Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me pick

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lexebidar
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by lexebidar » 23 Sep 2017, 10:45

You are right. Either TN or IPS will be ok. It's just a matter of preference as long as both have 8bit panels.
At 27" Both ips glow and TN angles will be hard to swallow. I would certainly go with IPS but the process of returning it back and getting replacement with better bleeding is just a chore.
Maybe something new will come out in 1/2 months until my purchase.
I'd argue it's not something to keep in mind on the 8-bit TN panels that get complaints either. I can't say for certain, as I don't own one, but I don't see how the monitors themselves could be the cause; the sources images used and user error (settings and poor camera capture) could be to blame there as well.
The problem must be due to very low gamma of dell 8bit TN panels. In reviews it's about 1.9.
It is not creating any banding but low gamma just brightens dark areas... or rather overexposes the banding already present in source.
That is still enough of a reason to read reviews beforehand and aim for panel with 2.2/2.3 gamma or just calibrate(which again is problem with dell since osd does not contain gamma setting while other do.

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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by jorimt » 23 Sep 2017, 11:54

You could wait 24 months, and the IPS glow, TN viewing angles, and quality control still wouldn't be solved with the gaming models available to you within your budget. You might just have to be willing to make a lot of returns and test a variety of different monitor models yourself.

It's that, or just go with the best reviewed gaming monitor you can afford (whether it be TN or IPS), and hope for the best.
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frunction
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by frunction » 26 Sep 2017, 15:19

I don't think banding is the fault of the monitor manufacturer necessarily. As said above, the movies that play as game intros are pretty compressed and also when I connect a S2716DG or XL2540 to an AMD GPU instead of Nvidia the banding effect is diminished, so it may be a driver problem. I used to have a PG278Q a few years ago, and never noticed banding on it at all. Honestly, I would put it in the much ado about nothing category. Bothers the kind of people who return their eight times because they expect $4,000 professional grade quality from a $600 monitor.

For IPS/VA generally, why do people care so much about viewing angle? How are they using their computer that it should matter? Even standing, slouching in chair, or using as a side monitor... TN is still fine to me. With IPS monitors I've had (XB271HU, QNIX), don't like the ghosting during gaming. When moving them over to use as a side monitor, the stupid glow/backlight are not worth slight improvement in colors imo.

I was hoping the new Samsung "1ms" QLED monitors would resolve these issues, but they look to still have problems with blacks/purples. Maybe the "0.5ms" 8-bit TN panels next year will be the go to.

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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 26 Sep 2017, 17:15

frunction wrote:I don't think banding is the fault of the monitor manufacturer necessarily.
Correct. Banding is greatly influenced by a lot of the weakest links.

Many factors can reduce the precision of the colors (whether monitor, firmware drivers, GPU, game, source art, etc). All that 10-bit or 12-bit beauty can be for naught with a poorly compressed 8-bit JPG -- or a graphics driver -- or a monitor's poor processing.
frunction wrote:For IPS/VA generally, why do people care so much about viewing angle? How are they using their computer that it should matter? Even standing, slouching in chair, or using as a side monitor... TN is still fine to me. With IPS monitors I've had (XB271HU, QNIX), don't like the ghosting during gaming. When moving them over to use as a side monitor, the stupid glow/backlight are not worth slight improvement in colors imo.
Everybody has different vision sensitivites. Some are sensitive to brightness. Some are more sensitive to colors, others not (8% of population is colorblind). Some are sensitive to flicker, others are not. Some are sensitive to color shifts, others are not. Etc.

I've seen instances where strobed TN has less eyetrain for certain types of people than others (e.g. for people motion blur eyestrain). While most people got less eyestrain when the world moved from CRT to LCD, there are actually people who got MORE eyestrain.

And some human flicker sensitivities do behave weird with PWM: They get eyestrain from PWM dimming, but they don't get eyestrain from motion blur reduction / ULMB (since it's a precision one-strobe-per-refresh that cleanly eliminates motion blur). In this case, the motion blur sensitivity is more painful than that individual's PWM sensitivity.

It's quite all over the map, and a poorly studied topic -- but so many anecdotes is saying everybody has different vision sensitivities.

