Noobie review of Hitachi LCD

[Demon]

I've put the review on the web..
http://www.phil-t.demon.co.uk/review/hitachi_review.htm

I apologise up front if this breaks forums rules, I have read the f.a.q. but can't see what I am doing wrong...

Edit by Spie - No rules broken at all

 

[Demon]

its actually only a 17.1"... the 174 just denotes its the 4 gen model...

But it is the same screen diameter as the sammy... as measured with a piece of calibrated string.....

 

[Demon]

I kept editing the original post as I discovered things.... maybe this was misconstrued as covering up forum infringements, I was only trying to keep all the info in the same place..


OK..
1. I can't find any dead pixels, or sub pixels.... just when I thought I had a dead subpixel, it turned ouy to be dust. I got fed up going through all the colours, and checking, if I can't find any looking moderately hard, I don;t think its worth going too mad looking for them.

2. Doing some technical colour tests, it appears that reds/blues dominate slightly, and yellow/cyan seems slightly supressed. This can make some yellows (.e.g a windows folder Icon) on certain backgrounds look a teensie bit off, but thats being critical... This is more a function of the colour temp I think, and the Samsung is just as bad at greens/reds...

3. I can;t make my mind up as to whether the samsung lower contrast/more dark detail looks better or worse then the Hitachi who use a higher contrast, less dark detail setting on DVI, I'd say for 75% of games, the Hitachi looks better, but some very dark games have more detailed revealed on the samsung, but don;t look half as vivid... and since you don't get a choice of contrast on DVI, its a moot point, only relevent when comparing, in isolation, they both look superb on the desktop.

 

[Demon]

Oops forgot about the stand...

The base of the Monitor is a smallish diameter disc, about 5 inches accross, Hiatchi give you a larger (abotu 8 inches from memory) disc that clips onto the smaller disc... and its very stable... not as pretty as the sammy though...

Having had 2 17's side by side, I think this would wind me up unless I had 2 DVI outputs, simply because one of them would have to be analogue... and the difference is v noticeable... plus I'd be forever comparing...

On the other hand 2 17" monitors looks kinda techie, in a swordfish kinda way....

 

[Demon]

Hitman, not sure what you mean by brighter lines? It hasn't got any visible brightness aborations that I can see.
The viewing angles are good for an LCD, and seem exactly the same as the 172T...

Ghosty,
I have a Hansol 925D (19" CRT), a Sony HMDA200(17" CRT), a Samsung 172T (LCD), Hitachi CML174 (of course), and in work have access to some pretty top end 21" CRT NEC graphics quality monitors.

In my appraisal of them side by side, the only critical thng I can find that isn't in the LCD's favour is the mouse pointer smearing. With the perfect focus/converfence/geometry DVI connection, the CRT's look a little out of focus and shabby in comparison. I am ignoring viewing angles/ghosting since I sit in front of my monitor, and the ghosting thing is so minimal on the Hitachi, its only noticeable to the critic.

As for the black level, the v bright Hitachi, with its good contrast ratio makes blacks look blacker then black to the eye, since it references black relative to the white level, which is high, I know that displaying a black desktop with the lights out looks worse on the LCD compared to the CRT, but the relative black level in normal use , to the eye, is a match to a CRT.. you'd have to see it to see how good it is.

I think for me, thats what I like about these newer LCD's, technically, on paper, they may lack in their colour/black level performance, but to the eye, in normal use, they do the job more then adequately.