Advice on TFT screen needed

[Otho]

I am planning to get rid of my old 21" crt monitor, it is just to clumsy. When getting a TFT screen, what features are important and what minimum stats are required for excellent game performance?

I planning to buy one or two 19-20" screens and also considering getting wide-screen format, does DAOC support it?

From what I can understand, important stats are:
Response time
Contrast ratio
Brightness values
(Viewing angle)

So anyone able to advice me on a what to look for or recommend a good TFT screen for gaming I be very thankful.

/Otho

 

[Svartmetall]

Make sure whatever screen you go for has proper 24-bit colour, i.e. 16.7 million colours; anything less and it'll be using a common cheat used by TFT manufacturers, making the screen 6-bit and using dithering to fake 24-bit colour compliance. Screens that try to cheat like this will show as having 16.2 million colours...avoid. Proper 24-bit for the win. LG make decent monitors.

 

[Girafmad]

From what I can understand, important stats are:
Response time 12ms is enough, though make sure that that is the slowest responce pixel on the screen.. not the fastest..
Contrast ratio around 500:1 should do just fine
Brightness values dunno
(Viewing angle) dunno
samsung & LG can be higly recomended, got one of both and they work great.

 

[Naffets]

I have a Viewsonic 19" tft

Native res of 1280 x 1024, ~700:1 contrast ratio, amazing viewing angle and 8ms response time. Cost me £200 locally. The best priced tfts in the uk are from aria

www.aria.co.uk

As said, you need at least 500:1 contrast ratio, and i wouldn't go below 8 for response time after using a few screens with more.

Only four or five companies actually manufacture their own panels in the uk, so you can't go far wrong. BenQ offer the fastest screens as far as response time go, LG, Viewsonic and the like are also Grade A screens. The best screens as far as widescreens go (which daoc does support) are dells ultrasharp range, a friend of mine has the 24 inch model. Full HD inputs and support, 8ms response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio and the screen itself looks great. However they're £600 each, ish.

In terms of daoc supporting widescreen, it does, as said in another thread you just need to manually set it using user.dat.

 

[Chronictank]

NEC LCD20WGX2 is the fastest out there atm, so for gaming is the best imo

Good read here:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/panel_comparisons/gamers_choice_2.htm

£360, so comes with a heavy pricetag tho,
but with monitors i personally would pay a little bit more for a good quality one

 

[Dracus]

I am planning to get rid of my old 21" crt monitor, it is just to clumsy. When getting a TFT screen, what features are important and what minimum stats are required for excellent game performance?

I planning to buy one or two 19-20" screens and also considering getting wide-screen format, does DAOC support it?

From what I can understand, important stats are:
Response time
Contrast ratio
Brightness values
(Viewing angle)

So anyone able to advice me on a what to look for or recommend a good TFT screen for gaming I be very thankful.

/Otho

If you can read danish this site is awesome with explanations on what to focus on.

http://www.flatpanels.dk/

The main difference between the monitors is the panel. It decides whether the monitor is best for imaging or 3d gaming. Generally the gaming ones are a tad more expensive if u also want good imaging(goes without saying ofc )

If you cant read danish get someone to translate >_<

/Dracus

 

[Otho]

Thanks for the helpful advice people (yes I managed to read the Danish articel

I think I will skip a widescreen model for now and go for the Belinea 101927. Good gaming rewiews and a decent price.

/Otho

 

[Konah]

keep the info coming, im about to buy one too

what kind of refresh rates do tft/lcd manage? i play a fair bit of quake3 freezetag and i need 120hz or more

 

[cHodAX]

I have a Dell 20" Widescreen, got it almost a year ago and never looked back. It has seriously helped reduce the really bad eye strain I was suffering from and converted me to LCD for life. Dell generally make fantastic screens but don't buy direct if you want a good price, have a look at Aria instead, they are a reseller for Dell and discount heavily plus you still get your full Dell warranty which is usually 3 years.

http://www.aria.co.uk/productsList.asp?Category=29&Submit=submit

 

[Shad]

iam using a 21" widescreen tft monitor atm, and it rocks 1680x1050 with a gforce 7800gtx and yes i can select that ress in Daoc.



i have a HP f2105 12ms that came with my "hempc" runing very smooth and all... its a big mofo 58cm wide

 

[Konah]

looking at: http://www.viewsonic.com/products/desktopdisplays/lcddisplays/xseries/vx2025wm/

20.1" widescreen, 8ms, 800:1, 16.7m colours 1680x1050 = £320 delivered

 

[Milkshake]

Has anyone got a BenQ TFT? They are selling them for quite a reasonable price over at Dabs, and I fancy grabbing myself 2.

