Comment by hastur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hastur | Hacker News Reader

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OK, so let's bring this hype down to Earth.

For this kind of money this can only be an e-IPS monitor. (The specs on e-bay say S-IPS, but it's certainly a lie.)

For those who don't differentiate between the different variants of IPS, e-IPS is a relatively new thing introduced around 2 years ago (by LG, I believe) and it's a simplified and much cheaper to manufacture version of IPS. Its characteristics are somewhere between TN and IPS.

Apart from the display itself, a monitor's quality is also very much dependent on its electronics. For this kind of money it's obvious they've put the absolute minimum into this thing.

(For a little comparison: I have an old, med-quality 19'' NEC 1990FX monitor and a cheap 23'' HP 2310ti touch monitor. The NEC weighs 9kg, the HP 8kg. How can a smaller monitor be heavier? It's all electronics.)

Same applies to other aspects: you can have no confidence in the monitor's electromagnetic emissions or reliability. And if the power supply fries for some reason in 3 months, don't count on your warranty.

I mean, you didn't believe for a second that a no-name brand that sells in the US purely thru e-bay will honor any kind of warranty, did you?

At least one of the Korean monitors has an identical panel to Apple's Cinema Display, so your claim of e-IPS is false. If you had checked some of the discussions on Overclock.net or HardForum first you would see that this has been proven true by users who have taken the monitors apart.

Secondly, I'm not sure if I agree with your claim that e-IPS is inferior to s-IPS. I read a document before (can't locate it now) implying that e-IPS had similar characteristics. If you can provide a primary source with more information on this, that would be great, and I'll happily agree with you.

And finally, there have been quite a few cases of sellers honoring the warranty. Check the aforementioned forums, or I can provide a direct link if you like.

> if this piece of crap doesn't even have an ability to regulate brightness and contrast

Reread the article. You can adjust brightness just fine, he just wasn't pressing the button down for long enough at first.

Thank you for pointing that out. Corrected.

In your defense, it took the author a few pages to even get to that fact.

Yeah, that was pretty lame. The author is clearly being paid by the word and/or page view, and the quality of the review suffered substantially because of it.

Hastur is being hasty with his FUD, all right, but it's not as if the article was much better.

Yeah, well, I didn't read the review even now and I don't plan to. And the reason is simple:

If something looks waaay too good to be true, it usually is.

$337 for 27'' H-IPS doesn't exist in the real world. They must have cut corners on something - and pretty badly.

...First example already provided in the Disqus guy comment: 30% failure rate in 3 months. I rest my case.

Actually, these are not e-IPS monitors. The panel inside the Catleap variants is a WS LG.Display H-IPS (LM270WQ1). TFT Central has the model number's listed in their database: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk

"The NEC's display must obviously be lighter. So it's all electronics."

It's not always the "electronics", and besides, who says better electronics need to weight more? A few years back, I interviewed with a company that makes high-end blu-ray players. They showed me how they put weights in the cases, so they were heavier, and felt "sturdier" and of higher quality.

There's an old saying that "Americans buy their cars by the pound." I suspect that it is a bit more universal.

Americans buy their cars by cupholders.

And monitors by input ports. ;)

It could also be as simple as the glass on the smaller monitor being marginally thicker.

Using weight as a metric for judging the quality of electronics seems … peculiar.

It's a good metric for power supplies, and not much else.

Not electronics quality but amount.

And from that I drew a (simplified, yes) conclusion that more electronics => more processing => better picture.

But amount tells you nothing, particularly when making comparisons across different generations of electronics. Besides, a lot of electronics can mean shit-ass deinterlacing hardware, or far too complicated OSD functionality, or pointless A/D conversion. None of which has anything to do with build quality or picture quality.

I'd be very surprised if you could tell the difference between a high end GPU processor (for example) which could do all the processing you could imagine without raising a sweat and a DIP AVR package that would have trouble multiplying two floats by weight. Even with those, the majority of the weight is in the ceramic packaging, and not the silicon.

Add in a massive amount of packaging in terms of LCD panel, plastic around it, wiring, screws, and any weight difference you could attribute to electronics horsepower (if there was one to begin with) will be lost in the noise.

These aren't transformers or power supplies, where you want large capacitors and heavy lumps of iron to smooth out ripples in an AC to DC conversion.

How can a smaller monitor be heavier? It's all electronics"

That is so far off it isn't even wrong.

1) Electronics generally become more integrated, reliable and lighter as time passes. This is generally a good thing.

2) On most monitors a significant amount of weight is in the mounting hardware. Some use structured plastic, some use smaller steel parts. One isn't better than the other, but they do weigh different amounts.

I've currently got an e-IPS dell and an IPS catleap from ebay sitting next to each other on my desk, and the catleap is considerably better. Make all the assumptions you want, the fact is that cheap 27" screens from korea can be damn good displays.

Yes lets bring down this hype down to earth without actually having used the product. Classic FUD.

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