Monitor disappointment

[Lanyon]

Hey there, first time posting so go easy on me!

I've been cracking my brain for a good year or so now trying to decide on a new monitor to buy. I've been stuck with a tiny, very old CRT for ages and wanted a nice new LCD widescreen monitor, but didn't know what to get as I wanted good performance and quality for a reasonable price.

Well, to make a long story short, I did some searches of reviews and whatnot, and based on the AnandTech review of the BenQ E2200HD monitor I decided to go out and get it. I was as excited as a kid at Chrsitmas opening the thing up... it was HUGE compared to what I'm used to, and really nice looking to boot. I hooked her up and installed the drivers from the CD, played around with the menu settings for a bit just to familiarize myself with them, set the whole shebang to the native resolution (1920x1080) and popped in a DVD of Frank Miller's "300" that I had rented last night (so it's a 'proper' DVD, not some burned copy) to test it out. Well, I'm extremely sad to report that I was sorely disappointed.

Now, I'm not a computer guru or anything but I can make my way around. The picture for the DVD was really quite grainy and looked WAY worse than it did on my old 12" CRT monitor. From reading the review, I thought this thing was supposed to be an HD monitor?? Isn't HD supposed to stand for High Definition? Basically I'm wondering what I've done wrong, or what essential piece of information I'm missing. Only thing i can think of that may explain this is my video card, which is a Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT. I know it's not the best card out there by any means, but could that really be the reason why the picture quality on my new monitor is so crappy? Any help or insight here would be greatly appreciated.

 

[TidusZ]

Well for starters, DVD is a long ways away from being HD. Try downloading it in 1080p and try again, or waste cash on a bluray player and rent it on bluray. Wait, I take back what I said about downloading, cus that would be immoral and wrong. If I were to do such a thing I should burn in an imaginary hell.

 

[adairusmc]

The monitor might be high definition, but the DVD you used is not.

 

[AzN]

Your old CRT use low resolution and your new LCD use high resolution. Considering a DVD is 480P it's not much off when you try to run it on a smaller CRT with a typical resolution of 1024x768. Your new LCD is 1920x1080 and it uses much higher resolution so your DVD will look like crap unless you make it smaller by running it on a window.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

dvds still shouldn't "look like crap"

i use a 1080p HDTV to watch dvds from a standalone dvd player all the time. it sure doesn't "look like crap"

 

[TidusZ]

I used to think so too, then I started watching only hdtv 720p or better. dvd looks like crap, mang.

 

[shempf]

quality of SD depends on the internal scaler. In this case the scaler is, mostly likely, garbage.

Most often SD will look best on an SD/'720P' TV versus a 1080 TV

 

[Machine350]

Lanyon, welcome to the forums. I'm really surprised no one mentioned this before, but "300" is SUPPOSED to look grainy. It was made to look that way on purpose. If anyone here has ever watched it on bluray on a large TV, it looks like CRAP. Try watching something like "Finding Nemo" or "Transformers." I think you'll find that your new monitor isn't as bad as what you think.

 

[AzN]

Originally posted by: LOUISSSSS
dvds still shouldn't "look like crap"

i use a 1080p HDTV to watch dvds from a standalone dvd player all the time. it sure doesn't "look like crap"

I had a 19" LCD and it looks better than my 21.5" 1080P LCD far as divx or DVD. You get more pixelated when you run higher resolutions.