Heh. I remember a time before I owned a Mac when I would confidently buy computer and electronics equipment. Back in the day, you'd buy a PC mag to look at the best components and then buy them. I'd buy a Sony TV, hi-fi, MiniDisc Walkman. It used to be easy. What's made me realise things have changed?
I bought myself a 22" LG TFT monitor for my MacBook Pro on Friday. I'd become underwhelmed with playing WoW with its tiny 15" screen - I'd previously enjoyed a 20" first generation Intel iMac and was very impressed with my little brother's dual-head 27" Dell monitors.
These days, there's a big market for budget TFT screens. Screens are getting bigger and the enclosures are getting more economical - and prices are coming down as a result. It's also a well-known fact that displays are made by a few manufacturers and then built into monitors by the companies you see selling them - Apple, Dell, Samsung, LG, Iiyama and all the rest source the actual part you look at from a smaller set of manufacturers. It's well debated that the quality of displays found in premium monitors such as from Apple and Dell is not essentially better than those from Samsung - the value is often added in the case and the on-screen display menu.
So, long story short, I decided to put this idea to the test. I bought my LG monitor from Amazon for £180. It's marketed as offering a 2ms response time and a 10000:1 contrast ratio. My hopes had already begun to slip before I even took delivery. Looking at reviews of the monitor, I saw that many were casting severe doubts over the claim of the 10000:1 contrast ratio. Looking at similar products, it does appear that this is the result of a deluded and over-paid marketing department.
The next day the monitor was delivered. After a few hours of use, I realised that I was having a lot of problems with it. Text was extremely blocky, and colours at low shades seemed to flicker and pulse. After about three hours of reading and configuring, I had learned much and solved very little.
The blocky text was caused by a sharpness setting that was accentuating the edges of the text. Turning it down a few notches fixed this, but still, it took me a while to read a bit and figure out what was wrong.
The pulsing colours was far more frustrating. At low shades of colours, particularly dark websites that employ various shades of grey, or if you've got a Mac the background colour of windows in iMovie, would pulse. It would flash between two subtle shades of grey, and look like a well-past-it CRT screen. It's so bad that it's headache-inducing. After hours of calibration, I still haven't solved it and I still don't exactly know what is causing it - but I have a hunch. Most economy monitors don't actually display as many colours as your old CRTs were capable of. 8-bit displays are capable of 16 million colours, and these are the ones that please aficionados and professionals who require colour accuracy in their displays. However, cheap displays use 6-bit displays that are only capable of displaying 260,000 colours. To try to make up the shortcoming, manufacturers employ dithering - modulating single or adjacent pixels to fool your eye into thinking a subtler shade is being displayed. It's the same sort of trick that fools you into thinking that 24 frames per second of 35mm film in a cinema is actually moving.
This isn't an unusual thing. Many laptops from many manufacturers use 6-bit displays with dithering, and Apple have recently attracted scorn for using a similar strategy on their new 20" iMacs.
I haven't seen anywhere any reports of dithering occuring in all pixels in a given area, pulsing at a noticable and sickening rate. This makes me believe it's either a result of buying on a budget (being used to reasonably good quality and configuration in Apple products) or that I've unfortunately been sold a faulty monitor. Either way, the past three years have seriously depleted my time and patience for troubleshooting electronic equipment. Setting up a perfect rig with an Athlon and a GeForce 2 with DDR RAM has not just lost its appeal - it's tiring and just unnecessary. In fact, this is the first time I'm sending something back to Amazon. I simply can't spend any more time or effort on something I spent £180 on. I'm getting my money back and saving it for an iMac next year.
I may have found a new respect for Apple Cinema displays and iMacs. As extortionately expensive as Apple products and particularly their Cinema displays are, people buy them for the same reason you buy an iPod. The marriage of iTunes and the iPod is a match made in heaven - as you'll understand if you've ever had the misfortune to buy a Walkman or a Creative and used the bundled software. Every part is precisely measured and designed to work together, and it is the same story with the Cinema displays and the iMac. There's no need to read websites and forums, no need to calibrate for hours on end. You plug it in and it works. I haven't had to do this at all in the three years I've owned a Mac, and it's showing an awful lot now.
Luckily I'm not alone, and I think the world is changing for the better. I'll leave you with two of the biggest hypocrites in Apple history. The wonderful Penny Arcade.
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kasumi_astra's journal
relieved
