is £150 really a bargain
I paid £109 for my 23 inch full HD monitor in 2009 and have never had any problems with it
Computer displays have never been better value for money, from the all-singing, all-dancing models with every bell and whistle you can think of, to the less extravagant monitors. Indeed, paying less for a display no longer means major compromises on quality or features, as it once did. These days, panels for under £150 are not …
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Its not a great bargain, not when you can shop around and get a BenQ GW2760HS (27 inch) for £150 with a 4ms response time. But £150 seems to be the current line-in-the-sand for buying a monitor these days, and its nice to know which are the top 10 for under that line.
for a second monitor or non gaming screen then I use a TV. Got a 32" one from Asda on black Friday (cant remember how much, was about £90). The panel is a lot better than I though it would be and is ideal for a streaming screen (and doubles as a second TV if I rotate the screen around - PC lives in the dining room).
Outside of sales there are lots of sub £140 24" Tvs about and not all of them no-name panels.
Speaking of which, the review is sadly silent in which of these (if any) will pivot.
I too used to go for vertical space but eventually spent some tax-deductible capital expense on an Asus PG278Q ROG Swift 27" which at 1440p and 27" doesn't need to pivot.
It does pivot, of course, and at that price you'd bloody hope so too. It just doesn't need to.
The point the article makes about the BenQ is misleading.
BenQ give the option to purchase with a "height adjustment stand (HAS)" (Model: GL2450HT).
With HAS, this monitor is currently retailing for 155 GBP's on Amazon, without 108 GPB.
Given this is a 24-inch monitor capable of taking a standard VESA mount then a quality stand such as the Ergotron Neo-Flex LCD Stand (part no. 33-310-060) (that can also pivot/pan) would suffice and that can be had for 41 GBP (obviously P&P extra on the above prices).
Beyond this all the monitors are identical and hence all could be mounted on the above Neo-Flex and deliver exactly the same landscape/portrait functionality as the BenQ, with the display being changed manually by the user via Windows... Personally, having had this capability for many years now, I'm disappointed that we've yet to see a mainstream monitor (in the 20~24 inch bracket) with the relevant sensor built in and a driver that can relay the orientation to Windows...
"With a matte screen"
Yeah, whatever happened to the computer use regulations which suggested non-glare screens or at least an anti-glare filter over the CRT screens? All this shiny glass is a bloody nightmare. But no one seems to know or care anymore, at least in many of the places I visit.
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DELL U2412M:
Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Yes, a very nice display - but I needed to add the
"StarTech.com Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter Cable" for a fiver to interface with shiny Apple laptops/Mac Minis
I actually prefer this U2412M which I still use to a newer Dell P2414H IPS Monitor 23,8" as I had to return fully two of those to AMZN due to marks on the screen, it was only the third one that a robot in the Dell factory hadn't scribbled-on. {I guessed that they were selling a series of 'failed' P2414H as new ones}
The U2412M has a sound-bar that's analogue & costs around a fiver - whilst the P24 needed a weird digital sound bar that *only interfaced with Windows 7 sound mixer* FFS, took a while to persuade it to work in Win8 - god knows how it could cope with my Macs... I won't even think to try!
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Someone needs to tell TV Licensing then, 'cos that's not what it says on their website.
IANAL but I believe the current interpretation of the legislation is such that although section 363 of the communications act (2003) states:
363 Licence required for use of TV receiver
(1) A television receiver must not be installed or used unless the installation and use of the receiver is authorised by a licence under this Part.
Elsewhere [in case law maybe??], 'a television receiver' is only defined as such if it is installed with the intention of receiving the live broadcast. If you've no intention of doing that then the requirement to have a licence does not exist.
Of course, if some MIBs from Crapita knock on your door, don't blame me ;-)
I only know because years ago, when I decided to ditch watching TV, I had to deal with the TV licensing guys. Their argument was because I bought a "TV" that had a receiver (i.e. the "capability to receive broadcast TV"), I intended to use it to receive broadcast TV and have to pay the TV licence.
I guess it makes sense, otherwise anybody could just buy a TV, not pay the licence by claiming "Look! I don't intend to watch broadcast TV. I did not hook it up to an antenna" and then just plug it in when the TV licensing guys go away.
In the end, I took a Dremel to my TV's tuner to physically turn it into a dumb monitor (it has spent its entire time hooked up to my PC, or my XBMC setup), which satisfied them, and since then they have not bothered me.
I mean, yes, I could go to court and argue about what I want to do, why I don't need to pay the licence, and the precise meaning of "Intent" in this context, but it was simpler, faster, less stressful and cheaper to just disable the tuner in my TV.
Although I seem to remember them thinking of widening the licensing scope to include any internet connected computer which is capable of watching live streaming of Iplayer. Not sure if that will get through though, we will see.
