Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaudat | Hacker News Reader

Tip: try to find out what panel the monitor you are buying has. Then look the panel up in a database like panelook.com. This way you can get the specifications without any marketing bullshit.

It also works the other way round. Find a panel that is good enough for your eyes, then see if there's a mass marketed display with that panel. If you are adventurous, you can grab "DIY" or "assembled" monitors with the panels on Chinese e-Commerce sites.

View on HN

Isn't there a chance that the assembled Chinese monitors actually use second grade panels that the big makers wouldn't accept?

I remember getting a 27-inch 1440p display from a Chinese manufacturer for really cheap back in high school. It should've been the exact same panel as was in Apple's iMacs. However, the were some quality issues with it long term and it's definitely suffering from burn-in that I don't think the iMacs suffer from.

That was the case with noname Korean/Chinese monitors a decade ago that used high quality IPS panels found in Apple and other professional displays - they used rejected panels, which had various issues (mostly dead pixels afaik).

https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displa...

But overall, they were a great purchase quality/performance/cost wise.

Yeah, a cheap 1440p as a student was certainly a great thing when they were still rather expensive, even though the base was wobbly as all hell and it later developed some issues.

That brings back memories :). I ended up buying one of these and apart from some weird quirks (only wanted to work over DVI and not with an HDMI-DVI dongle), the image quality was great and so cheap (for the time).

I'm reading this on an IPS panel I bought a decade ago from South Korea. Works great, but with a bit of light bleed in the top left hand corner. I paid extra to have one without dead pixels.

Yep! Still using the "Auria" monitor that I purchased at Microcenter back around 2012. Cost maybe $300-350 for a 2560x1440 IPS monitor at a time when you were easily looking at $500-800+ for a similar panel from a name brand.

Now, if you were a professional, that quality control and warranty (not to mention better ergonomics, etc.) were easily worth the added cost, but for just "some dude who liked playing video games and doing some photo/video editing", it was a great bang for the buck.

I still use this as my main monitor and haven't noticed any dead pixels (if there are any, they're so hard to see that they may as well not be there). It's not the best monitor out there and you can probably get a better 2560x1440 display for less now, but at the time it was a big improvement over the cheap 1920x1080 display that quickly got demoted to secondary (and has now been loaned indefinitely to a teacher friend who needed a second monitor to plug into her laptop for online classes).

Heyo another Auria user here! I actually recently upgraded to a Dell 4k screen, but that Auria served me great for several years and is my secondary setup screen. Got it used for $150, amazing value there!

Bought mine on Amazon for $400 six years ago. It stopped showing a picture but I get a white flicker at the base of the screen every few seconds.

I could (and probably should) investigate fixing it but it was easier to buy a 2160p Philips for $240. Only issue with the Philips is it doesn't have a VESA mount and it would be difficult to make some sort of jury-rigging work.

I run them attached to a Mac Mini and use the DisplayPort on the monitor. At one point I believe HDMI (or maybe just the Mac) wouldn't do 1440p. I'm copying stuff from an Intel Mac mini to an M1 and I'm able to toggle back and forth using HDMI for the Intel just fine.

Actually iMacs and their display counterparts in the LG ultrafine series are known to suffer from burn-in.

Google iMac or LG ultrafine “image retention” or “ghosting.” I have no idea what percent of displays are affected, but there’s enough threads about it on Reddit and macrumors to make me think it’s pretty common.

FWIW Planar makes 27" monitors that use the same 5K and 2K panels used in the iMacs, down to the bonded glass surface. The Planar IX2790 and PXL2790MW respectively. I have the PXL2790MW and if you look closely you can see the glass peephole for the nonexistent iSight Camera. Not sure if it's B grade panels that Apple rejected but it's flawless, maybe I just got lucky.

I have a couple of these from 2014-15, and they are very, very nice (and as a plus, they matched the dpi of some macbook models at the time, at least). One surprise: they were very heavy compared to other, similarly-specced monitors.

The only issue I had was coil whine coming from a choke on the power supply inverter board. I resolved this by cracking open the monitor and encasing the choke in two part epoxy.

