Hi all,
After reading the many positive threads on both Anandtech, Neowin and Firstadopter, I purchased the 2001fp here in the UK and received it yesterday.
First impressions when opening the box were...it's all silver! Yes, the Ebay seller had the all silver version instead of the usual black one seen on the reviews.
I connected it to my 9800pro (Cat 4.9) with the DVI cable and started the PC. XP loaded and it looked quite nice, but I wasn't as blown away as I thought I would be. I don't think my colours are quite right, so if anyone can suggest some settings or ICC profiles then I'd be most grateful. I've set the brightness at 25, but may raise this as I believe the brightness can affect colour depth.
Setting a desktop wallpaper at 1600x1200 looked fantastic, so I realised my problem was not colour range or definition. What must have been bothering me was the fact that any images such as those found on websites, are shown with all their compression and low resolution qualities. So I've discovered that high resolution can have it's drawbacks, if the original source is not designed for 1600x1200.
I was overall impressed by the screen size, and it does make web browsing more pleasurable. Once I can get my gamma corrected I can see myself getting very used to the LCD.
I'm coming from a Formac Pro-nitron 17inch CRT, bought with my first Mac almost seven years ago. My only reason for upgrading was the small screen size, but a 19inch CRT would probably have been too bulky. I had the intention of getting a 17inch LCD, but thought the 20inch would be a greater experience.
The most important aspect of this purchase was gaming. I'm currently playing Battlefield 1942:Forgotten Hope on most evenings, and I'm still amazed at how beautiful Battlefield still looks. Starting a game up on the 2001fp however, I was immediately drawn to the issue mentioned above. The game engine may run at 1600x1200, but it seems other aspects such as option screens and in-game maps were not designed for this. Therefore in-game text, maps and selection buttons are all pixelated and blurry. Another problem was textures. Gone were the rich realistic textures, to be replaced with blurry, flat colours. Something I found out was that you have to enable anisotropic filtering, otherwise there's just a shimmering blur in front of you. I think this boils down to Battlefield 1942 not being intended for 1600x1200.
Loading up the newer Battlefield Vietnam did drastically improve the graphics quality, so I would say don't get this monitor to play older FPS games. As everything is so sharp at this resolution, I also found that 4xAA did make a difference, whereas I never noticed any improvement on my CRT. Weapon definition was amazing, almost life like. The problem is textures, but hopefully the next generation of games such as HL2 and BF2 will shine on this monitor.
Something which I didn't understand, was when I switched resolution during the games. On my CRT, when I select a higher resolution the game area becomes bigger, with smaller maps and buttons etc. However, on this monitor all it seems to do is make the image sharper. Therefore I was left feeling that I could probably have achieved the same effect by using a 17inch LCD situated closer to me. I'm hoping that some setting in my setup is wrong here, and the fact that 800x600 resolution is the worst of them all for blurring. I thought it was supposed to be sharp, so I hope I'm doing something wrong. It would be great if someone could send me a screen grab of Battlefield in play, so I could see if it was the same as mine. I also don't know how to use the pixel reduction technique, that leaves you with borders when playing at lower resolutions, hopefully that might help my older games. It would also be great if anyone could suggest any colour profiles that can be used with the 9800pro, in the colour tab on the settings menu of the ATI control panel.
Regarding ghosting, it doesn't seem to be much better than the 25ms LCD I use at work. Quickly turning in a helicopter playing Battlefield is going to take me awhile to get used to. Again, I hope this is more of a texture problem than a ghosting one. The reason I'm thinking this, is that the crosshair doesn't seem to ghost, but maybe that's because it's small and I notice it less.
The final thing to mention for now, is the backlight leakage. In a dark room it's very obvious. I tried pressing the case but it didn't seem to help much, but it's only present on dark games or images. When I woke up this morning to have a quick look at the monitor, I couldn't see the leakage, so this must just be a problem when using the monitor in a dark room.
Any feedback would be most appreciated, and I'll post another report later, seeing if I've got more used to it.