I guess it depends on who you get from the TV licensing people, and how anal they are. At least this way they can't come back later and say I lied to them. The TV is no longer a TV according to their own definition.
IANAL and all that, just saying what I had to do to get them off my back :-)
TV licence has to be paid if the device is "Capable of receiving broadcast TV", so if it has a TV receiver, you have to pay the TV licence, even if you never hook it up, or use it.
...
I only know because years ago, when I decided to ditch watching TV, I had to deal with the TV licensing guys. Their argument was ...
Their argument was bullshit. When purchasing a device capable of receiving broadcast TV, the retailer is required to collect your details and pass them on to TV licensing, but you are only required to have a TV license if you connect that device to an aerial.
How would they know that you connected it to an aerial then? I mean, they get your details from the retailer, and you just show/tell them you didn't connect it up. What stops you just connecting it up once they leave? It isn't like they can monitor the back of the TV 24/7. If that is true, it seems like a really massive loophole in the whole thing.
"it depends on who you get from the TV licensing people"
1: "TV licensing" is a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary of the BBC
2: They outsource enforcement to Crapita
3: The only "training" given to the "TV licensing people" is along these lines:
"Everyone has a TV. Therefore anyone who says they don't is lieing"
It gets even more fun when you have a license and they pound on your door claiming you don't.
FWIW if one ever does come a-knocking, they are _extremely_ camera shy.
As in "run away quickly" camera shy.
The television receiver isn't "installed" if you only use it as a computer monitor. That is a long established principle since the days when people were hooking up their Acorn Electrons to TVs. Of course, nowadays, you can use your computer to watch the live streams on iPlayer, and you need a TV licence for that. You don't however need a TV licence to watch the on-demand streams.
> Actually, the TV licence has to be paid if the device is "Capable of receiving broadcast TV", so if it has a TV receiver, you have to pay the TV licence, even if you never hook it up, or use it.
No, no, no!
See here: "You need to be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record TV as it's being broadcast."
You only need a TV licence to receive the live TV signal (or a live stream). The law says nothing about devices capable of receiving but not doing so.
This also means you don't need a licence to use things like iPlayer so long as you don't watch live streams. (If you use catch up services a lot you should probably consider buying a licence anyway.)
I have a TV that's hooked up to a media PC but not an aerial. I have a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a phone which are technically capable of playing live streams. I have a parts bin that contains several tuner cards. Crapita have repeatedly confirmed that I do not need a licence.
Note that they also like to imply that it's a legal requirement to inform them that you don't need a TV licence. It isn't but they will bombard you with crap until you do.
I've told them the information about whether or not I need a licence is not available for free, that there is a cost (and a requirement to book an appointment) for their goons getting entry to my house and DARED them multiple times to take me to court and get reamed out for my costs when they lose.
I dont feel the need to support Capitas business model for free - they can pay for the privilege.
On the plus side, you don't get bombarded by all the banal advertising that one gets on US TV and UK cable TV. (Just tedious trailers about how wonderful the BBC is.)
There's always a debate on it, it is not a tax because if you're not receiving live TV broadcasts then you don't need to pay it. The contention comes when someone says they never watch any BBC stuff so why should they pay for a licence to support the BBC just to watch other stuff.
"You Brits have to get a license to watch TV? Are you serious???"
At least you have to have a TV and be watching live broadcasts.
Pity the poor belgians: TV licenses there are mandatory for every address, TV or not AND there's no belgian state broadcaster receiving the fees.
Many other countries have rules that merely having something capable of receiving means a license is required.
I, also, much prefer 16:10 -- my iiyama E2403WS is still going strong so I haven't yet felt enough justification to buy a new monitor but I would like a decent ~30" 16:10 LED backlit one.
I think a 16:9 just a little lacking and for watching movies you're left without space for controls etc..
The author references E2418HS-B1 and E2481HS-B1 in the same section.
It looks like the latter (E2481HS-B1) as I've got four of these on my BOFH desk at home - selected for the multi-monitor-setup-friendly thin bezel. They're bright with pretty good viewing angle. I don't use the provided stands but I understand they have height adjust, rotate on the base, and will pivot portrait/landscape.
With multiple monitors there's no good place for the buttons as they either increase bezel width or can be obscured. Having them on the back is perhaps the least worst option.
I don't know where the author got the £130 price from. I bought from Flea-Buyer two months ago for £160 each with free delivery when (review device source) Overclockers were charging more plus delivery. Ebuyer's price has gone up since then but even now Overclockers are charging £150 each plus delivery.
I've just bought some 22" (technically 21.5") Dell Ultrasharps for £120 ea. They have great picture quality, the stands are some of the best I've used (You can rotate the monitors to portrait - great for reading on) and they have a good selection of ports. Unless you're using them from a distance, I'm not sure why you'd want to pay more for a bigger, but worse monitor?
