My recent TN purchase. Where'd I go wrong?
Posted: 17 Dec 2013, 21:57
Just wanted to write up this quick story about something that recently happened to me that's made me a lot more discerning about my monitor purchase choice, followed by a question.
Quick background, I loved CRTs as a kid and grew up changing every monitor's refresh rate to 100hz if I could. Initial flat screens looked awful, had blur, bad viewing angles, and worst of all, burn-in! I held onto fat monitors well into 2003 (I just loved pushing the degauss button...) when I finally saw that Dell was coming out with good looking flat panel monitors. Over the course of the last decade I've lived with two such monitors and enjoyed them both. Never learned what IPS or TN were.
As Black Friday came up, I began looking for deals on 120hz monitors. Thought the reviews on newegg and amazon for the BenQ XL2420TE were amazing and decided to make the purchase of this 144hz beauty. Got the delivery, opened up, assembled, plugged in, and holy... what the... this thing is bright! So bright it's blowing out the colors on my desktop wallpaper. OK, try to adjust, try to adjust more... um... What is wrong with this thing?
After doing more adjusting and reading, I believe what I've discovered is that TN monitors are absolute crap if you try to do anything on your desktop. Games, oddly, looked fine but I use my desktop just as much as I play games and having a crappy desktop experience is pretty awful when I need to use Photoshop and do work. So what I believe I've learned is, stay away from TN monitors.
Now for the question. I'm going to list all the awful things I experienced with the BenQ monitor and I'd like to know if this is just specific to BenQ brand, a defect in the monitor I purchased, or something that is a known issue with TN panels.
Firstly was the viewing angle. If I moved my head up or down 2 inches, I could see a significant change in the brightness of the monitor. In fact, having my view centered in the middle, I could see visibly different brightnesses at the bottom and top of the screen.
Secondly, the monitor presented some strangely awful color reproduction. Here's a tiny slice of my desktop:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/0BVERa1.png)
On my Dell IPS monitor, the color gradient coming off the sun is perfectly smooth. On the BenQ TN monitor, there was very visible artifacting across the gradient, similar to the same kind of artifacting you'd see when your monitor accidentally gets downgraded to 16-bit color mode. How a panel's manufacturing can allow this kind of weird color reproduction is beyond me.
Finally, the monitor warms up. And by warms up, I mean when I first turn it on for the day, it's super-ultra-bright for about 10 minutes and slowly gets darker until it stabilizes at a certain brightness. I used the monitor for 2 weeks to see if this was just a "it's new, whatever" kind of thing but it only got more and more recognizable as time went on. I didn't know display technologies were still being produced that needed this kind of warming up. Weird!
In any case, Newegg is letting me get a full refund on the monitor, so no harm, no foul. Not to mention the fact that I want to hold out for G-Sync tech that seems to do for 60hz what 144hz could never do anyway. That 45 fps G-Sync example NVidia showed is just gorgeous compared to any 144 fps I hit with the BenQ.
So, all that said, am I just an elitist with IPS or is BenQ just crap? Considering what I've gone through, should I hold out for G-Sync to reach IPS monitors or can Asus TNs deal with these issues way better than BenQ does? Let me know what you think!
Quick background, I loved CRTs as a kid and grew up changing every monitor's refresh rate to 100hz if I could. Initial flat screens looked awful, had blur, bad viewing angles, and worst of all, burn-in! I held onto fat monitors well into 2003 (I just loved pushing the degauss button...) when I finally saw that Dell was coming out with good looking flat panel monitors. Over the course of the last decade I've lived with two such monitors and enjoyed them both. Never learned what IPS or TN were.
As Black Friday came up, I began looking for deals on 120hz monitors. Thought the reviews on newegg and amazon for the BenQ XL2420TE were amazing and decided to make the purchase of this 144hz beauty. Got the delivery, opened up, assembled, plugged in, and holy... what the... this thing is bright! So bright it's blowing out the colors on my desktop wallpaper. OK, try to adjust, try to adjust more... um... What is wrong with this thing?
After doing more adjusting and reading, I believe what I've discovered is that TN monitors are absolute crap if you try to do anything on your desktop. Games, oddly, looked fine but I use my desktop just as much as I play games and having a crappy desktop experience is pretty awful when I need to use Photoshop and do work. So what I believe I've learned is, stay away from TN monitors.
Now for the question. I'm going to list all the awful things I experienced with the BenQ monitor and I'd like to know if this is just specific to BenQ brand, a defect in the monitor I purchased, or something that is a known issue with TN panels.
Firstly was the viewing angle. If I moved my head up or down 2 inches, I could see a significant change in the brightness of the monitor. In fact, having my view centered in the middle, I could see visibly different brightnesses at the bottom and top of the screen.
Secondly, the monitor presented some strangely awful color reproduction. Here's a tiny slice of my desktop:
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/0BVERa1.png)
On my Dell IPS monitor, the color gradient coming off the sun is perfectly smooth. On the BenQ TN monitor, there was very visible artifacting across the gradient, similar to the same kind of artifacting you'd see when your monitor accidentally gets downgraded to 16-bit color mode. How a panel's manufacturing can allow this kind of weird color reproduction is beyond me.
Finally, the monitor warms up. And by warms up, I mean when I first turn it on for the day, it's super-ultra-bright for about 10 minutes and slowly gets darker until it stabilizes at a certain brightness. I used the monitor for 2 weeks to see if this was just a "it's new, whatever" kind of thing but it only got more and more recognizable as time went on. I didn't know display technologies were still being produced that needed this kind of warming up. Weird!
In any case, Newegg is letting me get a full refund on the monitor, so no harm, no foul. Not to mention the fact that I want to hold out for G-Sync tech that seems to do for 60hz what 144hz could never do anyway. That 45 fps G-Sync example NVidia showed is just gorgeous compared to any 144 fps I hit with the BenQ.
So, all that said, am I just an elitist with IPS or is BenQ just crap? Considering what I've gone through, should I hold out for G-Sync to reach IPS monitors or can Asus TNs deal with these issues way better than BenQ does? Let me know what you think!