I want to buy a good monitor, and I've read lots of reviews on AnandTech and Tom's Hardware. However, I'm still unable to tell whether a given monitor will be able to render dark scenes in atmospheric games well. (eg Deus Ex)
The main factors I can put my fingers on are contrast rate at low brightness (or really, the black level at 100cd brightness), and THG's LaCie color calibration curve. However, this information appears to be insufficient.
For example, the Shuttle XP17 has a pretty good looking curve, deltaE under 2 for all but the lowest 4%. It also has good contrast. An Anandtech review does a practical test using Max Payne 2, though, and it fares terribly: "Distinguishing objects from each other in the dark shadows proved nearly impossible. The fine hue differentiation didn't exist".
I think I remember another pair of reviews for another monitor, which I can't find right now, where the monitor got really good LaCie and contrast data on the THG review, and failed miserably in Max Payne on Anandtech. There was some perculiarity with the dithering scheme (which renders 16M color using 6 bits), that badly damaged the quality of dark images.
The main factors I can put my fingers on are contrast rate at low brightness (or really, the black level at 100cd brightness), and THG's LaCie color calibration curve. However, this information appears to be insufficient.
For example, the Shuttle XP17 has a pretty good looking curve, deltaE under 2 for all but the lowest 4%. It also has good contrast. An Anandtech review does a practical test using Max Payne 2, though, and it fares terribly: "Distinguishing objects from each other in the dark shadows proved nearly impossible. The fine hue differentiation didn't exist".
I think I remember another pair of reviews for another monitor, which I can't find right now, where the monitor got really good LaCie and contrast data on the THG review, and failed miserably in Max Payne on Anandtech. There was some perculiarity with the dithering scheme (which renders 16M color using 6 bits), that badly damaged the quality of dark images.
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