Linkeh is http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3X1Y

 

[Naffets]

BenQ are quite a good brand aye.

Personally i have a Viewsonic VA902

 

[cHodAX]

Benq suck, they use 6bit panels instead of the higher quality 8 bit and they give misleading response time figures by quoting grey-to-grey response instead of the much more important black-to-white which is a much better measure of response.

I found this quote in a recent IGN review of a Benq screen...

BenQ's 2ms offering, the FP93G X, is a 19'' 1280x1024 (SXGA) display. BenQ is willing to admit that the 2ms figure is measured in terms of grey-grey response-time, an accepted, if not entirely complete, style of measuring pixel speed. The 2ms number is made possible by BenQ's Advanced Motion Accelerator (AMA) technology that accelerates the twisting speed of liquid crystal by increasing the voltage. Full-cycle black-white-black response-time on the FP93G X is 8ms. Rounding out the specs, the FP93G X has a contrast ratio of 700:1, 300 cd/m^2 brightness, and 6-Bit color allowing for 16.2 million colors.

As you can see, Benq are selling this as a 2ms screen but it is infact a 6bit 8ms screen so the colour reproduction sucks and the response is not better than most of the new screens out there. Benq will happily mislead you though and tell you it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

 

[Svartmetall]

www.tftcentral.co.uk

Quite tempted by that NEC 20" widescreen jobby...

An interesting multi-test of widescreen TFTs here:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/03/30/20_inch_widescreen_monitors/1.html

 

[Blackstuff]

I use a Viewsonic VP191b and I definitely would not recommend it based on my experiences with it.

The amount of smearing is absolutely terrible. Just experimenting now dragging mouse pointer over this screen and I get quite bad ghosting.

On daoc it is brutal with strong/dark colours eg som shade mode. If I pan rapidly across someone with som activated I get a black streak.

Piece of shit imo - don't touch. uke:

Wish I'd never given my missus the 17" tft when i thought I was 'upgrading'.

 

[Thorwyn]

The response time doesn´t mean jack shit. I´ve seen 12ms TFTs smearing and dragging like you´re on a bad LSD trip and no-name TFTs with enormous response times working fine. My recommendation is: whatever TFT you want to buy, TEST it before you buy it. And when you buy it, make sure you´ll get EXACTLY the monitor you´ve tested (because TFT manufacturers are "allowed" to have a 3-4 Bad-pixel-tolerance... at least that´s the case where I live, i.e. you can´t give it back when there are 2 annoying pixel errors right on your screen).

 

[cHodAX]

The response time doesn´t mean jack shit. I´ve seen 12ms TFTs smearing and dragging like you´re on a bad LSD trip and no-name TFTs with enormous response times working fine. My recommendation is: whatever TFT you want to buy, TEST it before you buy it. And when you buy it, make sure you´ll get EXACTLY the monitor you´ve tested (because TFT manufacturers are "allowed" to have a 3-4 Bad-pixel-tolerance... at least that´s the case where I live, i.e. you can´t give it back when there are 2 annoying pixel errors right on your screen).

Alot of those 12ms screens you mention fall under the grey-to-grey response trick that alot of manufacturers are trying to pull off. 12ms grey-to-grey indicates a true response time of roughly 25ms which is too slow for gaming and video, you get tons of ghosting and smearing.

Anyone looking for a screen really needs to read the fine print, if they only show grey-to-grey response then don't settle for anything under 8ms as you will find anything higher is likely to be junk that the manufacturers are trying to fob off on to the uninformed masses.