LCD monitor recommendations

(post earlier in the wrong forum)

Need suggestions or recommendation in getting a new monitor for my PC for photo and video editing?
My old Sony trinitron is dying a slow death.

1. Is it advisable to get a LCD monitor with a TV tuner?
2. What would you guys recommend for an LCD monitor for photo editing?

Thanks.

There have been many many many threads on monitor reviews and recommendations, including one less than a dozen below this when you posted. Try searching, including lots of informative posts from NewsyL.

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Simon

focus101 said:

1. Is it advisable to get a LCD monitor with a TV tuner?

Click to expand...

In general... No. The smaller units are sometimes bundled with a "TN" TFT LCD panel which is not the preferred panel technology for image editing. The larger units (TV's ?) often don't have the resolution or the menu options necessary to calibrate the screen adequately.

focus101 said:

2. What would you guys recommend for an LCD monitor for photo editing?

Click to expand...

It is all about the type of LCD panel used in the monitor.

More info here:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=32608747

&nbsp

Before we start suggesting 14bit processing 64billion colour palate 30" $4000 monster screens to you....

Do you have a $$$ budget ????

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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NewsyL said:

focus101 said:

1. Is it advisable to get a LCD monitor with a TV tuner?

Click to expand...

No. The smaller untis are sometimes bundled with a "TN" TFT LCD panel which is not the preferred panel technology for image editing. The larger units (TV's ?) often don't have the resolution or the menu options necessary to calibrate the screen adequately.

Member said:

2. What would you guys recommend for an LCD monitor for photo editing?

Click to expand...

It is all about the type of LCD panel used in the monitor.

More info here:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=32608747

Before we start sugegsting 14bit processing 64billion colour palate 30" $4000 monster screens to you....

Do you have a $$$ budget ????

.

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. Read several of the reviews and recommendations but the more I read the more I drool. But I've to be realistic of the budget. Preferably no more than $350.

focus101 said:

NewsyL said:

Before we start suggesting 14bit processing 64billion colour palate 30" $4000 monster screens to you....

Do you have a $$$ budget ????

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. Read several of the reviews and recommendations but the more I read the more I drool. But I've to be realistic of the budget. Preferably no more than $350.

Click to expand...

OK... now we have something to work with.

I strongly encourage you to focus on the monitors discussed here:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=33571824

Dell 2209WA
NEC EA231WMi
Viewsonic VP2365WB

-they're in your budget range
-they have the e-IPS panel

-they're almost 100% sRGB which is the main color space people work in for web images

Two of the three are available now.

Also consider the HP LP2275w as it falls in your $$$ range, and is a wide gamut panel (which may be problematic - not an issue if understood)

You may want to sneak a peak at either the:

HP LP2575w
Dell U2410
Dell 2408WFP

These three are much discussed in these forums but well outside your budget though occasionally are on sale down into the low 400's. They would be your next level up.

I strongly suggest you get a hardware calibrator as not one LCD under $1500 comes from the factory particularly well calibrated.

As you also indicate you may edit video, read the Prad.de review sections on "DVD and Video" to see how the monitors handle various signal feeds.

i.e. http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review/2009/review-dell-2209wa-part14.html#DVD

Reviews:
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/reviews.html
-look for the "Very Good"

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews.htm

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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Thanks newsyl. Appreciate the summary.

Hi This is my first "posting", I would just like to comment on your posting for it is a subject that really has a lot of hidden unexpected outcomes.

I have been editing images and video on a computer since 1997 and it was all so simple on an analogue screen such as your Sony. Then came the digital age and with it problems that probably only video editors will notice AND NOT ACCEPT AND OR WILL COMPLAIN ABOUT with no resolution at all.

Talking digital images: in general the aspect ratio of the digital image as generated in a stills camera is 4:3 3:2 or perhpas 16:9 and in the past we would have viewed these successfully on a 4:3 computer screen via some software that was probably designed for use with a 4:3 computer screen and/or television.

The flat screen that came with the digital revolution these days is provided in anything else but a 4:3 aspect ratio.

A 16:9 wide screen monitor will most likely generate viewed images that are 33% stretched sideways. Cars will have egg shaped wheels, faces will be stretched and ladies will look somewhat broader UNLESS the software or your system is capable of producing a 4:3 image with black bands down each side. I hate it.