Well you really need a 24" (although a 23" 16:10 could just do it) to display an A3 (2 x A4) page at 1:1 and have a little space left for toolbars etc.
Yes with the 21.5" Dell Ultrasharp's you are being a little spoilt, but 1920 x 1080/1200 on a 24" display has a very similar pixel density to 1680 x 1050 on a 20" panel - which given most 20" panels these days seem to be 1600 x 900...
I recently bought an Asus VN247H - I don't know what's the difference between this and the reviewed VE247H.
I almost immediately returned it. The stand was so flimsy that the screen would wobble as I typed (maybe I should cut out the strength pills). But the main problem was that it caused the operating system to freeze. I first saw this with Ubuntu 14.10, so I backed off to 14.04, but the problem remained. Within 15 min of logging in, the system froze and required a hard reboot. Following a change of monitor, no problem.
I was surprised about this, because I imagined that the monitor is a purely passive peripheral. Maybe the problem was with driver software, but this too is surprising, as I certainly didn't install any drivers and I should have thought all 1920x1080 HDMI monitors would be identical from the perspective of the O/S.
"I imagined that the monitor is a purely passive peripheral. Maybe the problem was with driver software, but this too is surprising, as I certainly didn't install any drivers"
Have you ever looked at the Xorg logs? They contain the make and model of your screen along with resolution, dpi, pixel ratio, refresh rates etc. Now I don't claim to know what's going on at the low level inside the drivers of Linux or any other OS but obviously there is a data exchange between the screen and GFX driver then some driver config magic to display your desktop at the ideal resolution. It may be that the logic in the screen was re-setting/crashing and sending incorrect or corrupt data back to the computer and the OS/driver was failing to cope with it.
I am, of course, assuming you meant that you were running Ubuntu in a GUI mode and not booting direct to console, which I'd imaging could never cause an OS crash no matter what the screen logic did.
If you're using HDMI it is probably going to be a handshake issue of some sort. If it's an ATI/Nvidia video card do/did you have the propriety drivers installed?
As for the cause, take your pick. It could be the video/audio drivers, the monitor, the cable, the video card, incompatibility between the hdmi transceivers, hdmi timing issues or any combination of them. I have a PC which won't display anything over HDMI when it goes through my AV Receiver. The screen comes out of no signal mode, recognises there is a signal and the PC recognises there is a screen attached in the display properties, but nothing ever displays on the screen. Plugged directly into the display it works fine. Everything else I have works without problems via the AV Receiver.
HDMI is great when it works, but can be a nightmare to diagnose when it decides not to.
It once took a couple of hours to track down an XBMC issue I had after an upgrade when playback became all jerky and kept freezing with the newer XBMC version. They had changed the audio engine which required a setting in the Windows audio driver changing. Installing the previous XMBC version everything worked fine, upgrading playback went nuts and kept freezing all because of 1 setting in the HDMI audio drivers.
Interesting since my 9 year old's F20 installation is doing precisely the same thing with a recycled Dell 19" 4:3 monitor - and as far as I can tell the monitor is pushing something back to the video card about "suspend mode status" with a garbage call - I've not got the full kit of debug logs since he's on an nvidia card at the moment. But the monitor is absolutely the issue (swapped it out and the issue vanished) -- if I find it, I'll log it with xorg.
So speaking as someone who has not got loads of cash to throw around but I would really like to upgrade his monitor from a couple of old dell office 19" jobs, anyone got any recommendations for a halfway decent reasonably cheap 27" monitor, mostly use the PC for some CAD, Photoshop and general use, don't play that many fast twitch FPS so much now, but still strategy games, thinking IPS is the way to go because of this.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Yes, but with larger sizes come higher resolutions. We already can't see interfaces that were designed a few years ago. It's literally impossible to see plugins (VSTs) that were designed 10 years ago, and still work perfectly fine, and will be needed in 20 years time because they are like a part of you now, like an old guitar. I'm thinking Sytrus by Image-Line here.
And still, no one can get this right. The only way around it is to build new vector type interfaces like LinPlug Alpha and the up and coming DCAM Synth-Squad by FXpansion. Then people moan that they look too flat.
Really, if you work in this field doing Gui design you will know exactly what I am talking about. Just because you use a very small subset of what an already small subset of users use, don't assume that you can call people idiots or shout why oh why oh why. It's a well known problem in the field. We aren't idiots. We are trying to please all the people all the time and that is just not possible.
When developers use older tech to be more compatible, they get criticized by the early adopters of the newer tech. When they use the newer cutting edge tech, they get criticized by the older/poorer/skinflints that are running slightly antiquated systems. Yes, they should test on all systems, but it isn't as simple as that. Changing to a lower resolution on a high res monitor will introduce artifacts. Really you need to plug in a whole different monitor for that native resolution. Not so simple time wise or space wise or financially wise.
