darzo wrote:My initial inclination would be to avoid ViewSonic and AOC.
Well, I'm not sure about blanket "avoid-a-manufacturer" statements....
For the AOC, get the G-SYNC version rather than the FreeSync version. AOC didn't do well at first to calibrate the overdrive of their early FreeSync monitors.
For the ViewSonic, their pro is that they tend to do closer than average color calibration: You unbox a Viewsonic and the colors are usually quite spot on for most people. The Amazon reviews of the ViewSonic XG2703-S 1440p G-SYNC is excellent (
4.3 stars from 232 users), and I believe RealNC (mod here) has that one.
Even BenQ had their issues, remember BlurBusters caused BenQ/Zowie to release a
firmware upgrade for XL2720Z? That was a huge strobe bug. But it had a great positive effect for consumers: Ever since then, BenQ Zowie has now enabled user-adjustable strobe phase and strobe length and our
Strobe Utility is the first
BenQ authorized third party adjustment utility, or via Service Menu.
So, even AOC/ViewSonic can do good, and even BenQ Zowie can occasionally do worse: Sometimes there's bugs, and sometimes there's bugfixes. It's worth noting that the AOC/ViewSonic 240Hz frameskipping bugs were manually fixable without a firmware upgrade...while the BenQ bug was unfixable/unsolvable without a firmware upgrade.
Also, not just bugs, but we influence the monitor industry to add new features. The existence of "ULMB Pulse Width" menu setting can be attributed to Blur Busters giving NVIDIA feedback (from the LightBoost 10% vs 50% vs 100% article) -- back when NVIDIA donated a G-SYNC monitor to Blur Busters to give away in a contest that launched these Blur Busters Forums at the beginning, during the G-SYNC Preview days) --
December 17, 2013 Forum Launch Announcement by Blur Busters.
Bugs are frustrating but we try to give feedback to manufacturers to fix/improve. And we try to publish workarounds.
I advocate that monitor manufacturers should make their future models firmware upgradeable by users, with an easy firmware upgrade utility. We'll probably think up a social media drive to convince monitor manufacturers to do this. TV manufacturers now have user firmware upgradeability, but monitor manufacturers do not....yet. So bugs (overdrive bugs, frameskip bugs, strobe bugs) can be fixed by downloading a firmware upgrade rather than sending the monitor back. It's time for this to happen.
Not to mention, ULMB exists partially because of our LightBoost advocacy that was a big part of BlurBuster's early existence. The LightBoost HOWTO is still one of the most popular BlurBusters pages, even to this day, even though other better strobe backlights (ULMB) has replaced it.
Also, little known currently (But is coming out in a book during 2018 by a known industry author) -- but my early contract with the very original Oculus Kickstarter for low-persistence research, in the pre-Carmack/pre-Abrash days (which apparently later led to them anxiously looking for low-persistence talent and put their research in overdrive) -- the early employees of Oculus were beta testers of TestUFO over 6 months prior to the TestUFO public launch! The rest is history -- VR and low persistence OLED rolling scans arrived a few years earlier than I had originally expected, even though I moved on shortly after that Kickstarter ended, but I apparently helped flip a domino effect, there.
One of the current drives (e.g. the 1000Hz advocacy --
Blur Busters Law & The Amazing Journey To Future 1000Hz Displays) aims to drive the monitor manufacturer a little forward too in the ultra long term. Make people think, get at least a few more engineers on it, and bring these kinds of things to a reality within our lifetimes. Formerly, I didn't think it would happen within my lifetime, but after seeing experimental displays and even early framerate amplification technologies, I'm now convinced that there's a manageable (albiet long) path of innovation forward within less than one human generation.