7 ms·

Tip: try to find out what panel the monitor you are buying has. Then look the panel up in a database like panelook.com. This way you can get the specifications

by gaudat 6y ago

Tip: try to find out what panel the monitor you are buying has. Then look the panel up in a database like panelook.com. This way you can get the specifications without any marketing bullshit. It also works the other way round. Find a panel that is good enough for your eyes, then see if there's a mass marketed display with that panel. If you are adventurous, you can grab "DIY" or "assembled" monitors with the panels on Chinese e-Commerce sites.

arvindamirtaa 6y ago
Wow I'll never shop for monitors the same again.
tilolebo 6y ago
Isn't it so that monitors or laptops under the same model sometimes use different panels?
- gaudat 6y ago
  Yes. Consider most people only care about the resolution, sometimes manufacturers substitute a lower cost panel that is inferior in say, gamut or response time.
Hamuko 6y ago
Isn't there a chance that the assembled Chinese monitors actually use second grade panels that the big makers wouldn't accept? I remember getting a 27-inch 1440p display from a Chinese manufacturer for really cheap back in high school. It should've been the exact same panel as was in Apple's iMacs. However, the were some quality issues with it long term and it's definitely suffering from burn-in that I don't think the iMacs suffer from.
- gaudat 6y ago
  Yes, so often I ask if the seller can provide a "perfect" display, that is, without any artifacts on the display. This adds 100-200 CNY to the price. There's a Chinese panel manufacturer called BOE that makes products competitive with some of the lower-end Samsung / LG panels. I got one 15.6" 2160p external display with a BOE panel that offers 100% sRGB coverage. I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display. Now if anyone can find a source of 55" 4K OLED panels, that would be the one ultimate display. Combine it with a VBO driver board and it becomes better than any smart TVs.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display. And outside of a few occupations that might actually require pixel-perfect colour, what does this matter? Is this like the audiophile world, where people argue about seemingly subjective things that no else cares about? The customer interprets colours differently than you, the customer sees colours differently than you, and the customer is using a monitor that almost assuredly displays the colours differently than yours. And the world continues to turn.
    - steve_adams_86 6y ago
      I enjoy having a high quality display for all kinds of reasons. Better comfort while programming, accurate colour representation while looking at photos, having a good sense of what things might look like for others (accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all), and otherwise, if I’m going to spend a lot on something I’ll own for half a decade I would prefer to get something accurate. The price difference isn’t sufficient enough to justify saving a little bit to have a poor colour experience.
      - wongarsu 6y ago
        > accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all Having a setup with multiple cheap monitors is imho really underrated for design and development. Moving something between screens and seeing clear contrast disappear, or see pleasing color choices turn ugly can be eye opening.
        thewebcount 6y ago
        Agreed! Back when I was in music school, they brought in Tony Bonjiovi[0], a well-known record producer at the time. He talked about how the ultimate test of any recording was to copy it to a cassette, take it out to the engineer's Camaro with 1 broken speaker and see how it sounded there. If it sounded good there, it would sound great anywhere else. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bongiovi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bongiovi
- bserge 6y ago
  That was the case with noname Korean/Chinese monitors a decade ago that used high quality IPS panels found in Apple and other professional displays - they used rejected panels, which had various issues (mostly dead pixels afaik). https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displays-from-korea-are-for-real/ https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displa... But overall, they were a great purchase quality/performance/cost wise.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Yeah, a cheap 1440p as a student was certainly a great thing when they were still rather expensive, even though the base was wobbly as all hell and it later developed some issues.
  - Macuyiko 6y ago
    That brings back memories :). I ended up buying one of these and apart from some weird quirks (only wanted to work over DVI and not with an HDMI-DVI dongle), the image quality was great and so cheap (for the time).
  - aembleton 6y ago
    I'm reading this on an IPS panel I bought a decade ago from South Korea. Works great, but with a bit of light bleed in the top left hand corner. I paid extra to have one without dead pixels.
  - soylentcola 6y ago
