Hey now. I do! That's the entire reason I bought my 55" set ... wow, 10 years ago!
I wanted a cinema experience. I got it. :D

Yep.

BTW, ditto on Samsung being blah. It has the worst audio, by far, and the video is average at best. Most everything is better than Samsung, when it comes to HDTVs. Sure, they have a decent set at times, but 9 out of 10 are something I'd avoid. It's no better than the no-names or the rebadgers (RCA, etc). The only consistent brand is Sony, and only for the higher-end models (JVC, Sharp and Panasonic used to be the same way).

Your average Amazon reviewer wouldn't recognize a good monitor if < insert cliche here >

So do I, or in dim light. But that's not what most people normally do. for most people. It's amazing how much more you can see without strong specular interference from all over the place. What most people do crank up the factory-supplied settings for in-your-face toon effects. Really ugly.

I've just bought an LG OLED TV, so I'm definitely not in that particular market. Looks like I'll be needing to replace my eight-year-old Samsung monitor, though. I'm not sure how good it is even by 2009 standards; it was primarily chosen for price.

Eight years is about all one can expect from any monitor, and the technology has improved markedly. Price has improved as well -- a good IPS panel costs less than half what it did in 2009. When prices fell about 4 or 5 years ago I bought my first IPS unit. The difference between that and my trusty old TFT was immediately apparent. Then after adjustment with X-Rite and the old iI Display-2 I was playing old videos just to look at the difference. It was an eye opener. I'm now on my second model.

I tried looking at that TFT Central site, but:
1. Isn't TFT the old, outdated tech? Or has the name of the site just stuck?
2. I can't find any reviews for any of the ViewSonic monitors I found at PLE at roughly the same size as my current. Searching usually returns a result, but no link to anything.

The TFT Selector only returns the Dell U2414H as a within-budget IPS of the right size. It's not available at PLE.

Even then a lot of the marketing the product pages throw at me is overwhelming.

I think the name of TFT Central's site has been in use for so long that it's not worth the trouble changing it for its many users.

Yes, marketing hype is intentional and confusing. Let's face it, it's intention to inform is secondary to the intention of selling. The same is true for showroom displays, which are set up for showrooms, not for living rooms. One pet peeve of mine are the contrast ratios usually cited, which are off the charts. A monitor with a contrast ratio of tens of millions-to-one would be impossible for you to use without destroying your eyeballs.

TFT Central does not, and certainly can not, review every monitor on the shelves. From their past reviews you can get a fairly good idea of how a brand of monitors performs on average. Viewsonic products come out looking pretty good, before and after calibration. TFTCentral's calibration reviews are useful in that they give you some insight into how factors vary and how calibration works. Even if you did find a review of exactly the model you want, chances are pretty high that exactly the same settings couldn't be used for every factory sample. It isn't economically feasible to manufacture every monitor with precise calibration out of the box, even with extremely expensive shop-grade monitors.

Sure, but you were suggesting I look there for reviews. Which would be helpful given that based on your ViewSonic recommendation I went here and they all seem basically the same. And then there are other brands...

Where are those guys getting their prices from? The VP-2368 has MSRP of $279 on Viewsonic's website, Amazon US sells it for $250, your dealer sells it for (What?) $400 AUS ? ? ? We have friends in Melbourne, I think I'll ask 'em about that. First, I don't think you need 2 USB-3 connections or audio output.

I'd go for the VS2476. The listing for the less expensive VA-2419 is confusing -- I don't think that's a conventional IPS panel, Viewsonic says it's an ADS panel and the 2419 has a bunch of letters after it showing that it comes with several different panel types.

VA panels (aka "ADS", as opposed to vanilla "WP" IPS) have slightly higher contrast but slower lag time than IPS. IPS has higher color accuracy, faster lag time for gamers, and very slightly wider angle of view than ADS. I'd stick with IPS for accuracy. Viewsonic tends to be slightly higher price than similar LG, HP, or others, priced closer to Dell Eversharp but that dealer doesn't handle Dell. You get a better monitor stand than the lower priced Viewsonics. as far as pricing goes, you could live without the cost of a touch-screen job. PC Magazine gave the VP-2476 good reviews, for what their reviews are worth (they tend toward features more than anything else, but at least you know the 2476 isn't junk).

