As the title suggests I’m in the market for a new 27" monitor.
This will be my home system so it’ll be used for watching video, light gaming, photo editing, graphic design, DAW stuff etc. It seems the going price is around NT$12k which is fair enough and I’ve limited it to three models easily available at Nova, but I’m not sure if I’m making a mistake ignoring brands available online like Hanns.G etc. Also I’m not sure if some technological great leap forward is likely to soon happen in monitor tech that is worth waiting for, other than the 120Hz refresh rate for 3D which I’m not really interested in.
At the moment it’s Asus ahead by a nose from Samsung with LG a distant third.
Anyone got any suggestions about these or other monitors or some real world experience based spanners to throw in the works?
Much obliged.
For photo editing, the first thing you need to look for is whether or not the monitor is a true 8-bit screen or not. Most monitors aren’t which means they won’t properly display the colors your camera can capture.
Photo editing isn’t serious at all, light PS stuff for personal snaps and a little for commercial printing like product shots for POP displays, not fine art photography. Graphic design part is a little more serious but like the PS stuff mentioned above having X zillion colours on screen is irrelevant if you can’t output them and 4 pass commercial CMYK printing for what I do has limited colour fidelity anyway, so again on screen colour fidelity not a biggie. Also this will just be for take home stuff, I’ll still be doing the majority of work on the office machine.
Based on what you guys are saying I hadn’t really considered the resolution to real estate ratio carefully enough, clearly. Cool as it would be, it seems getting 2560x1440 doubles or triples the price, which is a pity as 30k is beyond my budget for a monitor. 1920x1080 seems to be a sort of industry standard for middle of the road monitors, but stretched out to 27" I can see how that may look nasty. Maybe even to the point where it’s worse looking than my current very modest 22" 1680x1050 Viewsonic?
That 26" Asus with the 1920x1200 and 2ms refresh seems like it could be a good compromise, but at $8990 it seems almost too cheap to be true? Is there anything between 2560x1440 and 1920x1200, is that even a category of displays? Primary concern is a decent home entertainment experience, youtube, downloaded TV, occasional game, etc.
Have you considered using 2 smaller ones? I still find it easier to have a dual monitor setup which allows me to have the image on one and everything else on the other.
Not much these days, I have one of the few models ever sold with 2048x1152 and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, I just regret I couldn’t afford a second one at the time. It’s not very colour correct, but it doesn’t matter in terms of what I do.
The Asus isn’t too cheap, saw the same model in TK3C today for the same price. It’s an “old” model they’re getting rid of me thinks. It’s a good deal and a 16:10 monitor gives you a bit more resolution than the current fad of 16:9 stupidness (ok, so mine is 16:9 as well, but it has higher, not lower resolution).
www.cnet.com is a good site for reviews, they review electronics.
To get reviews from real people and consumers using them everyday, try looking up the monitors on Amazon. They usually have loads of reviews for each product, and people write in with their own experiences, tips, pros and cons, etc.
Sorry, but cnet is crap, half the people there don’t know what they’re talking about and trust me, I know some people that work for cnet.
Another option, albeit only 23.6-inches, is this model from Samsung with a cPVA panel shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=item … 09&ROWNO=8
It’s not fantastic from the reviews I’ve read, but it’s better than TN screens for colour correct work and it’s under NT$10k
I use the Dell U2711, which is the same IPS panel (LG I believe) Apple uses in their 27" iMac except it’s matte instead of glossy which is a huge plus for me, 2560x1440, colors are outstanding, and it’s got tons of connection options including displayport. Even better, it’s relatively cheap in Taiwan - cheaper than in the states for some reason. Here’s one for 23,000 in Taipei with a 3 year warranty:
And I agree that anything 1920x1080 (and even 1920x1200 in most cases) is probably NOT a great computer monitor, I’ve found that most of those panels were made for TV purposes and don’t look good up close.
I go here for monitor reviews. This site helped me choose the HP w2408h. It only has an TN panel, but it does have extended colour gamut, and was very well received by the Germans.
[quote=“The Germans”]The image quality of the 24-ich model is respectable and the w2408h can cover 100 percent of the sRGB-colour space. The only negative point here is the fact that the TN panel used provides limited viewing angles. If you can live with this and have no problem with the reflective glare panel, you can look forward to numerous setting options and good calibration behaviour.
The responsiveness of the LCD monitor is good to very good and most hardcore gamers should be happy with the monitor, with its excellent interpolation behaviour for different image formats. There are no serious negative aspects of the HP w2408 in this category and it is an example for others in the 24-inch class.[/quote]
I currently run this as my main monitor, and a Benq 22" as my secondary monitor. If I could find another two HP w2408s, I’d buy them for a triple monitor setup, as they must be dirt cheap by now. Calibrating them helps too (I used this).
Once again, thanks a lot for all the technical input and website suggestions everyone, it’s been a big help!
I’ve done a lot of reading online and I think I’m a lot less ignorant about displays than I was, and I’m certainly very glad I didn’t jump into getting the biggest, cheapest display the Nova could offer. Having looked at a few of the higher end options put forward the Dell U2711 in the mid N$20k price range with a 3 year warranty seems like a more worthwhile investment than I originally thought. I spend many, many hours staring at my home PC screen, in terms of hours of use it’s probably the most heavily used appliance in my home second to my guitar amp, and something like that seems to me to be worth investing a little cash in. In comparison to a NT$9k run of the mill low res 27" that seems pricey but considering how much I’d use it and the fact that it’s the same super high resolution and colour quality display panel as Apple’s 27" ‘cinema display’ but comes in 35% cheaper than Apple and way cheaper than Dell’s retail price in the US, that seems like a good deal for one hell of a monitor!