    Yep! Still using the "Auria" monitor that I purchased at Microcenter back around 2012. Cost maybe $300-350 for a 2560x1440 IPS monitor at a time when you were easily looking at $500-800+ for a similar panel from a name brand. Now, if you were a professional, that quality control and warranty (not to mention better ergonomics, etc.) were easily worth the added cost, but for just "some dude who liked playing video games and doing some photo/video editing", it was a great bang for the buck. I still use this as my main monitor and haven't noticed any dead pixels (if there are any, they're so hard to see that they may as well not be there). It's not the best monitor out there and you can probably get a better 2560x1440 display for less now, but at the time it was a big improvement over the cheap 1920x1080 display that quickly got demoted to secondary (and has now been loaned indefinitely to a teacher friend who needed a second monitor to plug into her laptop for online classes).
- pembrook 6y ago
  Actually iMacs and their display counterparts in the LG ultrafine series are known to suffer from burn-in. Google iMac or LG ultrafine “image retention” or “ghosting.” I have no idea what percent of displays are affected, but there’s enough threads about it on Reddit and macrumors to make me think it’s pretty common.
- remlov 6y ago
  FWIW Planar makes 27" monitors that use the same 5K and 2K panels used in the iMacs, down to the bonded glass surface. The Planar IX2790 and PXL2790MW respectively. I have the PXL2790MW and if you look closely you can see the glass peephole for the nonexistent iSight Camera. Not sure if it's B grade panels that Apple rejected but it's flawless, maybe I just got lucky.
  - randallsquared 6y ago
    I have a couple of these from 2014-15, and they are very, very nice (and as a plus, they matched the dpi of some macbook models at the time, at least). One surprise: they were very heavy compared to other, similarly-specced monitors.
    - remlov 6y ago
      The only issue I had was coil whine coming from a choke on the power supply inverter board. I resolved this by cracking open the monitor and encasing the choke in two part epoxy.
  - whatever1 6y ago
    It is hit or miss. I own two, the one is flawless (apart from the retention which is the norm apparently in LG displays). The other I have exchanged it 2 times and still have issues with many many dead pixels. So in my case 3/4 were bad apples.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
bserge 6y ago
Yeah, if you look into it, you'll find most monitors using the same panels from LG, AUO, Samsung or ChiMei, with some outliers. When it comes to assembled monitors, the highest failure rate is in the power supply. The components used and the cooling/ventilation play a big part in that.
pembrook 6y ago
This sounds compelling. I'd love to get my hands on the LG Ultrafine 5k panel in a cheaper case and just bring my own thunderbolt dock. What sites are you finding these "assembled" monitors?
api 6y ago
Yep, that's what I did. The panel is the actual product. The housing is just stuff around the panel.
wruza 6y ago
For monitors it is more than that. For a pretty expensive 144hz/1440p/gsync category that I researched a couple of years ago there were three options: acer, asus and viewsonic (and unavailable aoc). It turned out that asus, despite being a “better, much more money” brand, did a worse job of mounting the panel, so it had statistically worse backlight bleeding at one edge.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  What's wrong with Asus installing alarms in their monitors? I learned the hard way being woken up in the middle of the night by a loud siren I couldnt locate the source as I wouldn't have expected it will come from a frikin monitor! There is no way to turn that off apart from physically powering it off and it happens totally random.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wruza 6y ago
    Oh, that’s amazing. I got curious and found this comment on youtube, sharing in case it may help or diagnose: Battle Angel Sorry, not sure why I didn't share previously. So, I believe this is caused by using a non-HDMI cable with the audio out turned on. Either turn the audio in the display off completely in the settings, or use a new HDMI cable. The alarm is a result of the display trying to send an audio signal through a Displayport cable. Are those of you getting this alarm using Displayport cables? They do not pair audio with video, as HDMI does. I hope this fixes your problem. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1i2dB8mGuKM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1i2dB8mGuKM
    - intricatedetail 6y ago
      This is so great! I've been looking for a solution to no avail but I have not seen that one. Yes I use DP cable. I'll try that. Thank you so much!
- vyrotek 6y ago
pkulak 6y ago
Does anything else have that LG 5K panel? :D
userbinator 6y ago
...and if you're really adventurous, you can buy just the bare panel, get the backlight inverter and "scaler board" elsewhere, and build your own custom monitor. The "3663" seems to be a common model of scaler.
- bertmuthalaly 6y ago
  Have you done this / do you have pointers to someone who has?