It is hit or miss. I own two, the one is flawless (apart from the retention which is the norm apparently in LG displays). The other I have exchanged it 2 times and still have issues with many many dead pixels. So in my case 3/4 were bad apples.

Yes, so often I ask if the seller can provide a "perfect" display, that is, without any artifacts on the display. This adds 100-200 CNY to the price.

There's a Chinese panel manufacturer called BOE that makes products competitive with some of the lower-end Samsung / LG panels.

I got one 15.6" 2160p external display with a BOE panel that offers 100% sRGB coverage. I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display.

Now if anyone can find a source of 55" 4K OLED panels, that would be the one ultimate display. Combine it with a VBO driver board and it becomes better than any smart TVs.

>I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display.

And outside of a few occupations that might actually require pixel-perfect colour, what does this matter? Is this like the audiophile world, where people argue about seemingly subjective things that no else cares about?

The customer interprets colours differently than you, the customer sees colours differently than you, and the customer is using a monitor that almost assuredly displays the colours differently than yours. And the world continues to turn.

I enjoy having a high quality display for all kinds of reasons. Better comfort while programming, accurate colour representation while looking at photos, having a good sense of what things might look like for others (accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all), and otherwise, if I’m going to spend a lot on something I’ll own for half a decade I would prefer to get something accurate. The price difference isn’t sufficient enough to justify saving a little bit to have a poor colour experience.

> accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all

Having a setup with multiple cheap monitors is imho really underrated for design and development. Moving something between screens and seeing clear contrast disappear, or see pleasing color choices turn ugly can be eye opening.

Agreed! Back when I was in music school, they brought in Tony Bonjiovi[0], a well-known record producer at the time. He talked about how the ultimate test of any recording was to copy it to a cassette, take it out to the engineer's Camaro with 1 broken speaker and see how it sounded there. If it sounded good there, it would sound great anywhere else.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bongiovi

Agree with your general stance. My current monitors are from 2007 and have endured many hours of use and a capacitor replacement.

I am considering my next purchase on the basis of at least 5 years of service and that is a long time to be looking at something "not quite right".

I don't think the audiophile comparison makes really sense here (and I like to mock audiophiles more than most) simply because display technology still has a long way to go before it reaches the level of audio when it comes to "bang for your buck".

CD quality audio is less than 1 megabit per second per channel, uncompressed. HDR (10 bits per component) 4K60fps 4:2:2 video is around 10Gbit per second of data.

Of course data bandwidth is only a small part of the problem of correctly reproducing an analog signal, but it gives you the orders of magnitude we're dealing with.

I currently use a cheap ASUS 4K display. It's more good enough for coding, but I wouldn't trust it for any sort of graphical work. The viewing angle is pretty bad, so depending on what part of the screen I'm looking at I see colors differently, and some gradients become more or less visible depending on which part of the screen they're on. Contrast is pretty bad, making even some videogame display poorly: depending on the location and time of day contrast seems always too high or too low.

You can buy a good sub $100 pair of earphones and a sub $50 DAAC and they'll be good enough to do 99% of any audiophile work you could ever want to do reliably. If you want to do serious graphics work without having to constantly adjust for your display you'll have to go for something a lot more expensive than an entry-level monitor.

> And outside of a few occupations that might actually require pixel-perfect colour, what does this matter? Is this like the audiophile world, where people argue about seemingly subjective things that no else cares about?

I'm a color blind person and even I can see a color difference between cheap displays that I have at work and an old EIZO one that I bought years ago at home.

I can more accurately diffrentiate between different colors/shades on my EIZO panel.

monitor image quality is quite a bit more objective than what audiophiles look for in high end audio equipment. sRGB defines a specific physical color that ought to be displayed for each RGB sequence. if you can get a very accurate display for <$1000 just by doing a bit of research, why wouldn't you?

A similar thing to audiophile is that better quality doesn't always mean improve QoL for just a consumer (not designer or similar use). Sometimes I think that it's happy if I satisfied with $100 headphones or cheap laptop display quality.