You can always wait and use X-Rite on your current monitor and see how it goes. I go for 21.5" panels myself, especially since my physical desk space won't accept anything bigger. From where I sit 18" away my 21.5" looks very big. But I don't think Viewsonic has anything in that size.

Do you mean the VX2476-SMHD? You referred to the VS2476 and the VP-2476, neither of which I can see on the PLE site. Or are they related models?

I'd already figured out the touchscreen thing; that one was fairly obvious. I've currently got a 22", IIRC, probably around 30" away. Don't think I'd go any smaller.

As for prices...welcome to Australia, where companies would rather spend time campaigning for huge taxes on online purchases instead of having competitive prices. The standard excuse used to be the high US dollar, but then it crashed in 2008, our dollar went from about 60 cents US to over a dollar US...and prices here did. Not. Move.

VX2476. My bad, sorry.

With the current madman politics going on, we expect prices to go haywire here as well. :smack:

I got my first IPS in 2005: an LG. Back then, LG monitors were still quality.

These days, ViewSonic is best for IPS. I'd probably never buy a "name brand" like Asus, HP, Samsung or LG now. Too many IPS shortcuts (6-bit), often to appease gamer nerds needing better refresh. I use my monitors for far more serious endeavors, and don't need high fps to color match video or Photoshop.

Also read this: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...ic-vp2365.html
Still relevant.

I'd go Eizo if I had to (from B&H). It's really costly though!

...yes, yes it is. :eek:

Don't think my budget is going to stretch that far!

-- merged --

Took another look at that horribly color-cast game, and I'm not sure desaturating it is really all that necessary. See attached images.

-- merged --

So the i1 arrived. Went through with the manual brightness settings, and could only get my monitor up to 113cd/m2. It's been on about 45, apparently. In a well-lit room.

Ran it again with the Automatic Display Control, and it managed to get 122cd/m2...at least in the middle. It drops all the way to 109 in one corner.

Greys seem a lot bluer, and the whole thing is obviously way brighter. Nothing else stands out so far.

The "before" images are under-saturated to begin with.

Whatd oes "wll_lit" mean?

120 is the considered the ideal target. 109 is a little low, but acceptable.

Backlight and screen uniformity suffer after a few years. Ideally there should be better shadow detail without shadow "fog" and brights shouldn't bloom or glow. Large areas of color should show no banding and should have smooth gradients. A ramp of gray patches should not show discoloration in the patches. The desktop background should be solid color, either neutral gray or, even better, a dark solid gray at RGB64 or RGB32. Colorful desktops and bright room lighting distort perception of individual colors.

At the end of the calibration routine, XRite shows a graph of the luma curve and how close the calibration matches the ideal curve. I usually save a screen capture every few calibrations or so. Eventually my old LG would no longer give a smooth curve and colors were all over the place, even crooked and jagged. That meant it was time for a new monitor. The final results XRite curve at one point on my old LG looked like this:

XRite results graph:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1486387493

INM case you're wondering what HCFR would be used for......
I used it with the I1 to to calibrate my TV sets. But I also used it to measure the sRGB responses curve after XRite calibration on that LG. Below is the grayscale curve for the LG after one of the calibeatioons, using HCFR's own generated Windows colors:

HCFR: LG luminance curve response (Red, Green, Blue + White luminance:). Each color should curve as close to the curved line as possible:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1486387732

HCFR sRGB grayscale measure after calibration. The pink line at the bottom measures chroma error, which in this case was a low of 0.2 at one point and a high of 0.6 at another, which is pretty clean and uniform: Ideally color errors should not exceed 3.0.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1486387857

The target gamma for these calibrations was 1.8, which was achieved according to the graphs above. The color temperature graph was at 6500 across the line, but I didn't keep that image.

I think you need a new keyboard. :laugh:

You suggested earlier that I desaturate them completely, due to how bad the colors were.

