Looking for a Great Gaming Display? It's already here.

[4Nou]

I've had the same PC monitor used for everything I need, for a long time. Before I even started playing games.

For years I've waited for something with a higher resolution and a larger screen that could best it, and every display I looked at never got within a mile of bettering it.

That display monitor was the Dell 2007WFP 16:10 1680x1050.
It had reference greyscale; It had reference colour gamut; It had reference backlight consistency; It had reference RTC, input lag and ghosting.
And it was S-IPS - so there were very little downsides to it.

I wanted a 1920x1080 16:9 display monitor like my Samsung D8000 LED HDTV, and the Samsung D8000 produces a picture that is far beyond the 2007WFP in every single way. But it has a problem - you can't play a game on it as it has over 40ms of input lag. And detailed graphics leave a white trail if the screen shifts at even an average pace.

So I did a lot of research.
I wanted a pre-calibrated monitor. It had to exceed the capabilities of the old Dell 2007WFP. It had to be 1920x1080 16:9 and that it looked stylish. And it had to be 24" to 27".

If you want a display monitor that has that, then you will do no better than Dell's U2414H.

It's reference level for gaming and near reference level for everything else. RTC and Input lag is extremely low (it's such a shame the 27" version of it is more than twice as high).
It's the best thing I've ever seen for £200 (it looks and feels like a £500-700 display)

And it's pre-calibrated with Minolta's Color Analyzer CA210 and the factory report shows a deltaE CIE94 of less than 3 across the whole board. Some of them like 8-Gray8 show a perfect 0.0 delta; 2-Gray2 shows 0.2; 14-Green2 shows 0.2 (the rest are 0.3 to 2.8). The highest at 2.8 is 11-Red3.

The pre-calibration is not defaulted when you turn it on. You have to set it to sRGB. Then in nVidia's Control Panel, you need to change the digital colour format from RGB to YCbCr444 to set RGB to 0-255.
The U2414H automatically detects this change and sets the pre-calibration sRGB to nVidia's YCbCr setting. Pretty neat I thought.

Once you do this, the greyscale is the best thing I've ever seen on a monitor (it's perfectly smooth and uncoloured). When you play a game, layered graphic effects (like fog and distance textures) look like a smooth cream. The greyscale is THAT good.

The colour gamut - I'm not exactly sure, but it's definitely either 96% or 106% of NTSC. It's higher than the P2414H - and it's likely the same as BenQ's BL2411PT, which has a high colour gamut (with a very similar capability in others as the U2414H - but I went for Dell).

If I could find one thing wrong with it, there is a very, very, very minor PWM flickering in the greyscale, which translates to the final image - I know it's there and it's incredibly difficult to spot. This is at the 75 brightness (calibrated setting of sRGB). Whether it stops before that or higher, I haven't tried - because this flickering in the greyscale is so small. But I can spot it compared to the 2007WFP. And it reminds me of a CRT display at 60hz when I look at the grey of Steam's GUI and the white text on the light grey input field.

I get no eyestrain looking a it. None. I'm very sensitive to that.

Did I mention the 'White' in the greyscale and text font? It is tack sharp and white-white.

Red, Green and Blue. Spears & Munsil tests indicate perfection in the transitions.
The Black transition show 1% grey and black as clear as day all the way to 254 White (where it is clearly not white).
I've not seen that before on any display except the D8000 LED (with the latest 2013 Firmware).


10/10
Very Highly recommended; near reference level display.

* It's a "Gaming Monitor" - if you spin quickly with the mouse (high speed flicks), it's pretty good. If you don't turn that fast (non-Quakelive) any medium speed rotation or slower, is smooth (it's CRT like). At that turn rate, there is no ghosting, trailing or colour deviation in those transitions. Not to the visible eye (including high speed flicks).

[Veristä mössöä]

If you wan't better display for gaming, it's Eizo Foris FG2421. VA-panel, 120hz.
http://gaming.eizo.com/products/foris_fg2421/

I also prefer image quality over response/hz, but that's why I have my IPS-monitors next to Eizo. If you go 120hz, you never want to go back.

[4Nou]

It's a great monitor... but it costs £449.

The U2414H is £227 and it's better overall.


If there were a Eizo Foris FG3021 display at £449...

[Veristä mössöä]

VA panels offer good viewing angles and generally better blacks and contrast than either TN or IPS panels.

Dell has better color accuracy and ergonomics. Nothing else is better in techwise.

For Desktop use, Dell is better.

