16.2m colour TFT's - AVIOD!!

[SilentDeath]

Yesterday, due to a cock up at an unnamed online retailer, I recived a sony SDM-HS94P 19" TFT monitor.

This gave me an opertunity to try out this monitor, more importantly, to try a 16.2m colour monitor.

So you might think, its only 0.5m colours short, your not going to notice. wrong. You do notice, and heres why:

1) It doesnt acctually do 16.2m colours, but a much lower number - correct me if Im wrong, but i think its 256 colours or another lowish number. Now to get 16.2m, it dithers them. Not quite sure how this works but ot lookshorrible.
Seriously, it makes the WHOLE screen look like a badly compressed JPEG image - and its very noticable when playing with the sharpness.

Let me put it this way, its not capable of pruducing a picture, which has only one colour. I opened psp7, made a new image, and filled it black, and went full screen. What do you see? not plain black, but blocky sort of squares everywhere which are a result of dithering.

This sony was also a bad TFT becuase of dead pixels, ok only a few were always off, but in a 10mm2 area, I could count about 50 dead sub-pixels when the screen was black. Not very good is it.

Now, HOW can sony or anyone put a £410 price tag on these things?? WOW its 12ms, but I noticedplenty of ghosting in cs.

I recommend anyone considering one of these, to quickly go over to aria, and instead buy the cheap 19" VGA-only TFTs that they have. They are 16.7m and not only that, you wouldnt notice the lack of DVI, or any of the other features. The picture quality would be better, and I bet they dont ghost as much.

DVI is pointless on a 16.2m TFT. I cant miagine why anyone would want a 16.m tft, especially for gaming - unless all they play is counter-strike, which only uses about 256 different colours anyway.

I have now ordered a Viewsonic VX912 (AGAIN!) which I have spoke to viewsonics sales manager about. He didnt seem to know anything about 16.2m colour TFT's but assured me that these are 16.7m. Also reading reviews, people are saying its got possibly the pest picture quality of any tft, so I doubt it could be a 16.2 for that reson.

[daniel_owen_uk]

Thats strange the new xbrites are supposed to be very good, and aren't all new tft's 16.2m colours (isn't that 32bit).

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/periphe...075100p,00.htm

[davidstone28]

16.2m colour TFT's - AVIOD!!

I wonder if you've been reading THG too much and been taking things out of context without seeing the big picture (no pun intended ). You can have moniitors with a smaller colour pallette looking better than one's with a bigger colour pallete, and vice versa. It's just one factor amongst many. To draw conclusions in isolation is akin to saying something along the lines of don't buy a 1.8ghz CPU because its slower than a 2.4ghz CPU or that one manufacturers response time spec of "12ms" is faster than another manufacturer's spec of "20ms". There are many other factors which need to be considered. Worst of all, you've sought to draw conclusions about monitors with 16.2m colour palletes which are simply wrong. To use an analogy - you buy a car with a 6 cylinder engine but it doesn't accelerate properly. You therefore conclude that no-one should buy cars with 6 cylinder engines because they don't accelerate properly. How do you know that your monitor isn't faulty or that you have a panel that has slipped through QC?

I had a few of the X-Black Sony monitors come through the office about 6 months ago, and couldn't resist borrowing a couple of the 17" models for er, 'evaluation'. The colour reproduction was just sensational - it reminded me of the colours that you see on a Wega TV or if we're harking back to yesteryear, the vibrant colour reproduction that you would get from aperture grill CRTs which were essentially Sony Technology. Colours were vibrant, rich and alive. Certainly a world away from the slightly flat (or at the other end of the scale, unnaturally saturated colours) of current TFT monitors based on AUO, or LG/Phillips panels. I didn't notice any of the black blocking effect that you describe either with or without DisplayMate. Two things put me off putting any money down for the Sonys - the reflections off the screen are absolutely horrific. The X-Black models have some sort of coating on the screen which seems to reflect every single lightsource in the room. You could stare at the screen and see your own reflection. Although I'm prettier that Jude Law, I'd need to see my desktop for work purposes. The second factor was the price - just under £500 each. Although this is quite subjective, I would that the colour reproduction was better than the Hydis panelled Acer 1731M monitor (16.7 millions colours, 8-bits per colour) that I currently have or the LG/Phillips Iiyama E431S (16.2m colours). Looking at the size of colour pallete (16.2m v 16.7m) without properly considering other factors which may affect colour reproduction represents a flawed methodology.

But you may or may not have a point. Only yesterday I was in Tottenham Court Road browsing for some 1920p and silver widescreen Mac moniitors and couldn't help noticing some of the 19" X-Black Sonys. Colour reproduction was looked very poor - washed out and bland. Now whether it was a case of them not being calibrated properly or the wrong colour pallete or temperatures being used, I do not know. I suspect it was more likely to be a case of poor setup or a 'low end' model being displayed. You would clearly need to evaluate a number of monitors usiing a variety of panels before make such sweeping statements about all monitors with 16.2m colour pallettes looking 'horrible'. I've seen monitors with 16.7m colour palletes looks 'horrible' too. I'm also inclined to agree with Daniel Owen about many or even most mainstream TFTs having a pallete of 16.2m colours. I'd even hazard a guess than any supposed "low" reponse time monitors have a 16.2m colour pallete as opposed to 16.7m. Would be interesting to know what the 'colour pallete' position is with other popular monitors eg. Samsung 172X, LG 1710B etc. Do all those look 'horrible' as well?

