Thanks for your informative feedback!
DaveKap wrote: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.
This quite true; it is quite a common complaint with TN panels, for desktop use.
There's a lot of people who don't mind the tradeoffs, especially people who primarily uses these monitors for gaming. Sometimes the fast response & motion clarity is more important (e.g. the rave reviews about games and motion clarity, as you've already seen all over Amazon, in the
LightBoost testimonials, and gamers who care about this fast response especially with
LightBoost enabled, which also further affects colors on most of the monitors even further, in exchange for CRT motion clarity).
However, there's also a lot of people who dislike the TN panels, especially at the desktop.
I prefer software development (e.g. Visual Studio) on a VA panel or IPS panel.
DaveKap wrote: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.
Viewing angles and banding/gradients are all known issues with many TN panels, especially if you've been a long-time CRT user and switched to LCD for the first time. It's not a defect of the BENQ brand in particular, there are good IPS and VA monitors sold by BENQ that does not have these color issues.
Alas, as you've just discovered, TN is great for games, but not ideal for PhotoShop users...
DaveKap wrote: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.
Yes, this is a known issue of TN, as well. For my TN monitors, the color goes down a few bits -- not all the way to 16-bits. However, using NVIDIA Control Panel to adjust colors will add a LOT more banding than using the on-screen-menu color adjustments. If you're using a colorimeter, adjust via the monitor adjustments (hopefully your calibration software can use DDC commands to do this) to remain as minimum gradient banding as possible. However, TN panels are often 6bit+FRC = 8bit.
DaveKap wrote: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.
That doesn't happen with most of my monitors. This may be an indicator of a defect. You've rightfully described several TN panel defects, but the brightness change should only be subtle (e.g. a few percent). Adjusting the XL2420TE to minimum brightness, you should be able to get under ~50 cd/m2 -- which is not bright. If this is not happening to you, then this specific part of the BENQ might be a warranty claimable defect. However, the banding/viewing angles are normal aspects of TN. Yes, it is indeed strange.
That said, there's another aspect of LCD's that warrants warming them up. Slower responding panels such as VA and IPS, can actually perform better when warm. If you forgot your watch or cellphone in a cold car in the winter, you've noticed how slow LCD's become in the cold. They ghost a lot more. This can happen to computer monitors when left in a cold room overnight, then turned on. That's why makers of the colorimeters (Spyder and i1 Display Pro) recommend to warm up the display before calibrating.
DaveKap wrote: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!
That's one approach you can do.
I should notice that I see less banding on the G-SYNC upgraded ASUS, but it's not zero -- you still have the inherent TN limitations to deal with. The banding comes back if I adjust the picture via NVIDIA Control Panel instead of monitor adjustments, however. That said, this is unofficial information from tests on a prototype G-SYNC monitor that NVIDIA sent. You could wait and try it out, especially if you buy with a good return/exchange policy, or visit a local demo.
You now have to think long and hard if you want to go to 120Hz+ territory, as it can get challenging to get PhotoShop-quality monitors with 120Hz+ flat panels. However, there are some solutions, with specific tradeoffs.
So on that note, if you decide to dip back into 120Hz territory, consider the
Eizo FG2421, the QNIX
QX2710 overclockable, or the
Overlord Tempest X270OC.
-- The VA panels have almost as good viewing angles as IPS, yet has better contrast ratio than IPS, and you get the "LightBoost" style Turbo240 feature. It's, IMHO, the best strobe-backlight monitor on the market at the moment, if you don't care about G-SYNC, and can live with some of its imperfections. Grey uniformity is so-so during dark colors, so that might affect PhotoShop work of dark imagery (e.g. dungeon artwork, etc), but you will get deliciously dark blacks and have the LightBoost motion clarity.
-- The QNIX QX2710 is a Korean 2560x1440p PLS monitor that is very easily overclockable to 120Hz. Backlight bleed is a common problem though, and warranty can be a hassle, so make sure you order via Amazon or getting a SquareTrade warranty. Colors can slightly distort when overclocking. You don't get a strobe backlight, so motion clarity is not nearly as good as LightBoost or Turbo240.
-- The Overlord Tempest X270OC, is one of the world's most reliably overclockable 2560x1440p monitors, using IPS panels instead of PLS panels, has a USA warranty, and is generally higher quality than the Korean options. No strobe backlight either, but the 120Hz is widely reported more reliable and PhotoShop-worthy than the QNIX.
Again, thanks for the informative feedback! Perhaps during 2014, I should create an article for Blur Busters about TN versus IPS versus PLS versus VA, and their specific pros and cons, especially in the light of some people preferring certain aspects (some people like me, are so picky about motion blur, that we don't mind gradients) while others prefer different aspects (e.g. resolution, color, etc).
P.S. Up to you, but if you order monitors online, feel free to support Blur Busters via ordering via the
Official 120Hz Monitor List.