Still a QC lottery in Jan '17?

The quality control on pc monitors is truly dire. You have to be seriously lucky to get a perfect one.

I had an absolute nightmare last time i bought a monitor. I sent two dells back with awful yellow tinge and bleed then got a refund and bought a viewsonic. I then sent that back due to awful backlight bleed. Replacement was better but far from perfect but i was fed up with sending monitors back so accepted it.

Then the power cirtuitry failed a couple of months later and viewsonic fobbed me off with a string of scruffy refurbs with red lines on the screen and terrible bleed. After sending three back i actually ended up getting my faulty one back repaired so just settled for that.

I'll never buy viewsonic again.

In fact, when i next come to buy a monitor, i may go for a 4k television as the quality control is so much better on tvs. I've never had to send a tv back.
 
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IvanDobskey said:
In fact, when i next come to buy a monitor, i may go for a 4k television as the quality control is so much better on tvs. I've never had to send a tv back.
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It's weird that you never see a TV with backlight bleed... Maybe because there are plenty of stores where you can walk round and look at them before you buy, and compare them to the screens next to them.

Monitors are often bought online, unseen, and viewed in isolation, such that people who don't know much about them will just accept whatever tat they're given.

Sad to hear you had issues with Dell though, I thought they were one of (if not the) best :/
 
I think the manufacturing processes are better for tvs. I know backlight bleed can be an issue on any lcd screen though. One of the reasons i now have an oled as my main living room screen. That said my previous sony lcd was perfect.

But the dell was horrendous. Whites were pretty much yellow! Maybe it was just that particular model. This was 3 years ago though.

I had been eying up one of the lg 34 inch ultra wide 1440p screens, but I'm not sure i can deal with panel lottery again.
 
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Yer, the current lottery has crushed my desire to buy. After three returns at the back end of 2015, I just can't stomach another round of faffing about just to end up not changing again... It's like taking a test drive in car I know I can't afford, just makes me want it more without offering any hope of getting it :(
 
IvanDobskey said:
It really should be illegal to sell products that vary so much out of the box.
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CPUs have their own silicon lottery... but then, you never get a CPU that doesn't work as it says on the box. Even the 'dog' chips can run at above stock speeds, so yeah, why should you get a monitor that has 5-10% of the screen discoloured?

More people need to return bad screens, imho. If 50% of consumers were brave enough to say "no, it's not up to standard, I want my money back," the manufacturers would sort it out pretty quick! Not sure how we've gotten to the state where people accept a monitor with obvious discolourations, but they'd immediately take their new TV back to the store if it had that sort of problem!
 
Good old CRT days were the best for quality. You just knew EXACTLY what to expect with any screen. Then if you got a nice Trinitron you were sorted!

It's a shame we have so much variance in the market now :(
 
Hedge said:
...Then if you got a nice Trinitron you were sorted! ...(
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Except for those two little dark lines that ran behind the screen xD

Had one for a while, swapped to LCD in the early days, maybe '01 or '02. Awful thing, but at least it didn't give me flicker-headaches!
 
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RidingTheFlow said:
What people name "clouding" is really kind of same issue but on the whole bigger area and looks a bit different - but it's same cause and effect, simply more rare-occurring.
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Hmm, I'm still not sure that's right. The output might indeed look the same, hence the same "effect" (though possibly in different areas), but the "cause" is completely different. With clouding, the problem lies with components (usually diffuser) and their tolerances. With BLB, the unit is poorly assembled. So even if the diffuser was the best in the world, the poor assembly could still bork it. Whereas if the diffuser is crap, then even the most perfectly made assembly won't fix it.

---------------

As for the TV quality control discussion:
Yes, hardware-wise it might indeed be better. But firmware/software-wise it might be the total opposite. Or at least with Philips it is, and I have personal empirical experience of it. Their "support" forums are riddled with people asking for bugfixes, but every "fix" they make, usually just makes the situation worse. The model line I had ended up having a broken firmware that rebooted the TVs almost daily. And Philips STILL hasn't fixed it, nor any of the other bugs, for that matter. And probably never will. So with the last update, Philips essentially borked their customers' sets. And it was released "conveniently" outside the warranty period.

