LED contrast as good as they claim?

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I am wanting to purchase a new monitor and am looking into the LED monitors. They give some crazy contrast ratio estimates (10,000,000:1) or even more in many.

Though I know they are exagerating as they always do...there must be a little truth to it?

Anyone have one of these monitors? Is the contrast a lot better than older tft versions? Do games look any different?

There's actually a limit to how many shades the human eye can detect. I have an LED monitor (they are actually LCD monitors with LED backlights instead of fluorescent) and I can't really imagine better contrast, though my former monitor was a CRT which usually had better graphic abilities than LCDs so perhaps I've never seen this presumably lower contrast that some LCD's might have.

What you should probably be more concerned about is viewing angle. Most LCD/LED monitors are twisted nematics (TN). The liquid crystals in these TN LCD monitors are oriented in a stacked helical fashion when the pixel is off. When it's in an on state, these crystals all orient such that the longer axis is perpendicular to the display surface. When you view the monitor at an angle, you see the back light passing through two crystal axises instead of one, and this ultimately causes the image to appear to shift to a negative.

A newer type of LCD/LED monitor is monitor that uses in plane switching (IPS). When the pixels in these monitors are in the off state, the crystals are oriented with the long axis parallel to the display plane, vertically or horizontally, I'm not sure which, and when the pixels are in an on state, the crystal flips from horizontal to vertical or vertical to horizontal, but the long axis still continues to remain parallel to the display plane. Consequently, when you view the display from an angle, most of the light you see is still passing through only one crystal axis/crystal face and you see almost no distortion in picture coloration at all.

Hmm ya IPS sounds pretty neat, but out of by budget range unfortunately unless I wait awhile but really itching to get a new monitor...seems they have come down a bit though on LG/Asus.

What brand did you buy on your LED? I want to get an AOC (Best low budget brand according to ratings) but it's $30 more than an Acer of pretty much same specs =/. Though I had an acer LCD before and it broke so I am very hesitant to buy another of the same brand. Plus I like the letters AOC since I like the game Age of Conan.

My monitor brand is LG. It sells for $180 on www.newegg.com
My only complaint about it is that the brightness settings on the monitor itself don't stick and I had to permanently set the brightness using settings in the display software, which took some fiddling around to find as I have multiple programs that can access the display settings and I wasn't sure which was the dominant one.

Maybe a tiny, tiny drop of truth. Thing is, no-one really cared or compared much when only CRT monitors were available but now manufacturers are playing the numbers game, the more outrageous the contrast ratio the "better" it looks. Big numbers are cool, right?

I have a 26" LaCie 526 (plus colorimeter) because of its wide colour gamut and accuracy, and it was well worth getting.

*drool*

oh for a sec i thought he meant OLED and not LED LCD.
for LED LCD make sure you get the resolution you want, i dont know if this is simply a marketting ploy but my 2 syncmaster 24" can run 1920 x 1200 whereas many new 24" inch monitors are only advertised for full hd.

how important is color accuracy to you?
do you take pictures or do multimediea work?

Lcd monitors work by polerising the light shone through each cell (pixel) by the backlight. By applying different current to the "liquid crystal" in the cells you get different colours. This approach is great but obviously when trying to display blacks, the backlight has to be obscured by polerising the light. Which isn't very efficent. Oled (organic led) displays use tiny leds so black is 0.

On my Droid, sorry for the bad grammar

Heh, yes indeed. Beg, steal or borrow until you can get one!

The "natural" resolution is likely the most important point. I doubt if any modern flat-panel screen has a visibly poor contrast ratio these days and unless you're into really accurate image and colour rendition - photography, etc - I'd think almost anything should do.

Not sure if the way the upper resolution is specified just amounts to an advertising copy clash of interests: "which sounds more whizz-bang: 'HD-Ready' or '1920x1200'?"
Since the actual panels used are all made to pretty much the same dimensional specs. I expect "full HD" would include 1920x1200, and presumably more detailed information is available for a given monitor.

thats the thing when looking up the actual specs for the monitors max resolution is 1920*1080.
maybe because of screen format but as you said when editing pictures the extra real estate counts,

also invest in a colorimeter if intending to do professional image work (i got the EODIS3 usb colorimeter, not the best but god enough, no way am i paying 3 times the amount for 0.1 the difference )

Strange - and definitely something to watch out for when reading the specs.

What so strange about that? It's pretty much the standard 1080p resolution, like what is generaly advertised for HD screen. Propably what they call Full HD in Europe and they arcarne names for resolutions. (In North America it's more things like 480i, 480p, 763i (If that one exist), 763p, 1080i and 1080p. At such, now a lot of monitors are 1920x1080, which is the 1080i/1080p HD standard, which is what you got from blu-ray movies for example. )

yes but the 1920x1200 is the standard for 24" computer monitors, or at least it was untill this idiotic term advertisement became the norm.

bottom line i think companies justify this with the fact that most people dont know that full hd has been around for 20 or so years on computers

What Oodain said. Spot on.
The marketing pap behind "HD" makes sense only for TV broadcast/display, not a computer display device. 1920x1080 is smaller than what I'm currently using.

What I am primarily using my computer for is Gaming, Videos, Word processing, and Internet browsing. (No photo editing......just viewing from time to time.)

I am possibly thinking of a 1600x1200 monitor as my games/videos will run smoother placing less demand on the computer.

But I've always gamed on 1900x1200...and used this resolution. I did have one monitor by I-inc that was 28" but the resolution was 1900x1080 (i believe it is?...)
I am currently on a 26" monitor by SOYO with resolution of 1900x1200. This is a good monitor for the most part but I dont believe it gets the best picture quality.
Also it is old and produces a lot of heat, wich might be but probably isn't dangerous just a little annoying. It has 4 dead pixels but at this resolution they aren't very visible.
I am also hoping to save some desk space as this has a large border around it and takes up a lot of space.

I am looking at these new 20" LCD LED monitors from Dell, AOC, And Acer.
But I could spend more money for a 21" or 23" monitor though it would take me longer to get the money.

This could be however a downgrade from my current monitor so I don't want to get one of these new monitors unless it is going to be better visually.
This monitor looks better than my I-Inc I had which seemed to be kind of grainy in quality. This monitor i'm on is run of the mil 2ms respons GTS or DRC what ever they want to call it- gaming mode
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... 1&itemid=1
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=3774

It was used in a restaraunt likely on for extended periods of time so it might be on its last leg. Which is another reason I would like to sell it before it breaks ><.....Hopefully not on me or who ever else buys it.

I think the 1080p monitors are so that they have a bigger market for those who want to hook their monitors up to their xbox's, ps3, satelite. Although i think xbox only goes up to 720p? Though the new ones might go 1080p.

I am paying bottom dollar if I buy a monitor so keep that in mind.....

I would like to pay $100-140....so my selection is limited.

This one is on sale for $99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6824260023

Also looking at this acer
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6824009256

And my top choice and most expensive would be AOC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6824160055

I would like to play AOC online at a lower resolution than 1080 or 1200 so that it is more playable. It's a B*(^& to run...

Money is an issue for me too. I can't afford to waste any. While I have no idea about Dell or Acer monitors, I do have a little experience with AOC.

I bought a 23" AOC WLED for £140 ($228) in March. I bought on price and a half-decent review on CNET. Big and very dumb mistake. It had the worst viewing angle I have ever seen on a monitor. If you moved your head even slightly, the image would darken horribly. No amount of fiddling with it made it any better. I took it back. It was a crap display. I'm sure you can do better, however limited your budget.

What did you get instead?