by gaudat 6y ago

arvindamirtaa 6y ago

Wow I'll never shop for monitors the same again.

tilolebo 6y ago

Isn't it so that monitors or laptops under the same model sometimes use different panels?

gaudat 6y ago
Yes. Consider most people only care about the resolution, sometimes manufacturers substitute a lower cost panel that is inferior in say, gamut or response time.

Hamuko 6y ago

Isn't there a chance that the assembled Chinese monitors actually use second grade panels that the big makers wouldn't accept? I remember getting a 27-inch 1440p display from a Chinese manufacturer for really cheap back in high school. It should've been the exact same panel as was in Apple's iMacs. However, the were some quality issues with it long term and it's definitely suffering from burn-in that I don't think the iMacs suffer from.

gaudat 6y ago
Yes, so often I ask if the seller can provide a "perfect" display, that is, without any artifacts on the display. This adds 100-200 CNY to the price. There's a Chinese panel manufacturer called BOE that makes products competitive with some of the lower-end Samsung / LG panels. I got one 15.6" 2160p external display with a BOE panel that offers 100% sRGB coverage. I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display. Now if anyone can find a source of 55" 4K OLED panels, that would be the one ultimate display. Combine it with a VBO driver board and it becomes better than any smart TVs.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display. And outside of a few occupations that might actually require pixel-perfect colour, what does this matter? Is this like the audiophile world, where people argue about seemingly subjective things that no else cares about? The customer interprets colours differently than you, the customer sees colours differently than you, and the customer is using a monitor that almost assuredly displays the colours differently than yours. And the world continues to turn.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    I enjoy having a high quality display for all kinds of reasons. Better comfort while programming, accurate colour representation while looking at photos, having a good sense of what things might look like for others (accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all), and otherwise, if I’m going to spend a lot on something I’ll own for half a decade I would prefer to get something accurate. The price difference isn’t sufficient enough to justify saving a little bit to have a poor colour experience.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      > accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all Having a setup with multiple cheap monitors is imho really underrated for design and development. Moving something between screens and seeing clear contrast disappear, or see pleasing color choices turn ugly can be eye opening.
      - thewebcount 6y ago
        Agreed! Back when I was in music school, they brought in Tony Bonjiovi[0], a well-known record producer at the time. He talked about how the ultimate test of any recording was to copy it to a cassette, take it out to the engineer's Camaro with 1 broken speaker and see how it sounded there. If it sounded good there, it would sound great anywhere else. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bongiovi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bongiovi
bserge 6y ago
That was the case with noname Korean/Chinese monitors a decade ago that used high quality IPS panels found in Apple and other professional displays - they used rejected panels, which had various issues (mostly dead pixels afaik). https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displays-from-korea-are-for-real/ https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displa... But overall, they were a great purchase quality/performance/cost wise.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Yeah, a cheap 1440p as a student was certainly a great thing when they were still rather expensive, even though the base was wobbly as all hell and it later developed some issues.
- Macuyiko 6y ago
  That brings back memories :). I ended up buying one of these and apart from some weird quirks (only wanted to work over DVI and not with an HDMI-DVI dongle), the image quality was great and so cheap (for the time).
- aembleton 6y ago
  I'm reading this on an IPS panel I bought a decade ago from South Korea. Works great, but with a bit of light bleed in the top left hand corner. I paid extra to have one without dead pixels.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  Yep! Still using the "Auria" monitor that I purchased at Microcenter back around 2012. Cost maybe $300-350 for a 2560x1440 IPS monitor at a time when you were easily looking at $500-800+ for a similar panel from a name brand. Now, if you were a professional, that quality control and warranty (not to mention better ergonomics, etc.) were easily worth the added cost, but for just "some dude who liked playing video games and doing some photo/video editing", it was a great bang for the buck. I still use this as my main monitor and haven't noticed any dead pixels (if there are any, they're so hard to see that they may as well not be there). It's not the best monitor out there and you can probably get a better 2560x1440 display for less now, but at the time it was a big improvement over the cheap 1920x1080 display that quickly got demoted to secondary (and has now been loaned indefinitely to a teacher friend who needed a second monitor to plug into her laptop for online classes).
pembrook 6y ago
Actually iMacs and their display counterparts in the LG ultrafine series are known to suffer from burn-in. Google iMac or LG ultrafine “image retention” or “ghosting.” I have no idea what percent of displays are affected, but there’s enough threads about it on Reddit and macrumors to make me think it’s pretty common.
remlov 6y ago
FWIW Planar makes 27" monitors that use the same 5K and 2K panels used in the iMacs, down to the bonded glass surface. The Planar IX2790 and PXL2790MW respectively. I have the PXL2790MW and if you look closely you can see the glass peephole for the nonexistent iSight Camera. Not sure if it's B grade panels that Apple rejected but it's flawless, maybe I just got lucky.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  I have a couple of these from 2014-15, and they are very, very nice (and as a plus, they matched the dpi of some macbook models at the time, at least). One surprise: they were very heavy compared to other, similarly-specced monitors.
  - remlov 6y ago
    The only issue I had was coil whine coming from a choke on the power supply inverter board. I resolved this by cracking open the monitor and encasing the choke in two part epoxy.
- whatever1 6y ago
  It is hit or miss. I own two, the one is flawless (apart from the retention which is the norm apparently in LG displays). The other I have exchanged it 2 times and still have issues with many many dead pixels. So in my case 3/4 were bad apples.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

