There are no good monitors!

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auxy
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Re: There are no good monitors!

Post by auxy » 16 Aug 2017, 01:45

I went over to RAGEPRO's place today to play with his new LG. To be clear, it is the 24GM79G-B. He has it set up alongside his LG 24UD58 and his two AOC M2060SWD2s. (I also have two of those! $74 clearance at Walmart!) (*'▽')

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed in the picture quality. We spent about 3 hours fiddling with the settings, ghetto-calibrating (using lagom.nl's LCD test pages as well as testufo.com), testing games, and then doing more fiddling, rinse, repeat. He's pretty savvy too, so it's not like it was just me doing all the work!

The thing that stuck out to me the most is that the blur reduction mode (called "1ms Motion Blur Reduction" in the OSD) REALLY slams the brightness. It's worse than Lightboost on my VG248QE, and it's much worse than it was on the Samsung C24FG70 we both returned. The backlight is spec'd at 350 nits, but it doesn't seem all that bright even at full brightness (with strobing off). With the motion blur reduction mode on, it's downright dim. The little 20-inch AOC side monitors we use are only spec'd for 250 nits, but they seem MUCH brighter side-by-side.

The low brightness causes a lot of problems with the image quality. Contrast is poor, as you'd expect from a TN LCD. RAGEPRO says he thinks the contrast is only poor in comparison to his other monitors (which are a fancy 10-bit IPS LCD and a pair of 3000:1 VA LCDs), but I think it was pretty bad overall with the blur reduction mode on. LG includes their "black equalizer" function of course, and as usual, enabling it completely crushes the dynamic range and looks terrible. However, with it disabled, you get the option of either having blown-out bright areas and blacked-out dark areas (high contrast setting) or an even dimmer display (low contrast setting).

To make matters worse, the motion clarity isn't excellent. It does seem there's a bit of strobe crosstalk. I wouldn't call it "bad" -- I have never seen a 24GM77, so I don't know how bad that was. But, with strobe mode enabled at 120Hz, there's a pretty significant after-image on the UFO test at the bottom of the screen, and a fore-image at the top. Comparing it to the BenQ XL2720Z example image in the Strobe Crosstalk FAQ, the LG 24GM79G-B is good quality in the middle of the screen, and then resembles the portion slightly below that at the bottom. The map test is legible in the middle, but blurry near the edges of the screen. Overall, I don't think it was too bad. We're not very experienced diagnosing strobe crosstalk but having looked at it on my VG248QE and then comparing to the LG 24GM79, I would say it's definitely not worse on the LG, but it's not much better. Average strobe crosstalk, then?

There's the option to adjust the Overdrive on the panel too ("Response time" setting); there doesn't appear to be hardly any difference between "low" and "normal" as both produced minor but visible overshoot. The "off" setting was terrible; might as well have had the strobe off for all it mattered. The "fast" setting produced HORRIBLE overshoot! Major ghosting with the Response time on "fast". In the end we both agreed that "low" was the best setting as it produced the best results on the TestUFO site in combination with the strobe backlight. LG only specs the monitor for a 5ms GtG response time (pretty bad for a TN?) but motion clarity in games using the display at 120Hz with strobe was pretty good overall in comparison to non-strobe mode or a 60Hz display.

In the end RAGEPRO was less forgiving of its faults than I think I would have been -- he's talking about returning it! I think the 24GM79 is a very minor but significant upgrade from my VG248QE if only because it trades the old-school DVI and VGA inputs of my older Asus for a DisplayPort and a second HDMI. It also has a USB 3.0 hub built in, which is pretty handy. The picture quality is nothing to write home about, but I think for a pure gaming monitor it's fine. I certainly wouldn't want to use it as my primary display for work or browsing, but I don't use my VG248QE that way either (although I think with its higher brightness, particularly in strobe mode, it's better-suited for it.) He was pretty disappointed in the muted colors while playing Doom (2016), which is a game that lends itself well to high-contrast displays.

