fish99 said:
To be fair, I did say CRTs produce deeper blacks only in a dark room, and I do mean pitch black, at night with the lights out. In daylight, or even in the evening with the lights on or dimmed, the glass front on a CRT relfects too much light and ruins the black level. Also not all CRTs can produce a deep black.
Fair enough. In my review, I covered the black levels as I felt that for some people this is very important. However, I personally would never sacrifice the proper colour balance for good blacks and particularly balance between the major colours and black and balance between standard RGB colours (when calibrating the screen). OK, some monitors have better blacks but poor colour accuracy/balance and vice versa. Good monitor will always try to properly combine those two variables together, but never sacrifice any of them. In that sense I was pleasantly surprised, as NEC is balancing them in a great way.
fish99 said:
Have you tried your CRT and LCD side by side, in a pitch dark room at night? I'm not doubting what you say though, afterall I've never used that NEC LCD. I would say it's probably the screen coating doing a similar thing to Sonys X-Black.
Yup, I tried the NEC & 740SB CRT side by side and I was puzzled (in good sense). When comparing the NEC @ Advanced DVM (1600:1) enabled/Contrast 50%/Brightness 50%/Native monitor profile and CRT side by side, NEC was winning and not by small margin. As I was in disbelief at first place, I tried to tweak the CRT so that somehow I match them, but no joy. Simply put, NEC colour reproduction was "deeper", more vibrant and more balanced. Probably, credit have to go to the new LG.Philips 1600:1 panel control & OptiClear. You have more info @
http://www.baddass.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tft_central/advancedcontent.htm#dfc
fish99 said:
Your 450 cd/m2 NEC must be incredibly bright at full settings, way too bright to use I would think, unless you sit a long way from it. I'm sure if you had to do 5 hours programming on it, looking at a mostly white screen, you'd have to turn the brightness way down to stop it hurting your eyes.
True. For close up is no go. If you watch from the distance it's OK.
fish99 said:
On my SM913B LCD I had to set gamma in the monitors OSD from 1 down to 3, and turn brightness down to about 40%, to make it useable, otherwise it hurt my eyes. My current CRT is a similar brightness to the LCD with those settings.
Here, I'm keeping at 60% brightness 50% contrast and it's "pleasant'. It may happen that OptiClear is somehow additionally "smoothing" the brightness glare. Generally, I always liked the screen coating option. Apart from the slight reflections problem, it's always "calming down" the screen and in some sense it was always more pleasant & natural to the eye (especially colours).
fish99 said:
You've got to wonder why they make these screens so bright when everyone just turns the brightness down. If they just put a dimmer backlight in them, you'd get the same result, except that the black level of the monitor would be much better. I guess they want high brightness because it's a spec they can use to market the screens.
Yes, in some sense we may conclude that this is pure marketing gimmick and my major point from the above is now rising again. Some people are always chasing the numbers (and higher the better) but in reality they have to be aware what is "expectable" from all those pretty numbers, at least in perceptive way.