I'm not singling you out here, just trying to explain that maybe there are broader issues at hand and that a lot of very clever people have been working on this, but it's just not so simple. What do you use your monitor for btw?
I'm not sure what the hell interface design has to do with monitor resolutions. I tend to agree that there are problem with older software on more modern hardware, the systems I use day-to-day don't work well on my widescreen displays for example. However, I would be seriously surprised if the reason that monitor manufacturers stopped making 16:10 monitors was due to people moaning about interfaces not working on them.
Really, by now monitors ought to be generally 16:10, or similar, and at least 2560×1600.
Oh, and if you're making an interface which can't be customised or, at the very least, scaled in DPI to fit higher resolutions then you're doing it wrong. I can't think of a single application under Linux I have tried on my displays (16:10 and 4:3 on my desktop and 16:9 on my laptops) which isn't adaptable -- and that's thanks to clever and thoughtful developers.
Sorry, perhaps I missed a deeper point in your post.
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If you stare at a screen 14 hours a day designing guis or doing any kind of graphics really, where you tend not to blink because you are constantly looking for small details, then make sure you have plenty of ambient light and turn the brightness of the display down.
I have mine on 7 out of 100 and it still hurts my eyes sometimes. It lights up a totally dark room like a light bulb, and your eyes are focusing on that for hours on end. Like with music, take a break, look around the room, focus on other things at other distances.
I need glasses now after getting a 24" monitor, but to be fair, my time was up anyway, being middle aged, as they call it. Now all I need is a Harley-Davidson. Eye-ronic/Eye-conic.
24" 1920x1080 screens were around 125 quid 5 years ago and haven't really dropped since tnen, so this really is a completely yawnsome non-article.
Of *much* more interest is what are the specs and prices of larger monitors, which have actually started to see a gradual price drop in recent years. Prices though, sadly still go exponentially through the roof as you add only a few inches at a time. You can just about get a 2560x1440 (which a few 10" tablets have!) 27" monitor for about 300 quid if you shop around a lot - yep, more than double the price for 3 more inches!
Some good 27/28/30" really hi-res monitors would have been an interesting and useful review. Sorry, but 24" 1080p monitors are a basic commodity now and have been for years.
You are right of course, but see my reply to a fellow commentard further up, about why one aspect of this remains so.
Resolutions can't get any higher for the 24" monitors. What people need now are 36" monitors, but even then, at a comparable resolution, many people would not be able to see the guis for their programs/plugins. Also, there is the space issue and many people have no space for a 36" on their ikea workstation in the spare bedroom, kind of thing.
The whole thing is in stasis.
However, there is no excuse for technology that is cheaper to manufacture now than it was 10 years ago, costing as much. But that is marketing for you. It's the main demographic for most users, so prices will stay at the 'sweet spot' for the mass majority and the so called 'early adopters' and 'power users', will pay a premium as well. Really, every one is getting gouged as usual. People buying the larger higher res screens should really get them cheaper as well, being leveraged by the prices of the mass market smaller screens.
It's win/win for them and lose/lose for us as usual. Weren't they caught price fixing this a few years ago? Or was that hard drives? Or computers in general? :-)
Until 4K TVs become common place it seems sensible prices for high resolution monitor and laptop screens are going to be slow coming, with mainstream stuck at 1080p :(
Display Panels seem to be one of the few things not succumbing to the price drops with improvements at the same rate as the rest of the PC components. It's crazy that phones and tablets are getting the higher resolution displays, but the panel manufactures are in the business of making money and will concentrate where the demand is.
With phones and tablets being replaced every couple of years while PC displays probably last even longer than TVs it's easy to see where the money can be made. I've only ever bought 3 LCD displays
for home use, a 4:3 (1280*1024) Sun many years ago, a 16:10 HP which swivels landscape/portrait and a 42" 1080p Hitachi Panel for use instead of an LCD TV. All are over 5 years old. With multiple inputs on the Sun and HP and an AV receiver feeding the Hitachi I never needed more than that. All still work and none are regularly used anymore as between laptops, tablets and a projector they no longer fit with device usage at home.
There are only 3 or 4 panel makers:
AOC, LG-Philips, Samsung and maybe a couple of others.
Everyone else wraps their cases around those panels (including iiyama - they may have made great CRTs but the LCDs are fairly run-of-the-mill) - and I've opened samsung + philips monitors to find AOC panels inside too.
For monitors with external PSUs, it's fairly easy to make up a molex adaptor cable to feed them 12V from the computer.
I was about to point out that at tis price entry, a better review would be the HDTV / Monitor.
Then I realised that you must pay a license fee for each TV that you own I guess to support BBC.
THen I realised that BBC is produces some damm good content compared to the crap produced in the US.
SO how about an HDTV / Monitor combination review? Largely so I can watch the content prvided on-line!!!