I tried to find a 4:3 flat screen when my analogue Sony quit and the sales person looked sideways at me. His solution was what turned out to be a 5:4 aspect ratio screen by Samsung and what that does in general is to stretch the 4:3 image by about 6% vertically. I hate that also but it is better than a 16:9 monitor that stretches such images 33% sideways.

The computer video card will probably have a variety of resolutions, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 960 are each 4:3 but when the Microsoft logic takes over the result is stretched images.

My Samsung screen documentation suggests that best outcomes are achieved at a video card resolution of 1280 x 1024 (5:4) so you can see that a normal 4:3 image should have black bands top and bottom. They do not. So stretch is the name of the game in the digital world of today, its appalling and I blame Microsoft and its generally faulty logic.

You may have to work with windows that you drag the shape to be 4:3 in the working area and then at least your DSLR images will have "circles as circles" and not "eggs".

My own view of flat monitor screens is the video card is more likely to control what you see, so almost any flat screen will do the job but finding one that will, in conjunction with software, produce circles as circles is quite impossible so one eventually accepts that there is never going to be a "round" solution.

Cheers, this is my web site with 50 years of photography and video archived.

http://users.chariot.net.au/~rossmcl/index.html

hi , before reading your post here I just started a thread with questions about stretched wide images and what monitor to get. reading your nice post explains some of it to me. really dislike those distorted images tho.
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Msongs
http://www.msongs.com
batik & digital art, t shirts and more!

617_sticks said:

A 16:9 wide screen monitor will most likely generate viewed images that are 33% stretched sideways. Cars will have egg shaped wheels, faces will be stretched and ladies will look somewhat broader UNLESS the software or your system is capable of producing a 4:3 image with black bands down each side. I hate it.

I tried to find a 4:3 flat screen when my analogue Sony quit and the sales person looked sideways at me. His solution was what turned out to be a 5:4 aspect ratio screen by Samsung and what that does in general is to stretch the 4:3 image by about 6% vertically. I hate that also but it is better than a 16:9 monitor that stretches such images 33% sideways.

Click to expand...

617_sticks said:

You may have to work with windows that you drag the shape to be 4:3 in the working area and then at least your DSLR images will have "circles as circles" and not "eggs".

My own view of flat monitor screens is the video card is more likely to control what you see, so almost any flat screen will do the job but finding one that will, in conjunction with software, produce circles as circles is quite impossible so one eventually accepts that there is never going to be a "round" solution.

Click to expand...

With all due respect, what you have stated here, if I'm understanding you correctly, is incorrect.

There are NO proportion issues with wide screen monitors if your PC or Mac is using the proper video driver resolution.

A perfect circle on on 4:3 ratio monitor (1600x1200) will also look like a perfect circle on a 16:10 ratio monitor (1680x1050 or 1920x1200) or a 16:9 monitor (1920x1080).

However, if you select in your video driver a resolution of 1600x1200 and have a 1920x1200 monitor connected.... yes, you will get an oval.

You get an oval because you have made a mistake in setting up your monitor.

LCD monitors must ALWAYS be set to their native resolution .

If the native resolution is 1680x1050, you don't set up the video card to provide 1440x900. The reason for this, is that unlike CRT's, most LCD monitors don't do a good job of interpolating the smaller resolution onto the larger screen. You'll end up with a fuzzy edge or jaggies on curves and angles.

Some people try to use the lower resolution to because they have a hard time reading text or can't see their icons. There are options in the operating systems to increase native font size, have larger icons, or failing that, use reading glasses.

I have a summary of information on LCD monitors in this thread:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=32608747

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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NewsyL said:

617_sticks said:

A 16:9 wide screen monitor will most likely generate viewed images that are 33% stretched sideways. Cars will have egg shaped wheels, faces will be stretched and ladies will look somewhat broader UNLESS the software or your system is capable of producing a 4:3 image with black bands down each side. I hate it.

I tried to find a 4:3 flat screen when my analogue Sony quit and the sales person looked sideways at me. His solution was what turned out to be a 5:4 aspect ratio screen by Samsung and what that does in general is to stretch the 4:3 image by about 6% vertically. I hate that also but it is better than a 16:9 monitor that stretches such images 33% sideways.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Pardon? I can get round circles on a widescreen display easily... The aspect ratio of the screen has NOTHING to do with the aspect ratio of the displayed picture as long as the screen is set to its native resolution. That is the job of the imaging program you are using to edit or display the picture. And it does nothing to change the aspect ratio of the image, unless you've specifically instructed it to stretch the image in some way. Wide screen displays actually have some advantages over the older 4:3 and 5:4 displays in that they provide more area on the sides of the image for too palettes, etc. that would have required a 2nd monitor in the old days. Now, if you're trying to view a 4:3 (standard definition) VIDEO image on a widescreen TV, there are a whole bunch of weird fomat modes you can employ to fill the screen with the image, but they'll distort the image. For the most part they only serve to confuse.