bserge 6y ago

Yeah, if you look into it, you'll find most monitors using the same panels from LG, AUO, Samsung or ChiMei, with some outliers. When it comes to assembled monitors, the highest failure rate is in the power supply. The components used and the cooling/ventilation play a big part in that.

pembrook 6y ago

This sounds compelling. I'd love to get my hands on the LG Ultrafine 5k panel in a cheaper case and just bring my own thunderbolt dock. What sites are you finding these "assembled" monitors?

api 6y ago

Yep, that's what I did. The panel is the actual product. The housing is just stuff around the panel.

wruza 6y ago

For monitors it is more than that. For a pretty expensive 144hz/1440p/gsync category that I researched a couple of years ago there were three options: acer, asus and viewsonic (and unavailable aoc). It turned out that asus, despite being a “better, much more money” brand, did a worse job of mounting the panel, so it had statistically worse backlight bleeding at one edge.

intricatedetail 6y ago
What's wrong with Asus installing alarms in their monitors? I learned the hard way being woken up in the middle of the night by a loud siren I couldnt locate the source as I wouldn't have expected it will come from a frikin monitor! There is no way to turn that off apart from physically powering it off and it happens totally random.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wruza 6y ago
  Oh, that’s amazing. I got curious and found this comment on youtube, sharing in case it may help or diagnose: Battle Angel Sorry, not sure why I didn't share previously. So, I believe this is caused by using a non-HDMI cable with the audio out turned on. Either turn the audio in the display off completely in the settings, or use a new HDMI cable. The alarm is a result of the display trying to send an audio signal through a Displayport cable. Are those of you getting this alarm using Displayport cables? They do not pair audio with video, as HDMI does. I hope this fixes your problem. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1i2dB8mGuKM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1i2dB8mGuKM
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    This is so great! I've been looking for a solution to no avail but I have not seen that one. Yes I use DP cable. I'll try that. Thank you so much!
vyrotek 6y ago

pkulak 6y ago

Does anything else have that LG 5K panel? :D

userbinator 6y ago

...and if you're really adventurous, you can buy just the bare panel, get the backlight inverter and "scaler board" elsewhere, and build your own custom monitor. The "3663" seems to be a common model of scaler.

bertmuthalaly 6y ago
Have you done this / do you have pointers to someone who has?