[4Nou]

My D8000 is a S-PVA panel and VA panels do one thing very well.
Black level.
My D8000 has been tested at 0.031. The FG2421 looks to be the same.

But black level is subjective.
If you're in a bright room, a AH-IPS will smoke a VA panel into the middle of next week in terms of everything.

If you watch in the evening and in a dark room (blu-ray movies), the blacks of a VA panel are going to smoke the daylights out of any panel tech that isn't Plasma or VA.
There is no argument to that.

I don't play games in the dark - I just don't like it like that (others will). There's a small amount of ambient light.
Any black deviation points are almost completely removed doing that - it will look like a VA panel.

Bottom line is, is that the FG2421 I've seen now (well 2 hours ago) has nowhere near - not even close - the colour fidelity and accuracy of the U2414H, and with a warm light behind it (well, the light sprays from the right to the left against a smooth magnolia painted wall), there is virtually no difference in black level.

When I used the FG2421, whenever you get movement pans, there is definitely a further degradation of colours going on - it's slight, but it's there, whenever there is movement panning (but not forward).

That doesn't happen at all on the U2414H.
And it's half the price.

Desktop use only... well it's on your desktop - but that's where that cannon shot above the bow ends.

[Veristä mössöä]

Yeah well..

I have older Dell U2412M and professional grade NEC 2690WUXi2 as my second and third monitor. From gaming angle, Eizo beats both of them, 120hz is just so much smoother and VA-panel doesn't have to shame in colors / contrast when we are talking about gaming requirements.

I'm not saying that Dell is bad. Just suggesting that there are better alternatives for pure gaming monitors. :)

[rotNdude]

I'm a little disappointed with the response time (8ms) and the brightness (250cd/m²), but I guess it's a very reasonable price for that performance. I have a couple of Dell Ultrasharp monitors and I am very satisfied. This is one of them

Dell™ UltraSharp™ 2407WFP

http://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/products/snp/UltraSharp%202407WFP_EN.pdf

It has a 6ms response time and 450cd/m² brightness. I've been running that one since it came out. It cost more than double the price of the U2414H though.

[4Nou]

Dell's 2407WFP is far, far behind the U2414H reviewed here in every conceivable test.

Dell's 2007WFP (20.1") I had outperformed it by a significant margin; which is why I never got the 2407WFP - it was awful by comparison.
That was a long time ago.

450cd/m² light output at that level in an area 24" across its diagonal is what got David Banner turning into the Hulk after a gamma ray burst hit his eyeballs.

Response time. If you're below 16ms and that delay is consistently below that throughout the entire starting-0 and end-255 g2g points, no one could possibly be able to detect the difference between 3ms and 13ms peaks, even if you moved your mouse at 60mph in a continuous movement, back and forth, as rapidly as possible.

Clock and Frequency.
Everyone is sensitive to that - 60hz is the minimum and 72hz is scientifically proven that that is about as far as 99% of the global population can detect as being indifferent to anything above 72hz.

120hz - 240hz.
That's for a world when the Machines take over.

[Veristä mössöä]

That is a well-spread myth that our eyes can only perceive 60 frames a second -- the reality is that the eye is much more advanced than that.

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

"Imagine yourself in a very dark room. You have been there for hours and it's totally black. Now light flashes right in front of you. Let's say as bright as the sun. Would you see it, when it's only 1/25th of a second? You surely would. 1/100th of a second? Yes. 1/200th of a second? Yes. Tests with Air force pilots have shown, that they could identify the plane on a flashed picture that was flashed only for 1/220th of a second."

If you have never played with 120hz monitor, you can't really say. Difference is massive. No blurring what-so-ever and mouse movements feel silky smooth. Only disadvantage is that your rig has to be quite powerful, because FPS has to be 120+ in order to gain full benefith.

[4Nou]

Sometimes, we can't see the wood for the trees.

We're academically making scientific observations via biological conditions that can never be the same.

You see one colour, I see another of its type - even if it's the same thing in the physical reality we exist in.

The fact is, as long as the technology doesn't have some kind of scanning or strobing light to differentiate intensity of that light and the density of the colour, 60hz is completely smooth and devoid of inconsistent visual information entering your eye and your brain interpteting it, as it can possibly be for 6 Billion unique individuals.

72hz seems to be the point where, if you put an extra 300hp into a car engine that was designed for 300hp, it will probably win the race, but kill the driver.

That's the point about anything, to making a point about what you're trying to achieve.

120hz is going to be too much to do the same thing that 60hz does, when the technology that produces them is the problem.

