BenQ EW2420 Advice Needed

[dimension7]

Hi Guys,
I know this VA LED monitor has been discussed to death in this and other forums. I have fallen for it and bought one, but yesterday after receiving it it seems my enthusiasm has lessened a little.

Firstly, the panel does not have gamma settings like 2.2 etc like some of you old timers have. It just goes 1,2,3,4,5. I used the Lagom.nl tests to fix this and found that the lowest gamma 1.0 on the monitor was still way off from 2.2. Other options only made it worse.

btw, this is connected to a laptop over HDMI-DVI link.

I cannot see blocks 1 to 4 on the lagom black level test. 5 is barely visible and the others are just visible. Using NVidia gamma and lagom if I correct the gamma to 2.2 it brings out the details in the shadows but causes horrible banding in the gradient test. Still blocks 1-4 are not visible. Improves visibility of other blocks though.

The whites are quiet crisp on the other hand and I can see all except the last two on the lagom white saturation test. However it appears that the contrast at 50-60 is just about right. Move it to over 60 and I start losing the white details. The brightness has pretty much no effect in bringing out shadow details and as long as it is between 30-60 it seems to make no visible difference to the colours or image.

Finally the colours were off too and I tried calibrating it using a grey scale image. The result is not too shabby though I'm sure I haven't got it all perfect.

Backlight is not uniform, I can see the corners a brighter. No edge bleed detected. No dark fingers effect on white background. No stuck pixels.

I didnt seem to be bothered by the response times.

Main questions:
1. Is there another way to fix gamma on the hardware. If I reduce the intensity of RGB channels individually, will it help in getting gamma closer to 2.2? I was hoping this panel would bring out more shadow detail compared to my TN, but it seem to be identical

2. The backlight causes the red and purple block images on lagom to appear pinkish at the corners. The viewing angles are better but the colour shift due to backlight kind of defeats it?

I'm kind of failing to see what the big deal is with this monitor compared with the fairly cheap uncalibrated Dell (E2009W) TN I use at work? I am really hoping its just my settings. Should I try returning this and getting a replacement due to any of these issues?

 

[PCM2]

Lagom.nl is a very poor test for gamma values - you need a colorimeter to measure them accurately but it is clear that your unit is giving you obvious and visual problems. It sounds as if your unit is plagued with 'the issues' though and shares the poor gamma controls of some other units.

1)The gamma control being weird - http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=18268263&postcount=585
2) Some other issues - http://www.pcmonitors.org/reviews/benq-ew2420-an-example-of-inter-unit-variability

 

[dimension7]

Thanks been through those links.
Now back from work and I have had a chance to play this monitor again and I've realised that it was a mistake to try and adjust the colours by eye.

And anyway the preset standard mode is pretty good at least for my model. Manufactured Dec 2010 in China.
Apparently BenQ have changed the firmware as the Gamma values are integers now. So I found that using the following settings works fine:

Picture: Standard
Color Temp: Normal (defaults to RGB 88,88,80)
Bright: 25
Contrast: 59
Sharp: 2
Gamma: 1.0

The interesting thing was that brightness had no say in improving or worsening the lagom tests. Contrast was more drastic and strange.
The default was 50 but I initially set brightness to 0 and the whites were slightly dirty. So I tried changing contrast while testing lagom white saturation. 52 made it worse then 54 improved it 59 was the best. 60 destroyed the 252 white block and 60+ destroyed further blocks. So 59 was the max contrast I could get without losing any white information. The contrast test was pretty good on the standard setting, strangely sRGB was duller on the same bright/contrast, so I decided to stay with Standard.

Finally I increased brightness to 25. The good thing is I can change this as much as I want without losing colour information!

Now gamma was still off and I could not fix it on the hardware. But colours are pretty amazing now. I guess BenQ have perhaps sorted the standard preset? I cannot know, but the colours feel natural to the eye. Not warm or cool. Finally I used the sharpness test to fix gamma using NVidia control panel.
Once gamma was spot on the colours seem to fade a bit but I got better results on the black levels (I can see square 10+). I've gamma at that value for desktop work, NVidia allows gamma setup for video separately and here I find leaving the default hardware gamma gives a richer picture for movies.

Interestingly reducing the brightness to 25 has reduced the backlight non-uniformity issues so thats a plus. There is absolutely no edge bleed or led ripple etc. So BenQ have worked on that I guess. All four corners are just slightly brighter.

I can now see the appeal of this monitor, though I guess its for enthusiasts. You cant expect it to work out of the box. You gotta sit with a colorimeter or like me with lagom and painfully tweak the parameters to get good results.

Its a keeper for me cause in the worse case it does no worse than a TN panel and definitely gives better viewing angle. So for the same price buying this instead of a TN makes sense. And then if you can spend time tweaking it or get a colorimeter from someone you can get the best out of it.

Just my 2 cents!!!