Member said:

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Click to expand...

You're speaking to 617_sticks and not me I hope.

mosswings said:

mosswings said:

617_sticks said:

A 16:9 wide screen monitor will most likely generate viewed images that are 33% stretched sideways. Cars will have egg shaped wheels, faces will be stretched and ladies will look somewhat broader UNLESS the software or your system is capable of producing a 4:3 image with black bands down each side. I hate it.

I tried to find a 4:3 flat screen when my analogue Sony quit and the sales person looked sideways at me. His solution was what turned out to be a 5:4 aspect ratio screen by Samsung and what that does in general is to stretch the 4:3 image by about 6% vertically. I hate that also but it is better than a 16:9 monitor that stretches such images 33% sideways.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Pardon? I can get round circles on a widescreen display easily... The aspect ratio of the screen has NOTHING to do with the aspect ratio of the displayed picture as long as the screen is set to its native resolution. That is the job of the imaging program you are using to edit or display the picture. And it does nothing to change the aspect ratio of the image, unless you've specifically instructed it to stretch the image in some way. Wide screen displays actually have some advantages over the older 4:3 and 5:4 displays in that they provide more area on the sides of the image for too palettes, etc. that would have required a 2nd monitor in the old days. Now, if you're trying to view a 4:3 (standard definition) VIDEO image on a widescreen TV, there are a whole bunch of weird fomat modes you can employ to fill the screen with the image, but they'll distort the image. For the most part they only serve to confuse.

mosswings said:

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Click to expand...

Click to expand...

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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Thanks indeed for the explanation of circles ain't circles.

There must be a lot of person's out there that cannot understand what using the natural resolution really means.

The Samsung screen I replaced my analogue 4:3 Sony with simply said it is recommended that best performance is obtained with a video card setting of 1028 x 1024. That is an aspect ratio of 5:4 the same as the physical dimensions of the screen.

My video card, an old ATI Radeon has only 2 settings that are 5:4, 1280 x 1024 and 1800 x 1440.

I quickly added a circle to a source 3:2 digital camera image and changed resolutions to see what happened.

Cat amongst the pidgeons again: the circles were circles at both 5:4 resolutions mentioned above. It seems to me based on that test one needs to be aware of what the physical aspect ratio shape of the screen really is and use a video card setting of the same aspect ratio.

The change from an analogue 4:3 as the only computer screen in days gone past may well lead to problems in the digital age mainly due to a lack of instructions by the provider of the screen. If he had effectively said to use a video resolution the same as the physical aspect ratio of the screen then there would never have been a problem.

I will bet the original poster of this string could also fall into the same hole that I did in not understanding that one needed to change ideas in the update process and not try to use old, well used and tried analogue setups. It is also compounded by software providers stating or recommending, for example, this software is designed for 1024 x 768 or the more modern stuff, 1280 x 960 both of which are 4:3 so its easy to follow one of two conflicting instructions. Guess I followed Adobe in video editing and got it wrong.

Thanks a lot

Cheers

AN ADDITIONAL STORY:

My wife arrived home with her works supplied 16:9 Laptop which is setup and maintained by an IT section that looks after over 300 employees with computers.

The laptop is obviously 16:9 and the video card was set by the IT people at 1024 x 768, obviously to suit a lot of software designed for use at that resolution and produces great digital image "eggs". Professional, highly paid IT people, what a joke!

Following upon the notion that I think one only needs to use any setting that is the same as the physical screen aspect ratio I changed the IT setup to the only 16:9 resolution available from the card. 1280 x 800 and yes my circle over a 3:2 image looked just fine.

So what then is the "natural resolution" of such a device, that term is just as confusing in the very confusing world of the flat screen.

Thanks a lot, I hope the original poster gains something from the content of this stream. I did and it shows a 75 year old is quite willing to learn from the experience.

http://users.chariot.net.au/~rossmcl/index.html

1280x1024 is a common resolution from several years ago. I'd actually forgotten it existed.