So, if you guys thought "planned obsolescence" was bad, then get ready for Philips' "active obsolescence". Sucks to be them, though, as now I'll NEVER buy anything from Philips, again. And I'll do my best to inform others, as well. (Consider yourself informed, btw.)

Luckily I refrained from updating to the last patch (as it didn't state any of the bugs that bothered me as fixed), and I was left with a semi-working unit (with the previous bugs still intact, though). Now I just can't let it access the internet, otherwise it will want to auto-update to the broken firmware.

Also, TVs indeed have backlight bleed as well, but in regular transmission programs the image content is so bright and colorful, that you don't usually notice it. But in darker scenes, it is still noticeable.

With regards to CRTs:
The last CRT I bought was 22" (20.5" visible area) and it cost me 800€ (in 2002, I think?). LCD had already been released and pushed to the market. In other words, CRTs weren't cheap, either.
 
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eddiew said:
CPUs have their own silicon lottery... but then, you never get a CPU that doesn't work as it says on the box. Even the 'dog' chips can run at above stock speeds, so yeah, why should you get a monitor that has 5-10% of the screen discoloured?
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True that. If they try to sell you "3.8Ghz CPU" but then state "we have standard and according to it CPU could actually be 0.3Ghz less" - people would tell its ridiculous. Not with monitors.

"no, it's not up to standard, I want my money back," the manufacturers would sort it out pretty quick!
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Funny thing, if you actually manage to find *panel official specifications* (that what manufacturer actually guarantees officially, mostly in engineer datasheet), they are almost never lie. Its just that these "standards" are pretty shockingly lax - e.g. its pretty common to state "acceptable uniformity is +-20% in the corners +-15% overall measured in (just) 9 points". So this horribly visible bleed would be indeed well within spec and you can't complain its not up to standard :)
Or, feast your eyes on Acer dead pixel policy standard - https://www.acer.com/ac/en/IN/content/dead-pixel. That's >30 officially allowed dead pixels for 4K panel :)

eddiew said:
The sad thing is I'm completely happy to pay more for a better product. Historically I've bought Dell screens, with the associated 100% premium over mainstream panels. I'm hesitant now because:

b) their warranty covers dead pixels (great!) but not BLB (bad)
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Sadly, Dell quality went along with rest industry (to the gutter) and nowhere where it was several years ago.
Also, their "dead pixel warranty" or ("premium panel guarantee") only covers bright (stuck pixels), but not black ones which many people only find out when they try to ring Dell to have their monitor repaired and are refused to - http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-premium-panel-guarantee#3

aatu said:
With BLB, the unit is poorly assembled.
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Alas, you can't really "well assemble" metal frame and glass sheets which are so cost-effectively thin that won't hold completely stiff&straight ;)
You may get lucky sometimes, but it would be ineffective to throw away (majority) of units which turn out not-100%-perfect. Hence BLB lottery.

eddiew said:
It's weird that you never see a TV with backlight bleed...
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Simply because most TV's are VA, and on them bleed is a lot less visible (since black level is much lower).
However don't buy "TV's have better QC", they just save cost differently - e.g. they almost never check them to properly display large areas of uniform colour (which is common if you use TV as monitor).
This is pretty normal for modern LCD TV - http://i.rtings.com/images/reviews/ku6300/ku6300-dse-large.jpg

Only OLED's are exempt, but issues with price and screen burn for static images (e.g. taskbar/letterbox) remain.
 
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eddiew said:
The sad thing is I'm completely happy to pay more for a better product. Historically I've bought Dell screens, with the associated 100% premium over mainstream panels. I'm hesitant now because:

a) the input lag on their 30" QHD model is quite high. Which I might live with except...
b) their warranty covers dead pixels (great!) but not BLB (bad)

Basically I won't pay a grand for a screen that may or may not have backlight bleed. Put in the component that costs an extra tenner, add it onto the price of the screen, and I will gladly have one.
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When I bought my Dell 4k screen it came with some sort of calibration test cert.
At the very least it means they tested it before selling it.
What I'm not sure of is how picky there test is.
My own screen looks fine to me and is a reasonable match to prints and Pantone book.