I'm not really sure how to explain. There's a light in the room, it makes stuff visible?

Bizarrely, all the calibration stuff talks about people having overlit screens, and now that I have an i1 it turns out that my screens have been around 45-50 nits, my monitor can't even reach 120 via the manual settings, and my TV requires contrast and backlight to be basically all the way up before it'll hit 120.

Of course, anything below 100 stim is an absolute disaster. My TV's gamma starts out at 2.1 for 0 stim (which was measured on a 5 stim screen because I mailed my bloody S&M disc to the other side of the country accidentally and don't have a 0 stim screen), pops up to 2.2 at 5 stim, and then careens for 1.1 at 50 stim and buggers off the bottom of the graph. Trying to target BT.1886, but the absolute minimum of all values from 95 down to 15 is higher than the target value, by as much as 50 nits.

On the other hand, my grayscale is a perfect 6500K now, and I wasn't aware before of just how damn green the midrange was.

I have a laptop that I occasionally use to watch things on my TV via HDMI, what would be the best way to calibrate that? The automatic X-Rite software, or just calibrating the TV?

You can use the i1 to calibrate the Tv, but with the XRite software. You need the i1, your laptop,. and either HCFR or Calman.

Older site that shows use of HCFR, which has a new version (and looks the same , but has new drivers for the i1 Pro and the older I1 Display 2): http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10457

New site that uses the i1 and overpriced ChromaPure software, which is unintuitive and convoluted in use IMO: http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35322

I do not know why people use a TV for computer viewing.

Earlier I suggested that the color in that bad video was so awful you might just as well grayscale it. Sorry you took it literally.

We can't discuss lighting issues. I don't even want to guess what you mean by "well-lit" with no detail about what lighting is present. All of my lighting at the work site is indirect 40-watt lamp about 20 feet away off to one side. The window blinds are closed and 30 feet to the same side.

My capture area is lit by a 20W lamp to see, so that no other glare hits the monitor where I'm capturing. You never want "well lit" anything around video monitors that are calibrated. Same for photo work. Glare can fool your eyes.

I used to output all video to a TV monitor (dual setup, TV + computer monitor) so I could verify calibration. But after the move, I decided against it. In all the years I had dual, I never had an instance of finding the LCD off. If anything, the TV sometimes changed values. .

Is that meant to say 'not with'? The 'but' seems strange as-is.

http://www.nbl.tv

It's...a light. Behind me, on the ceiling. 7 feet from the screen, maybe? Looking at the spares in the cupboard, the box claims "12w = 75w", whatever that means, and 4000K. 850 lumens, I think.

It's jut a standard room light, basically.

I've looked at MediaLight, but I'm not sure they'll fit on my TV and I'd rather hit them for both screens at once given shipping. Apparently there's a 'quad' coming out in a few weeks. I know the room lighting is wrong right now, my comment was more that I was functioning perfectly fine on a 45cd/m2 screen even under those lighting conditions, in terms of visibility for web browsing and such, and all the calibration info is always 'you'll need the screen way less bright than most people have it', which is even higher than my screen gets to.

Excuse my stupid typo, please. You can calibrate a tv You can't calibrate a TV with the i1, but not with the XRite software.

I still don't know why people use a TV set as a PC monitor. Or vice versa. Of course you're welcome to view whatever you want however you want. I don't care for the lower quality of computer-streamed or internet-streamed media. And the visual quality of too many HD channels is in the toilet these days, so I watch far fewer channels than I used to. My eyes haven't been re-trained by the media yet.

The lower quality of internet streams of badly-digitised VHS tapes from the 80s? Internet streaming is the least of your problems there.

It's the only way to watch the content in question. It'd be nice if it were available properly-restored and captured (I kind of hate this place whenever I see people saying 'oh, but it's VHS, that's how it looks, stop complaining'...I wish I could be that satisfied with it), and on discs and things, but it isn't.

Any thoughts on the MediaLight and my TV?

Should I be making some sort of contrast adjustment? The X-Rite software doesn't go there. The new ViewSonic looks very washed-out.

Should I have the color range at limited, or full?