Monitors Continued

For me, this road was a long and winding one.  Two years ago I swapped my 5 year old HP L2335 for a HP LP2465.  I preferred the S-PVA blacks to the S-IPS, and it didn’t have that slight pink tone the L2335 was famous for.  A year later I purchased a second LP2465 from Newegg, as they were having a deal on these products which were refurbished.  $199 plus free shipping was too good to pass up.  This summer, I was able to make a trade to a friend for a third LP2465, which was a refurb from Newegg as well.  These panels have a lot of hours on them, but the refurbishment typically involved replacing the lighting and updating the firmware.  Of the three LP2465 monitors I have, only one has a small “bruise” slightly off of the center of the monitor.  It is somewhat annoying, but as I have it as a peripheral monitor, it is not an issue for me.  Otherwise, the three panels are very good in terms of overall quality.

I have no issues with the response time, and in twitch games I more than hold my own.  I personally get more satisfaction with the better color, viewing angles, contrast, and deep blacks that S-PVA panels provide.  I found these refurb products to give the best overall value for the quality I was looking for.  I prefer the 1920 x 1200 resolution over 1080P.  But if a person does not care about 1080P, there are a couple of very interesting budget non-TN LCDs out there.

as-ml239h.jpg

The Asus ML239H is a 23" E-IPS based panel with LED lighting.  The cheap price plus relatively thin bezel makes this a compelling choice for Eyefinity.

A-MVA and E-IPS panels are the budget version of PVA/MVA and IPS technologies respectively.  It just so happens that Asus provides two models based on each of these types.  I first noticed these around the beginning of the year, and have been intrigued by them and how they stack up against TN panels in their price range.  The first is the Asus ML249H which features the A-MVA panel.  This panel fluctuates in price anywhere from $219 to $234, depending on specials.  The advantages of this panel include better contrast, color, and viewing angle as compared to TN panels.  It is still going to be a slower response time than TN, but not as bad as some older MVA/PVA/IPS panels.  This panel also includes LED lighting, so the contrast ratio is amazingly high.  This is based on the new A-MVA panel designs of the past few years.

The second monitor from Asus is the ML239H.  This number seems to sit around the $199 to $209 level, and is a full 1920 x 1080 panel.  It appears to be an E-IPS panel, which is a more cost optimized IPS design.  It still shares the same wide viewing angle and color representation as the most expensive versions, but as with most IPS panels there is quite a bit of backlight bleedthrough.  This makes darks not nearly as dark as on TN, PVA, or MVA panels.

Opinions will again vary, but I feel that all of these panels work well for gaming, productivity, and video applications.  The refurb HPs offer the larger 1920 x 1200 resolution, while the other two Asus parts feature the now more common 1080P.  Anyway, I would pick all of these over a TN panel for myself.  These are nice alternatives to the traditional S-PVA and S-IPS panels in the 23” to 24” range, which have prices typically above $499.  Let us not mention the 30” panels which feature 2560 x 1600 resolutions, and go for well over $1100 in most instances.

Setting it all Up

Physically setting up the monitors and video cards is the simple part.  Place the three monitors on the desk, either in a straight line, or with the surrounding monitors rotated towards the sitting position at a 30 degree angle from the center LCD.  The PC case for the video cards should be relatively uncluttered with enough airflow to keep the cards cooled adequately.

Do not make the same mistake that I made though.  Before putting in the new card, be sure to uninstall the AMD Catalyst drivers first.  While I was using the latest Catalyst drivers at the time, I had thought to put in the new card, load up DOS from a USB memory stick, and then re-flash the BIOS to match the original card (unlocking the extra shaders).  Unfortunately, I missed hitting the boot device setting, and went back into Windows 7.  It found the second card, loaded drivers for it, etc.  But because it had not been flashed yet, I was leery of leaving it be with the current drivers.  So I attempted to uninstall.  Two hours later I finally just had to hard reboot the system because the Catalyst drivers were not cooperating with the system in its new configuration.  After cleaning everything out, and then flashing the card, I was up and running.  It should not have been this hard, so do the right thing and uninstall any current AMD driver before adding a second card.

as-ml249h.jpg

The Asus ML249H is a 24" A-MVA panel that also features LED backlighting and again a relatively thin bezel.

Cabling is of great import as well.  The cards mentioned above have two DVI (one dual link, the other single link), two mini-DisplayPort connections, and a mini-HDMI port to round things out.  As mentioned above, I had purchased the Sapphire active Mini-DP to DVI adapter.  These seem to be in the general price range of other models, and the reviews so far have shown them to be pretty good as compared to some horror stories listed from other manufacturers.  This could just be bad luck, as it looks like these adapters are made by one or two suppliers, and then rebranded at will.  Because of the HP LP2465 monitors I had chosen, I had to go with DVI cables to each.  Native DisplayPort monitors are still few and far between, and they typically have a higher price than other comparable panels.

If I had used 30” monitors with 2560×1600 resolutions, then I would have been forced to use the single dual-link DVI port, as well as the two DisplayPort plus the $100 active DP to dual-link DVI adapters.  It is either this or the 30” monitors support DisplayPort natively, then the user only needs to purchase two mini-DP to DP cables.  This does add to the expense of the endeavor, but we must figure that most people who can afford 3 x $1100 panels can spare a few extra hundred for the correct adapters and cables.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this endeavor is to calibrate the monitors so they generally match each other.  Resetting the monitors to factory defaults does not in fact make them identical in my particular case.  Due to potentially different years of manufacture, different firmware versions, and then the very fact that they are a refurb product with some potential issues, calibration turned out to be a chore.  Add into this issue the final refurb monitor I bought came on special with a PANTONE Huey Pro.  This is supposed to make calibration very easy, but unfortunately the current software does not fully support Eyefinity.  While the Huey Pro does support multiple monitors, it is only supported in the native Windows setting, and not Eyefinity.  So when it attempts to calibrate in Eyefinity, the calibration patterns are only displayed on the center screen.  So when calibrating the other monitors, this is obviously a problem.  I was able to eyeball them to be pretty close, and then I use the Huey Pro to get the center monitor up to spec.  This is not much of an issue, but if one were to work on photography while using Eyefinity, the results could be slightly off.

The other issue I ran into is with the Eyefinity software.  After numbering/labeling the monitors and their physical placement, the Catalyst drivers could not correctly figure out which monitor was which when calibrating through the driver profiles.  When I would choose the far left monitor, the color calibration would activate on the far right.  When choosing the far right, then the center would be calibrated.  This is just sorta sloppy by AMD.  It did not affect any of the other applications I worked with, just the initial color and brightness calibration.

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