I have a strange issue with this monitor. Certain content just looks godawful. It's like there's something that looks like sharpen filter or severe JPEG artifacts covering some content. Very noticeable on youtube -- especially on lower resolution videos with lots of compression artifacts. This monitor makes them look even worse than they should. It's really difficult to explain.
It becomes very odd. Take a look at this picture, for example.
To the right is the screenshot of the normal sized icon. To the left is the same screenshot enlarged in photoshop.
Look at the enlarged image. If you pay attention to the edge of the .txt page icon in the folder, you'll see that it's slightly sharper than it should be and that there's ugly blots of black along the edge. Also, if you look at the binding of the notepad icon, you will notice some unwanted noise like a few pink pixels and a rough yellow outline.
Now take a look at the normal sized icon. These rough details shouldn't be there - it should be nice and smooth. But on this monitor it isn't - all the crap is still there. That's why I've zoomed in on the picture in Photoshop to rule out the possibility that the monitor itself is adding these details through some sort of processing. But no, they are still there. It's like where a different monitor would "censor" them out and they would only become visible by zooming in like I did, but this one doesn't. If this was indeed always there, I never noticed it with my VA monitor.
It just doesn't look like something dithering would do. It's sharpening certain details for no reason at all.
And speaking of dithering, some gradients blend together so obviously that it's like the monitor is not even trying to dither. Or it's dithering in huge blocks that look like added JPEG artifacts where they shouldn't be.
I've tried DVI, I've tried DisplayPort, I've tried adjusting Color Vibrance and Black Equalizer, I've tried turning off Instant Mode, hell, I've tried tons of things that shouldn't have any impact like AMA settings. No matter what I do, it looks the same. Is this actually normal behavior for this panel?