I'm not surprised -- a huge number of different people see very differently, and this leads me to believe that "subtle sensitivity differences" are quite widespread (much more so than vision diseases). One person might be sensitive to 60Hz or 75Hz or "X" Hz flicker, and another may only see that same frequency as a slight flicker. Another person may see colors just fine but don't see a big difference between IPS vs TN. Etc. Etc.

Hate motion blur? Or even eyestrain from motion blur? Get a strobed monitor (ULMB, DyAc, etc -- improved descendants of LightBoost)
Hate motion blur and flicker? ...Get as much Hz as you can afford (240Hz), get a good GPU, and run 240fps@240Hz
Sensitive to gamma shifts? ....Get an IPS monitor
Unusually sensitive to poor contrast? ... Get a VA or OLED display
Sensitive to brightness? ....Get a monitor with a wide brightness adjust range
Sensitive to blue light? ....Get a monitor with adjustability here (Low Color Temperature, Low Blue Light, Night Mode, etc)
Sensitive to stutters/tearing? .... Get GSYNC or FreeSync
Etc...

No monitor can solve all the above, all simultaneously, for all games.

It's very, very hard to simultaneously solve motion blur (get CRT clarity) and flicker (avoid impulsing/strobing/etc), until you go into the Hertz stratosphere, so it's often an "either-or" proposion. It is also why we were so eager to test 480Hz -- basically the closest thing you can get to "Strobeless LightBoost" or "Strobeless ULMB". Until it truly happens, we're stuck with selecting multiple different modes on the same gaming monitor to try to address a specific problem.

There's currently no jack-of-all-trades display that addresses every single human sensitivity, but many of the monitors can check multiple boxes simultaneously. A modern 240Hz monitor can check multiple boxes all at once, just have to select between different modes of operation. Many often has PWM-free backlight dimming (addresses flicker sensitivity) while also giving option to switch to strobed modes (addresses motion blur sensitivity) or switch to variable refresh rate (addresses stutter/tearing sensitivity) etc. And you can often adjust/calibrate to address brightness sensitivities.

If your eyes is fine with TN LCD, then a good 240Hz with VRR/strobing features (and PWM-free dimming in non-strobed mode) is quite flexible in selectiable modes: It can provide you with multiple modes to try out:

(1) normal fixed-Hz modes for compatibility
(2) strobed modes for fixing motion blur
(3) variable-refresh-rate modes to fix stutters/tearing
(4) and also, the minimum possible motion blur that you can get without strobing (240Hz, of the 1ms GtG TN type, definitely has less motion blur than anything non-strobed less than 240Hz).
(5) many of these monitors can also provide other ergonomic options (wide brightness adjust range, low blue light, PWM-free brightness, etc) if one addresses your specific sensitivity.

For those interested, we always mark which ones has VRR or strobing features:
- Official List of Best Gaming Monitors
- List of G-SYNC Monitors
- List of FreeSync Monitors
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by RealNC » 28 Sep 2017, 02:54

frunction wrote:For IPS/VA generally, why do people care so much about viewing angle? How are they using their computer that it should matter?
One reason is portrait mode. Portrait games like Pinball FX and many portrait mode MAME arcade games are borderline unplayable on TN (and this is not an exaggeration.)

Another reason is that on TN, you have an artificial image detail boost in the lower corners of the screen in dark scenes. Things that should be in darkness now show up amidst a washed out gray background. This is an issue for some people (including me) who prefer to have their monitor closer to them and set a larger FOV in games.
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lexebidar
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by lexebidar » 04 Oct 2017, 10:58

So... I've got an AOC AG251AG.

WTF?! Why did nobody told me 240hz makes such a huge difference even on desktop. What is even going on.
And 144hz with ULMB is crystal clear. Just fantastic.

I've used it for 5 minutes and I had to go do something else :evil: When I will be back, I will do testing galore. But The build quality is very good with this monitor and 240hz is mind blowing. wow.

I've not tested picture quality but and its very bright out of the box (looks ok).
One thing I've noticed is the very weirdly looking black screen when monitor is starting. It looks like crumbled paper. Maybe it's clouding. I am not sure

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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 04 Oct 2017, 13:36

lexebidar wrote:WTF?! Why did nobody told me 240hz makes such a huge difference even on desktop. What is even going on.
And 144hz with ULMB is crystal clear. Just fantastic.
Indeed, 240Hz makes a quite a difference around here!
The mainstream sites often claim 240Hz is useless/meaningless, but we know better around here!