If you need a new screen I wouldn't be put off. Research the best place to buy for ease of swap should you get a problem.
 
Holst1981 said:
When I bought my Dell 4k screen it came with some sort of calibration test cert.
At the very least it means they tested it before selling it.
What I'm not sure of is how picky there test is.
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In most cases such certs only guarantee that colours are accurate for single point where they stuck the calibrator on (probably the center).

Unless it specifically states acceptable multi-point uniformity tolerance.
 
RidingTheFlow said:
...Its just that these "standards" are pretty shockingly lax - e.g. its pretty common to state "acceptable uniformity is +-20% in the corners +-15% overall measured in (just) 9 points". So this horribly visible bleed would be indeed well within spec and you can't complain its not up to standard :)
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I take your point, but by "up to standard" I'm thinking the internet sales regs that allow you to return based on a product not being of the expected quality. No picture on any retailer's site shows anything less than a perfect picture, and it wouldn't really be reasonable to expect people to read the datasheets of every product before they buy it, so I suspect the return would have to be authorised. If enough people did it, the problem would soon go away :) (Not that it isn't disgraceful that the specs are so slack!)
 
Holst1981 said:
When I bought my Dell 4k screen it came with some sort of calibration test cert.
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Dell check for colour accuracy because they're pitching to a professional market. The certificate is your assurance that you don't need to perform any additional calibration yourself :) Whether they're doing a full-panel test, and whether they're checking for BLB and similar is another question.

My problem with returns is that even I feel like I'm taking the **** with them. I sent back three around Dec '15, to various retailers. I don't want to get branded a serial returner and blacklisted - which is why I'd really like to feel that the industry has improved their production quality :/
 
eddiew said:
I take your point, but by "up to standard" I'm thinking the internet sales regs that allow you to return based on a product not being of the expected quality. No picture on any retailer's site shows anything less than a perfect picture, and it wouldn't really be reasonable to expect people to read the datasheets of every product before they buy it, so I suspect the return would have to be authorised. If enough people did it, the problem would soon go away :) (Not that it isn't disgraceful that the specs are so slack!)
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People eventually tend to give up - after they've tried returning 3 monitors and none of them perfect, they are lot more willing to finally settle for something less than perfect. And for manufacturers several return costs are nothing, comparing money they will have to throw at to actually raise QC/tech bar back significantly.
This tactics works simply because "everybody is doing it". It could be broken only if some manufacturer appears who decides to go against common trend and get competing edge based on true premium quality. But there are like 3 large TFT panel factories in the whole world, and AFAIK they all in cahoots with each other (I still remember ~1-2 year old scandal about price fixing).
 
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RidingTheFlow said:
It could be broken only if some manufacturer appears who decides to go against common trend and get competing edge based on true premium quality. But there are like 3 large TFT panel factories in the whole world, and AFAIK they all in cahoots with each other (I still remember ~1-2 year old scandal about price fixing).
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Yeah, I'm still searching for a monitor manufacturer who jumps in with a truly premium "flawless guarantee" offering... Not that the likes of Dell and NEC are bad, but their smallprint doesn't suggest they have as much faith in their products as the price leads us to believe.
 
Yeah, that's basically what all the 24" Dells I have access to look like. Range from 2007-2012.

The oldest is actually the best for colours and blacks; S-PVA screen with more than 100% sRGB. Unfortunately it kicks out a ton of heat and has really quite bad smearing. I settled on a 2012er, IPS with 100% sRGB, but less trails in games/media. No noticeable glow or BLB though :)
 
Yeah the only downside to that monitor was the ghosting but I got used to it years ago. There'd often be faint red trails on certain fast-moving images. Otherwise I was really happy with PVA/MVA panel technology. All the monitors I have at home and work these days are IPS (and much thinner).
 
I will probably wait until pc monitors use something other than lcd before replacing my 27 inch 1440p viewsonic.

I just can't stomach the hassle of sending monitors back.

Sad state of affairs.
 
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