My In-Progress Review of the Viewsonic VX924

[HeroOfPellinor]

I have the VX924, an 8ms VP171B and an Envision 19" CRT all in my home office for another week.

Below are the tests I ran between all three and how the LCDs compared. I'm hoping to get new test suggestions. Suggest a movie or game sequence to test and what you want me to look for specifically and, if I have it, I'll post the results. I run the monitors in dual screen and compare movies and games side by side when possible and, otherwise, in one screen at a time switching back and forth frequently. My system is an Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB PC3200 ram and a 6600GT.

Matrix Revolutions (the second quarter of the movie)
-- VP171B: No perceptible difference between the two.
-- VX924: No perceptible difference between the two.

Solitaire
-- VP171B: The same very apparent green ghosting when moving the cards around slowly that every other LCD I've tried has.
-- VX924: Initially it actually looked as if there was zero ghosting, but, if you get less than a foot from the screen you can see alternating black and light green lines about 2-3 pixels long trailing the card.

Half-Life 2
-- VP171B: I used the trees in the distance during the first combat stop along the canals to test. The trees are very defined and detailed and are in stark contrast to the landscape behind them so I thought they'd make an excellent stressful test. I aligned the trees on the left side of the monitor then, at the count of one-one-thousand, moved them to the far right side. Sure enough the details of the trees blur slightly, but not so much that they lose their definition, but it is definitely noticeable after doing the same on a CRT where there is obviously none. The effect is like a blurring or smudging.
-- VX924: Same slight blurring reduced perhaps 20% over the VP171B. I went back and forth over this particular grove of trees more than 200 times on each monitor to try and gauge the difference.
-- Notes: When using a plain CRT monitor at 75hz Refresh Rate, I still got what could be described as ghosting during HL2 and I actually preferred the blurring on the LCDs to the ghosting of the CRT. Obviously the CRT itself wasn't ghosting, but the way the video card was redrawing the screen gave this appearance. This is exactly why I threw the CRT in th mix as a control subject. So HL2 proved to be a poor test subject. Nevertheless, it's a popular game that I'm sure everybody wants to know about anyway.



I loaded UT2004 a few minutes ago and will be testing it tomorrow morning. But I wanted to get these initial impresions out there because if I wait until I have a thorough impression, it might take a while at the rate I'm going being so busy. Like I said at the top. Post suggestions and ask questions and I'll answer them.

 

[Spacecomber]

If you have 3DMark2001SE handy, you might take a look at the Dragothic test with the flying dragon. I forget if it is the low detail or the high detail test which seemed to bring out motion blur the best, but watching the beating wings of the dragon really shows up problems for a LCD with a response time that can't keep up. I think it is because of all the dark shades of color involved.

Since this test is readily available and it is scripted, it seems to provide something of a standard for people to work with. I guess that you could even use a camera to capture some images of the screen if you wanted a result that was a bit more objective. (Just use a fast enough shutter speed so as to not exaggerate the blur.)

Space

 

[Goronmon]

The VX924 is at the top of my list for a new monitor and I was wondering if anyone had any new impressions about it?

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: Spacecomber
If you have 3DMark2001SE handy, you might take a look at the Dragothic test with the flying dragon. I forget if it is the low detail or the high detail test which seemed to bring out motion blur the best, but watching the beating wings of the dragon really shows up problems for a LCD with a response time that can't keep up. I think it is because of all the dark shades of color involved.

Since this test is readily available and it is scripted, it seems to provide something of a standard for people to work with. I guess that you could even use a camera to capture some images of the screen if you wanted a result that was a bit more objective. (Just use a fast enough shutter speed so as to not exaggerate the blur.)

Space

Ran the test 5 times on each monitor. The VX924 was noticeably better than the VP171B in Dragothic. You could still detect some blurring on things like the church steeple stained glass window, but, again, as in HL2, the blurring with the VX924 isn't enough for the object to lose definition, so during a game, you wouldn't see it.

Blurring is a poor word since it keeps it's definition, but it isn't quite as crisp as the CRT.....hell, this could be partly attributed to the dot pitch.

I'll compare UT2004 on all three this afternoon and report.

 

[Goronmon]

Anyone else have any experience with this monitor?

 

[Goronmon]

Or opinions, suggestiongs, alternatives, etc?

 

[rasp47]

I got this mon a week ago.
What refresh rate do you use? I cant go up to 70 hz (even tho the manual says it can go up to 75!) but with ati x800xl pci it's not possible, not sure why.
But even with 70 Hz I'm getting artifacts sometimes in 2d while browsing (like small lines on the screen, 2-3 mm and 5-6 sm long).
I called View sonic and they told me the 60 hz is the standard so if I use any higher there could be artifacts. Lol the second time I called a person with a strong french accent told me that I ca use 75 perfectly fine, even if the "hide unsupported rates" option is checked (unchecked and use it lol).

The other thing that I dont like is fog in games, grey fog is horrible - I can see all the pixels, besides that it's a nice monitor.

 

[rasp47]

anyone?

 

[crazyjeeper]

Originally posted by: rasp47
I got this mon a week ago.
What refresh rate do you use? I cant go up to 70 hz (even tho the manual says it can go up to 75!) but with ati x800xl pci it's not possible, not sure why.
But even with 70 Hz I'm getting artifacts sometimes in 2d while browsing (like small lines on the screen, 2-3 mm and 5-6 sm long).
I called View sonic and they told me the 60 hz is the standard so if I use any higher there could be artifacts. Lol the second time I called a person with a strong french accent told me that I ca use 75 perfectly fine, even if the "hide unsupported rates" option is checked (unchecked and use it lol).

The other thing that I dont like is fog in games, grey fog is horrible - I can see all the pixels, besides that it's a nice monitor.

If you use the viewsonic CD, then it takes your 1280x1024@75 option away and leaves 1280x1024@70 as the max. Windoze will let you keep the 75hz rate, if you don't use the ViewSonic drivers. I didn't see anything with the VS drivers that actually made any difference in using them compared to the windoze pnp driver (except for taking away 5hz lol ).

The line artifacts you're talking about might actually be something with your video card and/or drivers. That happens on my workputer both on the CRT when docked and on its LCD when portable. I originally thought it was the LCD, but then I started noticing it on the CRT too... Dunno...
I haven't noticed anything like that on my VX924 though.

It looks so much better than my 2 previous 19" CRTs, it's scary. The color and contrast are much better. I can actually see people hiding in shadows without burning my retinas.

Right now I'm running mine at 1280x1024@75 for everything but games, which I run as close to that as the playability will allow (I'm limited slightly by my 9700Pro on newer games).

 

[Xionide]

Any updates?