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Thursday, June 2, 2011

I have a new monitor

12:16 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

My birthday isn't till next month, but ever mindful of the potential for cock-ups to occur when technology is involved, if I'm planning on getting anything computer-related I generally make a point of buying early in order to (a) pre-empt any potential returns/replacements and (b) ensure that everything's up and running the way I want it by my actual birthday. Last year, this prudent thinking came in hand when my new motherboard inexplicably died, so I decided to take the same approach this year.

I've wanted to get a new desktop monitor for a while. The Dell UltraSharp 2709W I bought back in February 2009 has served me reasonably well, but I've never been 100% happy with it. Its input lag is pretty noticeable, its gamma curve is way off in the lower values (which tends to bring out compression artefacts on BDs and DVDs that wouldn't be visible on a properly calibrated system), and I've already had to get it replaced once when, after less than a year of use, it developed a fault whereby a vertical magenta line, a single pixel wide but running the entire height of the display, would appear upon start-up and not disappear until the monitor had been running for 20-30 minutes. Over the last few months, the replacement has developed a similar problem, this time cyan rather than magenta and running the gamut from a single line to four. Clearly it's a fault with this particular model. I'm going to haggle with Dell to get it replaced (though the fact that it's now out of warranty will probably make this very difficult), but if so will end up selling the replacement as, quite frankly, I've had enough.

Enter the Hazro HZ27WB:

Hazro is a UK-based company that primarily caters towards creative and multimedia professionals, as well as medical and military organisations. The HZ27WB, a 27" 16:9 S-IPS display with a native resolution of 2560x1400, is the sort of stripped-down no-bullshit device I've been looking for. There's no scaler, in fact no support for anything apart from the native resolution (which, in case you're slack-jawed with horror, is not a problem - it just means using the video card rather than the display to scale lower resolutions to the correct size). There are no controls on the monitor besides a power button and a mechanism to raise and lower the backlight (which means using a custom Windows colour profile to achieve a properly calibrated image rather than changing any settings on the display itself). The only input is a single dual-link DVI connector.

What all this means in practice is very low input lag, because the monitor isn't doing anything to the image beyond simply displaying what the video card sends it. Over the years, I've observed that, broadly speaking, the more inputs a display has - DVI, VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, component and the like - the worse the input lag will be. TFT Central, probably the best monitor review site out there, measured an average input lag of just over 11 milliseconds - a fabulous result and one that you'd need to be superhuman to actually detect. As a result, everything just feels much more responsive. I can now play STARCRAFT II, a game that relies on lightning-fast responses, without that annoying feeling that my brain is responding faster than the game to my commands. I'm really surprised to see lag this low outside of a TN panel.

I'm not done yet. I've created a colour profile with a demo of ColorEyes Display Pro, and will probably run the calibration again once the monitor has had a few dozen hours of use to age it. And of course there's the fact that Windows colour profiles are a colossal headache. I've managed to get most of my software to play nice with the profile ColorEyes created, including Photoshop and even - to my surprise - TotalMedia Theatre 3, which I use when watching BDs on my PC. But I've come across a couple of inconsistencies - the Windows Photo Viewer, for example, shows desaturated hues compared to everything else. As such, I won't be writing any BD reviews based on what I see on this screen until I'm satisfied that what I'm seeing isn't distorted in any significant way. (Though I should point out that, whenever I review a BD, I also look at it on a Panasonic Plasma and JVC rear projector, both calibrated by an ISF-certified technician.)

But I'm very pleased with the monitor so far. I haven't found any stuck or dead pixels yet (though to be honest I'm not going out of my way to look for them - that's just a recipe for frustration, and Hazro don't have Dell's "premium pixel" guarantee, whereby they'll replace the display if even a single defective pixel is found), the backlight seems reasonably uniform for an S-IPS display (there's a bit of blooming in the bottom right hand corner, but on the plus side none of the "pinching" that affected my 2709W). After using my previous monitor for so long, which had an unusually large pixel pitch (a 27" computer monitor with a resolution of "only" 1920x1200 is pretty rare), it's taking me a while to get used to how small everything now looks, since despite the higher resolution, this display is actually the same physical size as my last.

And then of course there's the fact that native resolution 1080p content now looks tiny:

Suddenly the resolution of a Blu-ray Disc doesn't seem quite as massive as it once did. :D

3 Comments

 
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