The old circle/oval issue is a fairly common inquiry here stemming from when people replace their old 4:3 or 5:4 ratio monitors with a new 16:10 widescreen and connect it to their old old PC.

Inevitably, the problem is fixed when they update their video card driver and suddenly the new resolution they need shows up on the list of resolutions they can change to.

Sometimes people worry as they know the resolution they're going to have to move to but can't see it when they check their video card utility with the old monitor still connected. As soon as they plug the new monitor in, it is auto detected, Windows loads the right driver and *voila* there it is.

Cheers

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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617_sticks said:

So what then is the "natural resolution" of such a device, that term is just as confusing in the very confusing world of the flat screen.

Click to expand...

The natural resolution would be the actual displayable pixel count horizontally and vertically of the screen. i.e. a 16:9 example... 1366 pixels left to right and 768 pixels top to bottom... 1366x768. This is often described as the "optimal resolution" in specs.

If you could get the brand and model number off the label on the bottom of the laptop, I could tell you in all likelihood.

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Newsy http://newsy.smugmug.com

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Thanks for the comments, the laptop is a DELL and I do not seem to be able to find the model. She has no instruction book for it. Not to worry, with only one 16:9 and 2 x 4:3 settings for the video card it would seem to be a problem that cannot be fixed if the available card setting is not the so called "native" one.

Actually something else comes to mind, another resident of our retirement village has just recently up dated and she has complained of wildly elongated images. I recall it looked like a flat screen in cinemascope 2.33:1 aspect ratio. I do not remember the brand and she is away on holidays.

One sure wonders what the industry is up to. I think it continually generates stuff to try and force us to needlessly update. I wonder where she will get a video card to suit that sort of aspect as obviously her provider, who set it up, has not got it right. Maybe its all because we are upside down relative to you guys in the UK or the northern hemisphere.

Cheers

617_sticks said:

Thanks for the comments, the laptop is a DELL and I do not seem to be able to find the model. She has no instruction book for it. Not to worry, with only one 16:9 and 2 x 4:3 settings for the video card it would seem to be a problem that cannot be fixed if the available card setting is not the so called "native" one.

Click to expand...

Almost always, the appropriate thing to do with a laptop is select the highest resolution offered in the display properties. Unless something strange is happening, that will be the native resolution of the panel, and it will have the appropriate aspect ratio.

617_sticks said:

I wonder where she will get a video card to suit that sort of aspect

Click to expand...

Most video cards can handle most aspect ratios. It's also actually possible to edit a file somewhere to change the list of resolutions displayed in the properties dialogue, IIRC.

I haven't found aspect ratio to be much of an issue with PCs and monitors... however, our TV often chooses the wrong aspect ratio, and getting it working sensibly with a laptop can be particularly challenging. Incidentally, this is one thing I really feel they could have got better with Win7 as it seems likely to effect a large number of consumers.

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Peter

Thanks again for the comments on this issue.

I am afraid what your suggesting would not be appropriate for me to attempt on someone elses computer particularly when she paid some professional to set it up. So I guess she will be stuck with what she has, from what appears to be a 2.33:L1 aspect ratio monitor. Certainly she does not like seeing family somewhat broader than the reality.

I still think the logic should have been to adjust the width for example to suit the resolution used on the card, in other words 4;3 images with black side bands when filling the screen or letterboxed cinemascope 2.33:1 format images when being played out full screen on a 16:9 resolution just like one gets on a television if it is all set up correctly.

Put another way: my 1280 x 1024 monitor if used to show full screen 4:3 images which relate to 1280 x 960 should have black bands 32 lines deep top and bottom. But that would carry forward the old analogue ideas.

I agree your comments on the TV side of things, its a nightmare making DVD's for others particularly anything that is from the old 4:3 format, generally nice "eggs" result and the user generally does not know how to reset the TV to cope.

All that said, I have just modified my flight simulator settings and at last I have round gauges when flying my Lancasters or any other aircraft. A BIG THANKS!

Cheers for now

not trying to be mean but he doesn't not understand how LCD monitors and graphics cards work together.

His troubles are NOT experienced by 100 million other PC users.

Don't be afraid of 16:9 widescreen displays.

Example picture in the post that follows.

My desktop at 1920 x1080 resolution. Text is shaped normal, boxes are not round, etc.

Course if you set the resolution of your graphics card wrong then even this picture will look strange but the point is that LCD displays have a fixed pixel resolution - they are not like tubes of the past.