The bottom line is, no fully working monitor whether 16.2m or 16.7m should produce the results that you describe. And no monitor should have 50 dead pixels which is clearly outside manufacturing tolerances. I'd say that the panel is faulty.

[Apex]

Thats strange the new xbrites are supposed to be very good, and aren't all new tft's 16.2m colours (isn't that 32bit).

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/periphe...075100p,00.htm

No

16.2m colours is 20bit

16.7 (16.77) is 24bit colour (8 bits per colour)

btw 32bit is winodows name for 24bit werid i know.......

regards low response time tft's with 16.7m colours this digimate branded one has it and so does the ag neovo f-17 and the newer f-417, in fact i thnk all of ag's tfts have 16.7m

[davidstone28]

No

16.2m colours is 20bit

Xbitlabs and Tom's seem to think that 16.2m is 18bit.

[Paul Adams]

16.7 (16.77) is 24bit colour (8 bits per colour)

btw 32bit is winodows name for 24bit werid i know.......

Completely off-topic side note:

IIRC the 4th byte is for "opacity" (or transparency if you're a "glass is half empty" person maybe ) which is why it has the same number of colours as 24-bit "true colour" but adds more cool functions to the desktop without masses of calculations being required.

Also, I think it helps a lot for data to be on even memory boundaries, it make data manipulation so much quicker - this might also be why 3-byte colour depths aren't used in Windows for realtime display, but static images are stored in disk this way.

When I used to program a bit of assembler and C years ago, it was actually quicker to move 2 bytes of data around than it was to use just 1, and there are compiler options to force single-byte variables to use 2 bytes of space for more efficient addressing.

Something to do with needing to perform 2 operations to fill a 16-bit memory register if you use just 8 bits.

We now return you to your regular topic thread...

[Apex]

Xbitlabs and Tom's seem to think that 16.2m is 18bit.

ok i might stand corrected.....

and paul.... i actually understand some of the logic behind what you said.

[azrael1]

It makes the desktop looks like what ?

I have 1 of these and quality is staggering !

I love it and before u call me a noob ive owned used many different models of crts and tfts through private and work use.

maybe u set it up wrongly or bad video card.

I have one using DVI on a 6800 gt and its amazing

[SilentDeath]

davidstone28 I think you have been reading too many threads by readers of THG.

I do not read THG.

Firstly, it is not TRUE 16.2m colours. As I pointed out it is in some way dithered to achive 16.2m colours from a much lower number. While the panel is faulty, the "artifacting" is clearnly not as a result of the faluty panel (dead pixels).

Dithering seems to result in what looks like JPEG artifacting on the screen. It does not look good and I dont understnad how you could say these monitors give a good picture. Go do some research for yourself about 16.2m colour tfts, they just cannot match a crt in anyway. Even a cheap £20 second hand 15" crt would give a better picture than these sony POS.

[Hobart Paving]

SilentDeath - Relax and stop being so defensive

It does sound as if your monitor is faulty though.

[daniel_owen_uk]

You have it at optimal res?

Sounds faulty to me.

[SilentDeath]

it was at 1280*1024.

It is faulty in dead pixels, but there is nothing wrong with it apart from that. Its just how 16.2m tfts work, go read about it.

[azrael1]

yeah its faulty or ure a <no need> and cant set up TFTs properly !

I have a dell 2005 FW as a second mon and a sony 19 inch as the main and the sony is so much more better

[Bulldog73]

it was at 1280*1024.

It is faulty in dead pixels, but there is nothing wrong with it apart from that. Its just how 16.2m tfts work, go read about it.

Isn't the native resolution of a 19" monitor 1600x1200 ???

[azrael1]

No bulldog

1280 1024

[SilentDeath]

yeah its faulty or ure a noob and cant set up TFTs properly !

I have a dell 2005 FW as a second mon and a sony 19 inch as the main and the sony is so much more better

Ye can fo. I didnt read it before, but it explains it perfectly. the link above to x-bit - http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/oth...-guide_11.html

Here is what I was about to write before I read that link though... and you are the noob.
16.2m tft's only have 262,144 colours (2^18) which are dithered to achive 16.2m colours.

16.7m colours is 2^24 - monitors obviously have no need for aditional 8 bits for alpha channel - although they are needed for desktop and games which is why 32bit is used.

There are two common problems: first, there appear transverse stripes in smooth color gradients. Sometimes it looks as if there are no FRC at all. This problem, however, mostly belongs to the first generation of ?fast? matrices, although some stripiness can sometimes be seen in a modern model. The second problem is that the FRC algorithms may fail on some specific pictures (for example, a one-pixel grid, especially if it is combined with a smooth gradient), resulting in flicker ? this flicker may be so strong as to make it impossible to work with the monitor. The latter effect can only be seen in the most inexpensive models, though.

Now you can all fo trashing my thread. 16.2m colour LCDs look ****e.