Associate
- Joined
- 27 Nov 2014
- Posts
- 18
TNs have a terrible reputation, much of it deserved, some of it not, for image quality and viewing angles. The thing what needs to be remembered is that most people's experience of TNs is those panels used in cheap and cheerful laptops and family PCs which indeed are terrible.
High end gaming panels are immensely better than the rubbish served up in a Hewlett Packard home pc. The TN Swift and Dell S2716GD have reasonably good image quality and much improved viewing angles, although there is a ceiling here. TNs are very fast and responsive and handle motion better than any IPS panel. Fast moving games where the camera pans quickly simply feel better on TN, there's no contest there although newer higher end IPS screens are closing the gap.
Colourful games - for example, the Rayman series, or Ori and the Blind Forest - look miles better on IPS though even though newer TNs have improved somewhat. Both panels have poor contrast, particularly in darker scenes. Larger IPS panels suffer badly from IPS glow which totally ruins image quality in dark scenes and to my mind at least is a worse issue than the mild darkening of parts of the screen when you shift your viewing position when playing on a premium TN screen.
Side by side almost everybody would pick an IPS over a TN.....until the image starts to move, in which case you will have some people favouring the TN. Personally I absolutely hate motion blur and every IPS I've ever used suffered badly with LCD sample and hold persistence. Granted I've yet to try the newer "4ms" IPS panels, but these have been plagued with quality control issues.
Bottom line is that there is no perfect monitor. TN is terrible by some metrics, excellent by others. The same goes for IPS. It all boils down to your own personal preference.
Hopefully in the next 12 months or so we might see IPS panels maturing to the point where TN is totally redundant, but we're not quite there yet. The response times of IPS has fallen substantially in 2015, if they sort out QA and glow we might have a decent compromise until OLED monitors become a reality.
High end gaming panels are immensely better than the rubbish served up in a Hewlett Packard home pc. The TN Swift and Dell S2716GD have reasonably good image quality and much improved viewing angles, although there is a ceiling here. TNs are very fast and responsive and handle motion better than any IPS panel. Fast moving games where the camera pans quickly simply feel better on TN, there's no contest there although newer higher end IPS screens are closing the gap.
Colourful games - for example, the Rayman series, or Ori and the Blind Forest - look miles better on IPS though even though newer TNs have improved somewhat. Both panels have poor contrast, particularly in darker scenes. Larger IPS panels suffer badly from IPS glow which totally ruins image quality in dark scenes and to my mind at least is a worse issue than the mild darkening of parts of the screen when you shift your viewing position when playing on a premium TN screen.
Side by side almost everybody would pick an IPS over a TN.....until the image starts to move, in which case you will have some people favouring the TN. Personally I absolutely hate motion blur and every IPS I've ever used suffered badly with LCD sample and hold persistence. Granted I've yet to try the newer "4ms" IPS panels, but these have been plagued with quality control issues.
Bottom line is that there is no perfect monitor. TN is terrible by some metrics, excellent by others. The same goes for IPS. It all boils down to your own personal preference.
Hopefully in the next 12 months or so we might see IPS panels maturing to the point where TN is totally redundant, but we're not quite there yet. The response times of IPS has fallen substantially in 2015, if they sort out QA and glow we might have a decent compromise until OLED monitors become a reality.
