Monitor help please.

Count_Zero99uk

Count_Zero99uk

Count_Zero99uk

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Hi all,

Right ive been looking over the monitors to get one to replace my old heavy 21" Dell CRT.

I will be using it for PC Gaming, X360 gaming and watching lots of videos.

I hope to have the PC and X360 plugged in at the same time.

My GFX card is the Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 3850 Pro 512MB

I have a budget of around £250-300.

Can anyone recomend something good, or point me at a primer that will tell me what all the different specs mean.

Thanks
 
IMO to do the things that you want it to do your budget is completely unrealistic.

You ideally want to be looking at something like the HP LP2475W (looking around, best price I found was £406.78) or the BenQ FP241W (best price £350.52) or the Dell 2408WFP (best price £379.50)

These will all have the extra inputs you are looking for and also all be very good for movie playback... My choice of the 3 would be the HP cos it's an IPS panel.

However if you are happy with slightly lower quality movie playback then there are other alternatives with TN panels that would be cheaper.

Personally I would find the resolution of the Dell S2409W very annoying 1920 x 1080 as it's not a properly supported resolution for gaming being 16:9 format instead of the regular pc format which is 16:10
 
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Monstermunch, I havent bought a monitor for years so am not aware of what options there are or what you mean by TN panels.

Do you know of any good guides on what it all means?

Thanks.

Also Budget is a bit fixed till i get back into fulltime work so ill have to keep it down at that value unfortunaly.
 
Count_Zero99uk said:
Monstermunch, I havent bought a monitor for years so am not aware of what options there are or what you mean by TN panels.

Do you know of any good guides on what it all means?

Thanks.

Also Budget is a bit fixed till i get back into fulltime work so ill have to keep it down at that value unfortunaly.
Click to expand...

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ thats one of the best...

Basically there are no perfect LCD panel monitors, each panel type have their deficiencies...

There are 3 types of panels... TN, VA & IPS. The VA models come in either S-PVA or P-MVA variations.

Now someone else please jump in if i get this wrong but here's how I understand things:

TN: Faster response times with their overdrive technology down to as low as 2ms for grey to grey & around 16ms for colours. Generally considered much better for gaming because the lower response times mean far less ghosting and by far the cheapest option.

VA: Middle of the road price wise and considered to be better for colour representation and video/movie playback than TN panels although IME the cheaper end of the VA panels can leave a lot to be desired with some quite bad ghosting traits and backlight bleed and colour response times are generally never better than 25ms no matter what the claims of the manufacturers are.

IPS: Top end price wise, although some very high spec VA panels are similarly priced. These panels are considered the best for professional use and have on average better colours and video/movie playback than others.


IMO it comes down to what you value more to lead your choice on panel type. a lot of others will probably claim that the VA panels are the best all rounders but IME the ghosting will be visually noticeable ingame, backlight bleed will cause annoyance and sometimes the input lag from the PC is absolutely rubbish.
 
Im Currently using a HP w2207 22" TFT, Ive had both the PC and 360 connected at the same time and this was around £200.

the Subsequent model also has HDMI too, 360 thru the official VGA cable was fine.

Depends how you would like to connect up your 360 but I disagree with the above stating that you need to spend a lot more.

This ahs done me fine for PC Gaming, 360 gaming, Movie whilst sitting at my desk and also across the other side of the room.
 
Monstermunch said:
Now someone else please jump in if i get this wrong but here's how I understand things:
Click to expand...

You missed out the viewing angles. A TN panel has very poor viewing angles meaning you need to be directly in front of it for it to look OK (and even then on a big screen that term is subjective). Viewing from any sort of angle will introduce washout.

An IPS or VA panel have much better viewing angles (most LCD TV's are VA based), but VA has a strange horizontal gamma shift visible on certain colour combos that may annoy you (hardforum is a good example of a site affected by the gamma shift problem).

With your budget though, the only option is a TN.
 
A helpful thread. Thanks for those info guys, ive been looking for this thread just to get ideas. I wanted to change my monitor also since it is 2 years old already. That old.lol
 
I'd chip in with the fact that a true 16:9 monitor *is* a great choice. Contrary to what Monstermunch wrot, every game I've loaded up in the last 6 months has had native 1920x1080 support.

In addition 16:9 is the perfect ratio for 360 and Ps3 games. So if you're connecting a console to your new monitor then no scaling/black bars are required. If you bought a 16:10 monitor the 360 recently added support for those rezes in the new dash, but all it does is letter box the 16:9 picture so it stays at the correct aspect ration.

16:9 Dell 2409 for the win I say. And its well within your budget. True its a TN panel with the associated downsides that brings, but its big, fast and cheap and has the inputs you'd need other than maybe component.
 
go for a 16:10 monitor if its for PC use, aswell as console use. Just make sure it has 1:1 pixel mapping, so that you get the correct aspect ratio from your console.

16:9 or 16:10 doesnt really matter, aslong as the 16:10 monitor has the 1:1 feature.
 
Well thanks again for all the info. The furniture is now out of the room and the paint is going up. So ill take your advice and look again at whats available and ill let you know what i choose and how it does for what i need.

Tata for now.
 
philjohn said:
You missed out the viewing angles. A TN panel has very poor viewing angles meaning you need to be directly in front of it for it to look OK (and even then on a big screen that term is subjective). Viewing from any sort of angle will introduce washout.

An IPS or VA panel have much better viewing angles (most LCD TV's are VA based), but VA has a strange horizontal gamma shift visible on certain colour combos that may annoy you (hardforum is a good example of a site affected by the gamma shift problem).

With your budget though, the only option is a TN.
Click to expand...

My old monitor was a VA panel... New one is a TN and it has far better viewing angles so this is not always true ;)
 
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