He says he's going to play around with it more, including trying to play with the Custom Resolution Utility, so I'll report back again if he tells me anything interesting. Obviously you can post here with any questions and I'll pass them along, or you could just message him directly at Tech Report! ('◇')ゞ

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RealNC
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Re: There are no good monitors!

Post by RealNC » 16 Aug 2017, 13:06

Well, there's plenty good monitors out there. But if you meant to say there's no perfect monitors, I'd agree. There aren't. No matter what LCD type you choose, they will have some flaws. It's about which flaws you're willing to accept.
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Chief Blur Buster
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Re: There are no good monitors!

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 16 Aug 2017, 13:19

Thank you for posting your big message!

I appreciate reading this kind of information even if there's dissapointments -- There are no perfect monitors.

I am aware that the 24GM77 had nasty strobe crosstalk, but the 24GM79 is improved in strobe crosstalk -- just a heck lot dimmer. LG now uses a 1ms pulse length I think. What you describe sounds like average strobe crosstalk for a modern global overdrive (NVIDIA often uses Y-axis-modified overdrive to make LightBoost/ULMB better than the average manufacturer -- pixels are overdriven differently at top versus bottom).

Currently, NVIDIA are the wizards of overdrive at the moment, with good VRR overdrive algorithms and custom strobe overdrive algorithms.

Right now, reasonable "average" strobing can be achieved with simple global overdrive (Well-calibrated using simple TestUFO tests) + large vertical totals.

For future strobe testing -- Try http://www.testufo.com/ghosting with the new tiny text TestUFO Ghosting with tiny 8-bit text. It's good for testing ULMB pulse widths and LightBoost 10%->100%, you can see the pixel text sharpen/blur. The "EVERYTHING BETTER THAN 60HZ(TM)" text is only 5 pixels tall so ULMB Pulse Width changes are much more visible. It's like our version of that old PixPerAn word balloon, for text readability. At 1ms pulse lengths, the text remains readable up to approximately 1920 pixels/second. At 2ms pulse lengths, the text stops becoming readable at above about 960 pixels/sec
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Re: There are no good monitors!

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 16 Aug 2017, 14:00

auxy wrote:He says he's going to play around with it more, including trying to play with the Custom Resolution Utility, so I'll report back again if he tells me anything interesting. Obviously you can post here with any questions and I'll pass them along, or you could just message him directly at Tech Report! ('◇')ゞ
Send me RAGEPRO's contact info to me at squad[at]blurbusters.com ... Thank you!

Sometimes monitors unlocks very interesting secrets with CRU utilities. It depends on manufacturer and model.
(e.g. the LightBoost HOWTO, the Benq Blur Reduction strobe calibration, pulse-width/brightening effects, triggers a beneficial bug, the ULMB+GSYNC trick, the ULMB 60Hz hack, or other CRU-induced behavior). All of them are very different behaviors, e.g. unlocked firmware logic versus mathematically modifying scanout physics (two different things affected by CRU hacks).

I don't know if LG monitors will respond to custom resolution utility tricks such as Large Vertical Totals, but one good test is to try to transfer pixels between VERTICAL Front Porch and Back Porch while maintaining the same Large Vertical Total. Occasionally on some manufacturers, that shifts the crosstalk zone up/down -- this becomes your poor man's "Strobe Phase" adjustment (shifting in Vertical Front/Back Porch) if the pulse is keyed to the VSYNC pulse that's exactly in between Vertical Front/Back porch. (1 pixel transferred between two = 1 pixel vertical shift in strobe crosstalk zone). In addition, increasing vertical totals may simultaneously push more strobe crosstalk off the top/bottom edges of the screen, like it does on Benq/Zowie monitors.

So test bigger vertical totals *and* shifting between Front/Back porch while viewing http://www.testufo.com/crosstalk ... That's your best bet in experiments in attempts to modify strobe crosstalk. Find out if there's a service menu, and then find out if there's pulse width or strobe phase adjustments -- that makes life a heck lot easier. Jumping from 1ms to 2ms can double the brightness of strobing without too much visible loss of persistence, for example.
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