These differences are very clearly noticeable. I upgraded many years ago from a 72% sRGB to a 99% sRGB Dell IPS and everything looked much better. I just got the LG 27GN950 which is 95% DCI P3... I was mainly getting it for the 4k/144 with the P3 as a nice bonus (I already had 4k/60 on the Dell). Looking at the Dell, I was thinking that P3 might be nice to have but it wouldn't really matter much aside from photo editing - the colors on the Dell already looked great.

I just unboxed the new monitor 2 days ago. The richer color was immediately noticeable, and when I looked at some random photos I took with my phone recently I was blown away by just how red and green and yellow/blue things were. Like a completely new realm of color.

It's one of those things that you can't appreciate until you experience it (same going from the original 72% to 99% sRGB).

The Dell was $450 for 4k, 2.5 years ago. The new LG was $800, but you can find 60fps P3 4k monitors for around $500 these days iirc. If you're on Hacker News you probably use your computer a lot. Unless you're running low on cash, upgrading to a great monitor is worth it.

Seconded. I have 2 LG 27GN950-B's on my desk, and love the 27" 4K HDR @ 144Hz experience (at least on Catalina. Big Sur has completely broken DSC and will only do HDR @ 60, non-HDR @ 95).

I love them for my photo editing.

I can't get 144hz at 4k. Any specific cable you're using?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XTYKLNJ

(This is on my 2019 Mac Pro)

There's a Chinese panel manufacturer called BOE

...which bought Korean manufacturer Hydis (was originally part of SK Hynix), so you'll often see panels marked "BOE-Hydis".

For monitors it is more than that. For a pretty expensive 144hz/1440p/gsync category that I researched a couple of years ago there were three options: acer, asus and viewsonic (and unavailable aoc). It turned out that asus, despite being a “better, much more money” brand, did a worse job of mounting the panel, so it had statistically worse backlight bleeding at one edge.

What's wrong with Asus installing alarms in their monitors? I learned the hard way being woken up in the middle of the night by a loud siren I couldnt locate the source as I wouldn't have expected it will come from a frikin monitor! There is no way to turn that off apart from physically powering it off and it happens totally random.

Oh, that’s amazing. I got curious and found this comment on youtube, sharing in case it may help or diagnose:

Battle Angel Sorry, not sure why I didn't share previously. So, I believe this is caused by using a non-HDMI cable with the audio out turned on. Either turn the audio in the display off completely in the settings, or use a new HDMI cable. The alarm is a result of the display trying to send an audio signal through a Displayport cable. Are those of you getting this alarm using Displayport cables? They do not pair audio with video, as HDMI does. I hope this fixes your problem.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1i2dB8mGuKM

This is so great! I've been looking for a solution to no avail but I have not seen that one. Yes I use DP cable. I'll try that. Thank you so much!

It took me a while to find something matching those specs too. I got a couple of these when the price dropped below $300 and they're great. I had to watch a few PC Building deal Reddits to catch the deal.

https://www.amazon.com/LG-27GL83A-B-Ultragear-Compatible-Mon...

Wow I'll never shop for monitors the same again.

Yeah, if you look into it, you'll find most monitors using the same panels from LG, AUO, Samsung or ChiMei, with some outliers.

When it comes to assembled monitors, the highest failure rate is in the power supply. The components used and the cooling/ventilation play a big part in that.

Isn't it so that monitors or laptops under the same model sometimes use different panels?

Yes. Consider most people only care about the resolution, sometimes manufacturers substitute a lower cost panel that is inferior in say, gamut or response time.

This sounds compelling. I'd love to get my hands on the LG Ultrafine 5k panel in a cheaper case and just bring my own thunderbolt dock.

What sites are you finding these "assembled" monitors?

...and if you're really adventurous, you can buy just the bare panel, get the backlight inverter and "scaler board" elsewhere, and build your own custom monitor. The "3663" seems to be a common model of scaler.

Have you done this / do you have pointers to someone who has?

Yep, that's what I did. The panel is the actual product. The housing is just stuff around the panel.

Does anything else have that LG 5K panel? :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com