I may as well mention some of my experience regarding quality control and I also think monitors are MUCH worse now than even just 5 years ago. 10 or so years ago, the build was a lot better on most. I think too many manufacturers are going for this "slim" effect and compromising too many things. I've only had one monitor that was a good one that has the display flush with what surrounds the screen rather than protruding boarders. That was a Dell S2415H and that was SOO good for the price. It is also the only glossy monitor that has been on sale with a VESA mount in years. I can't find any now.
Anyway, aside from that, I bought 3 pretty expensive monitors separately, and returned them simply because I was disappointed with the quality of them for the price.
I first got a Dell U2518D and the backlight bleed was horrendous. I really think it was related to the fact that it had no chunky boarders around the edge, and all of the leaking backlight was where it had pressure on it in transport. (the supposedly protective pads at each corner) It also seemed really bad at the bottom with loads of brown patches visible on dark colours. For well over £300, I thought that was unacceptable and returned it.
I then got a Philips 258B6QEB. This had no obvious backlight bleed, but awful colour shift from one side of the monitor to the other. Very warm on the right and cool on the left. Effectively making white documents look like you had vastly changed the colour temperature as you go across the screen. The monitor was powered by a AC to DC convertor, but despite this, when the monitor was on, it emitted a really irritating buzz. Maybe too high pitched for that average to hear, but was so irritating that I had to return it.
I then bought a BenQ PD2500Q. This had an issue that may have just been more down to me being fussy that something unacceptable, but the colour rendering was atrocious given it was claiming to be very accurate. Everything looked way too saturated no matter what I did in the OSD. Things that were bright just seemed so intense that they were a distraction, and it didn't seem to be a brightness issue, more contrast or something else. If there where a whole load of bright things together, it was very hard to distinguish different shades. It also seemed to have some colour shift towards the right of the monitor. For example, dark blue looked fine at the left and the centre, but lost virtually all of it's depth and became grey on the far right side. It also seemed to have a really thin coat over the display as any slight pressure on the screen even from cleaning left noticeable streaks of backlight bleed, which I found really bizzare. Given I never touch the screen (i point with the mouse if i need to show someone something), I hate to think how many damaged spots this screen would get from all those fingers! Any pressure seemed to allow some of the backlight to come through, until you tried to evenly pressure it all out again. This was really irritating, as well as the colours, so I returned it.
I then gave up with expensive monitors and bought a Philips 243V7QDAB for just £69. Amusingly, it has none of the colour shift from one side of the monitor to the other, but still very bad backlight bleed, and the colours are not great either. Dark shades are hard to tell apart from each other and it all ends up looking rather dark. but the fact is, it was cheap and far better value than the other 3. I want a monitor like the first Dell I mentioned which went faulty after about 4 years. But I just feel I won't be able to find a decent one now. Backlight bleed seems to be far more common on screens that don't have protruding boarders. I would rather get a bulky, dated looking screen that actually is well built and has a good panel inside!
All this said, although some have been returned, I have purchased 7 monitors over the past 10 years, and it was only the first one that had a single dead pixel. All the others were fine. My faulty dell after some years started getting stuck sub pixels, but what was odd about that is that if I stopped using it for a month, they wouldn't return until i had used it for another few weeks. They seemed to keep recovering then going stuck again.
I'm trying to put up with my cheap monitor for now, but that is because I don't believe things are built well enough at the moment to risk going for an expensive display. If monitors over £200 have noticeable backlight bleed or colourshift while my old dell didn't (which was £104), I just can't accept that.
Moan over for now! Hope it was appropriate for the thread.
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. I'm not about to say the X34GS is unuseable, but the overshoot behaviour across the g-sync range of AW3821DW is better.