CRT had a scanning-electron gun, and unless it was 85hz, it was not very pleasant to look at. 72hz just barely halted migraines if you looked at a CRT at 72hz for more than a few hours, and it never looked like -
a LCD at 60hz which seems to look like a 100hz CRT (which I've seen on an Iiyama CRT).

What the real problem is, is nothing to do with perception, or what the human eye can or cannot do.
It's what LCD technology cannot do and CRT could.

LCD is cheap. It's light. It's easy to manufacture and transport and package; and it is extremely reliable.

Manufacturers, and their economy, would persistently support a pile of crap if it could profit from an extra penny saved. Even if what you're seeing is an unacceptable difference from what came before it.
So they rely on big and small numbers and some science explanation or academia report about the problem as if it were straightening out the problem.

Meanwhile, your brain is getting confused about facts and seeing things it wants to see out of pure frustration at the lack of anything improving.

Samsung and LG put a whopping price tag on OLED not as an indication that it is better for everyone's eyes, but to basically make sure you buy the backlog of LCD displays currently sitting in warehouses in the millions that everybody knows sucks balls compared to a CRT at 85hz.

[rotNdude]

Ursprungligen skrivet av 4Nou:

Dell's 2407WFP is far, far behind the U2414H reviewed here in every conceivable test.

Dell's 2007WFP (20.1") I had outperformed it by a significant margin; which is why I never got the 2407WFP - it was awful by comparison.
That was a long time ago.

Post some reviews that actually substantiate that the 2407WFP is awful compared to the U2414H or that old 2007WFP.

http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/dell-ultrasharp-2407wfp/4505-3174_7-31899303.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2184/8
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/monitors/2006/06/23/Dell_Ultrasharp_2407WFP_monito/4

[4Nou]

This really isn't open to any further debate.

The Dell 2407WFP and the Dell 2408WFP are no where near what the U2414H is capable of by a very large margin. I know this because I've compared them (this morning).

The U2414H produces the clearest greyscale I've ever encountered to the point that you won't get better in a £700-900 display.
It also has the most balanced response time and rtc I've encountered with the possible exception of BenQ's BL2411PT - but I haven't personally compared it and no one I know has one at the moment.
I have tried to obtain one, and I simply can't. BenQ's distribution chain is well below standard compared to Dell. If I was being honest here, BenQ's BL2411PT was my first consideration, before the Dell U2414H.

Back to the 2407WFP - if you think that monitor is good, then you keep believing that. I can tell you I used one for a few months and hated the F* thing. It has a terrible greyscale that cannot be corrected and it affects everything else to a significant degree.
The 2408WFP improved it, but the response time and rtc was so high it was borderline ridiculous to use it for anything but textual work - where it then ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that part up as well. The text was awful to look at. It also suffered from colour banding that was worse than everything else that it did wrong; it really didn't help matters.

The U2414H.
It is literally reference level on every scale you can think of, in comparison to those displays. The 2407WFP is right down at the lowest scale of an "acceptable average".
I did not expect the U2414H Edge-lit design to be any good, but the only thing I can see is a tiny portion of a lightened area in the bottom left of the screen, and it is undetectable in normal viewing without using a camera exposure to pointlessly expose it.

And for £227 (and if you have GPU with HDMI [it has no DVI-D] (the cable is supplied)) you are seriously missing out on what you think a superbly balanced gaming monitor is in the form of the 2407WFP.

The Foris FG2421 is massively over-priced - however, I agree that it makes a great gaming monitor specifically for gamers of the type that are into competitive gaming where everything matters to each pixel you can see on the screen - but that's it.

And the 2412M... from whom a user in this thread has mentioned. That monitor doesn't get any where near the U2412H. It's not even remotely close. It's better than the U2410, but not by much; but the biggest problem I have with the U2410, was the text sharpness. Cross-eyed doesn't quite get my point across sat infront of that screen.

rotNdude - if you're satisfied with the 2407WFP, then a U2414H is going to make you unsatisfied having it in the same room with anything else that isn't £700 worth of screen space.
I guarantee it.

My 2007WFP crushes your 2407WFP with ease in every category of performance, colour accuracy (although it does have a noticeable D65 yellow-tint to the grayscale I could never correct), text handling and gaming.

And yet the U2414H punts the 2007WFP over the bar and into the crowd of cheering onlookers.

Which is why I bought one and replaced "7 years of unable to find anything better".

[rotNdude]

Ursprungligen skrivet av 4Nou:

This really isn't open to any further debate.

That's pretty apparent. I like Dell monitors and so do you. If anybody wants to get a new monitor, please feel free to recommend in the threads asking for help.