X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 8)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Monitors

The month was all boiling with news as if reacting to the arrival of the new generation of graphics chips. First of all, we saw numerous new products that prove the rising tendency: matrixes are now improved through reduction of the pixel response time, rather than through better brightness, contrast ratio and so on.

For example, 12msec responsiveness is quite ordinary for the basic 17” diagonal. Cheap models like the Prestigio P175 may have 16msec at worst, although this number was considered a record just a little while ago. So such products as e-yama 17JN1-S or Shuttle XP17 with their 25msec produce a feeling of slight bewilderment. Our choice is something like a BenQ FP783 (although the integrated web-cam may be a superfluous feature), NEC 179M or S, or Samsung SyncMaster 710T – all with 12msec responsiveness.

Times are slower with 19” monitors. Well, 12msec are there, for example in the NEC RTD194S, but it is hardly a norm because there are many models which focus on brightness and contrast ratio, rather than pixel speed. For example, take the Samsung SyncMaster 910T with 25msec and 800:1 contrast ratio (against 400:1 in the RDT194S).

Longer diagonals still don’t have any common norms. The parameters of different models may differ greatly – all manufacturers do as they think right. For example, consider the 21.3” ProLite H540S from Iiyama with 25msec response time, 500:1 contrast ratio, 280 candela/sq. m brightness, or the 20.1” LG L2010B with 16msec response time, 400:1 contrast ratio and 250 candela/sq. m brightness. It’s hard to tell which parameter may be viewed as a norm.

But I can definitely say that the prices will grow in this market, and not only for LCD monitors, but also for CRT devices. In April, the manufacturers increased them by 2-3% and are going to do a 5-7% addition in May due to the deficit of key components. And this deficit may linger throughout the second half of the year. The same goes for LCD monitors: prices for color filters for the panels are growing and thus panels are also growing in price. One of the major manufacturers of panels, Hannstar Display, promises a price growth of over 5% for the second half of the year.

This doesn’t sound very optimistic, yeah? We may turn to OLED displays for better news. Epson showcased a prototype of 12.5” OLED monitor at the EDEX’2004 expo in Tokyo. There’s only one problem with this device – it takes this monitor only 1000 hours for the brightness to degenerate in two times. Anyway, we’ll probably hear first announcements of PDAs or even sub-notebooks with OLED screens closer to Christmas.