Screen/Monitor QC - Why can't anyone get it right!!?

It's fairly simple, albeit not what customer expects, I guess - because it's profitable.

If they wanted to sell premium screens @ class 1, they'd have to throw like 30-40% screens to the garbage bin. That would mean no bad pixels (unless they appeared after QC, but that's... rare), good screen uniformity, etc.

But that 30-40% is a hefty loss and a typical consumer doesn't give a rat's ass about whether the product has dead pixels or not.

We're a group of enthusiasts/OCD-ers that care, but we're a minority. We're not worth the money they lose on thrashing crappy, but still sellable panels.

Also, it doesn't help that in some cases, different brands (Acer, Asus, AUO, for instance) use the same AU Optrionics (which is Acer's, by the way) screens, notorious for terrible QC and frequent faults.


A solution is to pick a good screen (sadly, thorugh a panel lottery) that we're expect to keep for a couple years, and stick with it. If you're a kind of customer that likes to change screens every year, you're bound to suffer more.
 
In the same position right now for my monitor upgrade. Had my Samsung 27" 1080p 120hz screen for 4 and a half years now. Not in desperate need of a change as it's a good monitor for gaming. Been looking at the Acer 1440p Gsync screens and of course the TN ones have pixel inversion, even the ROG Swift.

So my choices today are either TN with pixel inversion artifacts, or go with IPS and get glow or backlight bleed.. which probably isn't ideal for dark scenes in games.

Such a shame there isn't anything almost flawless. Even paying out quite a bit doesn't guarantee much.
 
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Such a shame, a working 144 ips would have been a steal at that price.

Looking through various boards across the internet it seems qc on pc monitors is rock bottom. You've got to buy from a good retailer so you can deal directly with them.
 
RidingTheFlow said:
Funny that Asus created ROG label and Acer created Predator *supposedly* to "cater for enthusiast market segment". Sadly, it was usual marketing bullspeak, since they had no clear idea themselves what that "enthusiast market" actually wants.
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I imagine they do, but they dont produce the panels themselves. And since they are niche products, the displays are probably not manufactured in super high quantities and dont have the same more rigorous standards on consistency. Yet being low quantity, they are still expensive.

So what's a boy to do?

I'm kind of hoping that 4K monitors will start to resolve this mess. 1440p is a resolution pretty much only PC gamers care about(outside of the smartphone market) and it's an awkward middle child between 1080p and 2160p, which is where the market is going. 4K will ultimately become the new standard, skipping over 1440p and will probably see much greater adoption. There is likely to be a whole lot more 4K desktop panels being produced in all kinds of variations than there will ever have been for 1440p.
 
Seanspeed said:
4K will ultimately become the new standard, skipping over 1440p and will probably see much greater adoption. There is likely to be a whole lot more 4K desktop panels being produced in all kinds of variations than there will ever have been for 1440p.
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Of course, but we're still lacking GPU power for 4K as it's hard to maintain even 60fps in newer games, minimum fps suffer quite a bit. And with 1440p you get the benefit of 120+hz which makes a decent difference to smoothness.

It's not an easy decision by any means. Even more so when the current panels leave more to be desired.
 
4K is also pretty horrible experience @ Windows.

Some glaring issues:
1. my custom icons don't work in 4K, they don't scale, making my desktop fugly
2. some apps don't work with scaling, making them a mess of blurry text (for example the popular mozilla thunderbird!)
3. Scalling troubles. Scalling text @ browser requires a different scale than text @ windows. Which is a frustrating experience because there's limited customization.
4. gaming gets limited to 40-50 fps at best, unless you spend a fortune on graphic cards.
5. not getting a dead pixel when you have 8 millions of them is pretty difficult.
 
NV have released a new tech called Multi-Res Scaling which trashes the IQ in the top & bottom of the screen (much like foveated rendering) to claw extra performance @ 4K. Certain games it is reported to be livable.
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
Of course, but we're still lacking GPU power for 4K as it's hard to maintain even 60fps in newer games, minimum fps suffer quite a bit. And with 1440p you get the benefit of 120+hz which makes a decent difference to smoothness.

It's not an easy decision by any means. Even more so when the current panels leave more to be desired.
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Well I mean over the next 2-3 years.

Pretty sure late 2017 into 2018 will start to see more affordable 4k/60fps-capable cards. Pascal was a huge leap with only minor architectural improvements. An improved process plus a REAL architectural jump should see some really good gains. Plus we've got higher bandwidth memory standards now that will help quite a bit.
 
Kaiketsu said:
4K is also pretty horrible experience @ Windows.

Some glaring issues:
1. my custom icons don't work in 4K, they don't scale, making my desktop fugly
2. some apps don't work with scaling, making them a mess of blurry text (for example the popular mozilla thunderbird!)
3. Scalling troubles. Scalling text @ browser requires a different scale than text @ windows. Which is a frustrating experience because there's limited customization.
4. gaming gets limited to 40-50 fps at best, unless you spend a fortune on graphic cards.
5. not getting a dead pixel when you have 8 millions of them is pretty difficult.
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Yeah 4K scaling in Windows is garbage.

Your 5th point made me remember reading what someone else said on these forums a while back, if you buy a monitor that advertises for example 3840x2160 pixels and you receive it with one or two dead pixels then you are not getting the amount of pixels advertised.

Either way I convinced myself my next major monitor purchase I will be going to a store directly, whether that means driving all the way down to stoke or where ever Overclockers are based or finding a decent store more locally that sells them even if the cost is a bit more than online. I'm fed up with playing the monitor lottery and constantly losing, wouldn't be surprised if they all get bashed about in transit too.
 
I feel this thread :( I too have given up on trying to win the panel lottery until they stop trotting out the same old flawed units with different plastic wrapped round them. Going to be using a 24" Dell from 2012 for the foreseeable; and that's only because there was one at work that I could liberate. Without this, I'd be using 24" Dell from 2007, because that's still better than a lot of today's stock.

The most frustrating part? I'd be willing to pay a premium price if any manufacturer would put a guarantee of perfection on the screen! Produce a 32" QHD with 100Hz, matte finish, full sRGB, and definitely no BLB, banding, dead pixels, or any other visual defects for £1000 and I'll take one the same day.

Does this level of quality exist at any price? No. They'd rather flog me a defective unit for £350 than a working one for a grand.

Not even Dell or NEC are willing to write "BLB free" into their product guarantees. Quality control is such an elephant in the room that nobody is even prepared to talk about it :(
 
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I did it! I won! I won the darn lottery!

...The panel lottery that is. Second time is the charm, or so it seems so far. The 'replacement' I got back from Asus has zero issues and didn't develop terirble backlight bleed after 24 hours. Unlike the first monitor, the packaging wasn't as damaged and there weren't the tiny bits of backlight bleed in the corner at the get-go, I essentially got a complete and proper replacement, though it did cost me a spare power cable (since the driver took the packing and everything, including a cable he wasn't meant to). Of course, it's Monday and I've only had it since Friday. Who knows if it might give up at some point and develop an issue later on down the line.

But I feel the pain. I felt so disheartened with the first monitor, to the point where I was about to return it and not bother with monitors for another few years. But I will agree that QC needs to be looked at properly. Even if it takes an RMA or 2 to get one with no issues, it shouldn't need an RMA in the first place. I know QC is very serious where I work, if it was similar for a monitor company, then they'd get shut down while they fix the kinks.
 
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