or if you feel like purchasing one to test). I hope LCD's do improve in this area, although I'm skeptical about the majority of LCD's improving in terms of their colour representation. It seems like things are mostly geared towards games and movies, and that translates into speed, brightness and contrast, but not necessarily colour. AJLynn, the results you observed on your Macbook are interesting. Have you tried eliminating Photoshop in your tests (viewing a gradient as a desktop background or something)? I don't know if this would introduce other issues or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 I've tried viewing the gradient in windows picture viewer and it looked exactly the same as in photoshop. I have heard good & bad things about Dell displays too. There is a new one coming out soon that looks pretty nice. http://www.bornrich.org/entry/new-dell-30-inches-ultrasharp-3007wfp-hc-lcd-display-debuts/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 Yes, the 1907FP's - the replacement to the 1905FP - are what I sent packing after I drew a black to white gradient in Photoshop and ended up with something that looked more like 12 vertical bars than a gradient. I *think* that the major difference in the new crop of LCD's is the display of 16.2 million colours as opposed to 16.7. 500,000 less colours is quite a lot! I would not recommend the 1907's from Dell based on my short experience with them. I had forgotten about this thread...but since this conversation we had purchased some dell's that came with the 1907fp's and they were complete trash. We called our Dell rep, and he told us that they have a model that is the 1907fpV, which they didn't even have as an option with the systems. He sent us the 1907fpv's and they are comparable to the older dell 1905fp's. I haven't noticed any banding or anything like that on them either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 Interesting- I just tried that (Why didn't I think of it? I'm probably not very smart on Friday afternoons) and if I save a PNG file of the gradient and open it in Windows picture viewer I see a banding pattern that's ust about as bad, but different. I can also change, but not eliminate, the pattern if I change Photoshop's color settings. We've been thinking about getting some of those 30" screens in the forseeable future, I think I'll have to get the Apple Store people to let me hook up my laptop to one and try it out. Any more recommendations for things to try on it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 I've tried viewing the gradient in windows picture viewer and it looked exactly the same as in photoshop. I have heard good & bad things about Dell displays too. There is a new one coming out soon that looks pretty nice. http://www.bornrich.org/entry/new-dell-30-inches-ultrasharp-3007wfp-hc-lcd-display-debuts/ That looks pretty sweet. (And I'm a big fan of cold cathode tubes after I used some in one of my thesis models - they're the tube lights they sell for pimping out PCs.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moshenko Posted December 8, 2006 Share Posted December 8, 2006 Interesting- I just tried that (Why didn't I think of it? I'm probably not very smart on Friday afternoons) and if I save a PNG file of the gradient and open it in Windows picture viewer I see a banding pattern that's ust about as bad, but different. I can also change, but not eliminate, the pattern if I change Photoshop's color settings. We've been thinking about getting some of those 30" screens in the forseeable future, I think I'll have to get the Apple Store people to let me hook up my laptop to one and try it out. Any more recommendations for things to try on it? Windows picture viewer will apply an sRGB correction to everything it shows, I think. The desktop suggestion was to try and remove any correction other than what is set in the system (if your monitor is calibrated this should mean that no additional correction is being applied). Try setting it as wallpaper and see if it's still wonky. Chad, thanks for the tip on the fpv models. I just checked for them on Dell's website and they do, indeed, look like the older 1905 models (and the slower response time would suggest that they are the same). The new Dell display may be worth trying out too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 Has anybody tried the SAMSUNG 971P yet? I was going to order some SAMSUNG 940t's but they are out of stock everywhere. The 971P sounds pretty good. The only thing that doesn't thrill me is the software based monitor adjustment controls. Here is a link for the 971p http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824001086 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moshenko Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 I meant to reply to this earlier: I received two Dell 1907FPV monitors this week following Chad's recommendation and I am happy to say that they are equal to - if not better than - the old Dell 1905FP monitors that I mentioned. I haven't tried the Samsung (although I suspect that the Dell uses Samsung guts) but these 1907FPV's are really, really nice. They cost CDN $329 so I'm sure they will be an absolute bargain in the US. Chad, if we ever meet: I owe you a drink! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fran Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 I'm extremely pleased with my new 19" Eizo's, but they are pricey. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 I'm extremely pleased with my new 19" Eizo's Yeah I bet you are! Lucky! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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