Not everyone is sensitive to motion blur, but almost everybody notices the difference during window-dragging and smooth-scrolling tests. As a rule of thumb, non-strobed 240Hz has about half the motion blur of non-strobe 120Hz, even for things like window-dragging and scrolling. (This is assuming good well-calibrated overdrive, like those by NVIDIA-calibrated 1ms TN panels -- aka all GSYNC/ULMB 240Hz monitors).

We have several articles that explain the relationship of persistence versus refresh rate, but we haven't yet updated them for 240Hz.
- 60Hz vs 120Hz vs ULMB
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lexebidar
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by lexebidar » 04 Oct 2017, 15:21

It's pretty neat.
At 240hz, the ghosting is "almost" as good as at 144hz+ulmb, at which point it's not existent.
I am testing on ghosting ufo test with text attached to it. With ulmb 144 it's crispy clear. At 240hz it's almost there.
Anyway... gsync 240 is mind blowing. Sure games like Witcher 3 are only 60-70fps for me but it feel much better.

As for picture quality. The biggest worry of mine were TN viewing angles... and theses are not a problem at all. Totally overblown issue. It was way worse on my old samsung 226bw I had 10 years ago.

In fact, after lowering the brightness to 20%, the colors are about the same as my iiyama xb2481hsu-b2 but whites are a bit whiter on AOC. and it's using warm preset. Normal preset looks cold.

I have only 2 problems with the screen and I am not sure if I should be trying to replace it with another one or whatever.
1)There are 3 gamma modes. As far as measured on lagom LCD by my eyes - first(default) is about 1.7, second is about 1.5(yep) and 3rd is about 2.0-2.1 so I ended up using mode 3. This does make some banding a little bit more visible but not much at all. It certainly does NOT creates any more banding than what is on iiyama.
In pcmonitors default gamma was measured at 2.2 lol.

2)On full screen black image screen, there are visible smudges of a bit brighter areas. Is this clouding?
It's not visible on colors or even on windowed image of black. Just full screen black so I don't think it's something to worry about.

So all in all(after short testing) - TN is not as bad as people make it out to be. I indeed prefer it to ips(cause I hate glow and silvering). Response times, 240hz, gsync are all awesome. Gamma could be better and clouding could be better I guess.

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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by jorimt » 04 Oct 2017, 17:15

lexebidar wrote:So... I've got an AOC AG251AG.
Good to hear!
lexebidar wrote:One thing I've noticed is the very weirdly looking black screen when monitor is starting. It looks like crumbled paper. Maybe it's clouding. I am not sure
Likely minor backlight bleed, but if you can get a realistically exposed shot, I could say for sure.
lexebidar wrote:In pcmonitors default gamma was measured at 2.2 lol.
Yup, that was one of my warnings to you in this post:
http://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic ... =30#p28565
jorimt wrote:2. Just because their gamma tracked a near perfect 2.2, does not mean yours will; each panel, even of the same model, will drift, but it should be close enough. This goes for any aspect of out-of-the-box calibration; not one unit is exactly the same.
Also, any gamma pattern you look at is also approximate, and can only give you a rough idea of your average gamma response. You'd need a colorimeter and measurement software to validate gamma across the entire range.

You seeing 2.0-2.1 on the patterns means the average isn't far off, and with the inherit gamma shift of a TN panel, even if the gamma is calibrated perfectly, it only applies to the middle/eye level of the screen; once you tilt the screen a little, or change eye level, the response will change anyway.

So that issue would not warrant a return, because for all you know the gamma could be tuned out-of-box even worse (or just differently) on another unit of the same model.
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Re: Do all TN G-sync monitors have banding issues? Help me p

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 04 Oct 2017, 18:00

lexebidar wrote:One thing I've noticed is the very weirdly looking black screen when monitor is starting. It looks like crumbled paper. Maybe it's clouding. I am not sure
You might be seeing power-up behavior such as a panel in its natural unpowered state or latent static charge (if backlight turns on before electricity hits the LCD panel). This is likely what is happening if you never see it again after powering up. For this sort of thing, if you bring up a black screen -- do you see the same issue? Also, check dark gray fields too. TN vs VA vs IPS have different black characteristics and artifacts (e.g. IPS glow, VA gamma behaviors, etc)
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