Robert.
After reading the many positive threads on both Anandtech, Neowin and Firstadopter, I purchased the 2001fp here in the UK and received it yesterday.
First impressions when opening the box were...it's all silver! Yes, the Ebay seller had the all silver version instead of the usual black one seen on the reviews.
I connected it to my 9800pro (Cat 4.9) with the DVI cable and started the PC. XP loaded and it looked quite nice, but I wasn't as blown away as I thought I would be. I don't think my colours are quite right, so if anyone can suggest some settings or ICC profiles then I'd be most grateful. I've set the brightness at 25, but may raise this as I believe the brightness can affect colour depth.
Setting a desktop wallpaper at 1600x1200 looked fantastic, so I realised my problem was not colour range or definition. What must have been bothering me was the fact that any images such as those found on websites, are shown with all their compression and low resolution qualities. So I've discovered that high resolution can have it's drawbacks, if the original source is not designed for 1600x1200.
I was overall impressed by the screen size, and it does make web browsing more pleasurable. Once I can get my gamma corrected I can see myself getting very used to the LCD.
I'm coming from a Formac Pro-nitron 17inch CRT, bought with my first Mac almost seven years ago. My only reason for upgrading was the small screen size, but a 19inch CRT would probably have been too bulky. I had the intention of getting a 17inch LCD, but thought the 20inch would be a greater experience.
The most important aspect of this purchase was gaming. I'm currently playing Battlefield 1942:Forgotten Hope on most evenings, and I'm still amazed at how beautiful Battlefield still looks. Starting a game up on the 2001fp however, I was immediately drawn to the issue mentioned above. The game engine may run at 1600x1200, but it seems other aspects such as option screens and in-game maps were not designed for this. Therefore in-game text, maps and selection buttons are all pixelated and blurry. Another problem was textures. Gone were the rich realistic textures, to be replaced with blurry, flat colours. Something I found out was that you have to enable anisotropic filtering, otherwise there's just a shimmering blur in front of you. I think this boils down to Battlefield 1942 not being intended for 1600x1200.
Loading up the newer Battlefield Vietnam did drastically improve the graphics quality, so I would say don't get this monitor to play older FPS games. As everything is so sharp at this resolution, I also found that 4xAA did make a difference, whereas I never noticed any improvement on my CRT. Weapon definition was amazing, almost life like. The problem is textures, but hopefully the next generation of games such as HL2 and BF2 will shine on this monitor.
Something which I didn't understand, was when I switched resolution during the games. On my CRT, when I select a higher resolution the game area becomes bigger, with smaller maps and buttons etc. However, on this monitor all it seems to do is make the image sharper. Therefore I was left feeling that I could probably have achieved the same effect by using a 17inch LCD situated closer to me. I'm hoping that some setting in my setup is wrong here, and the fact that 800x600 resolution is the worst of them all for blurring. I thought it was supposed to be sharp, so I hope I'm doing something wrong. It would be great if someone could send me a screen grab of Battlefield in play, so I could see if it was the same as mine. I also don't know how to use the pixel reduction technique, that leaves you with borders when playing at lower resolutions, hopefully that might help my older games. It would also be great if anyone could suggest any colour profiles that can be used with the 9800pro, in the colour tab on the settings menu of the ATI control panel.
Regarding ghosting, it doesn't seem to be much better than the 25ms LCD I use at work. Quickly turning in a helicopter playing Battlefield is going to take me awhile to get used to. Again, I hope this is more of a texture problem than a ghosting one. The reason I'm thinking this, is that the crosshair doesn't seem to ghost, but maybe that's because it's small and I notice it less.
The final thing to mention for now, is the backlight leakage. In a dark room it's very obvious. I tried pressing the case but it didn't seem to help much, but it's only present on dark games or images. When I woke up this morning to have a quick look at the monitor, I couldn't see the leakage, so this must just be a problem when using the monitor in a dark room.
Any feedback would be most appreciated, and I'll post another report later, seeing if I've got more used to it.
Robert.
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