X-bit labs

24" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part II (page 8)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 04/28/2008 | 11:40 AM ]

The monitor has 90% brightness and 50% contrast by default. I selected 40% brightness and 30% contrast to achieve a 100nit white. You shouldn’t set the contrast above 56% as it makes light halftones indistinguishable from white. The brightness is regulated by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 223Hz.

Color gradients look striped on this monitor. The viewing angles are good enough for a TN matrix but the darkening of the top of the screen is noticeable when you are looking at it from below. Moreover, white transforms into turquoise and yellow into green at that. But as opposed to the Samsung SyncMaster 226CW where you could see this effect even while sitting in front of the monitor, you have to deflect your eyes down from the center of the screen to see it on the AccuSync LCD24WMCX. That’s not going to be a big trouble in practice. On the other hand, the other TN matrixes in this review are free from this defect.

The monitor’s color gamut is close to the standard sRGB color space, being larger than it in greens and smaller in reds.

The uniformity of white brightness is 3.3% with a max deflection of 16.9%. On black, the average and maximum are 2.7% and 11.9%, respectively. On black, there is only a narrow lighter band along the left edge of the screen which has had a little effect on the measurements and is almost invisible in the picture above.

The gamma curves don’t look right at the default settings. They do not coincide and go higher than the theoretical curve for gamma 2.2.

It’s not much better at the reduced settings: the image is still whitish due to the low gamma (the lower the gamma value, the higher the curves go).

Fortunately, the monitor’s menu offers a gamma adjustment option. Setting it at Mode 3, you can improve the situation considerably.

As you might have expected, the monitor is not fast. Its response time average is 14.1 milliseconds (GtG) with a maximum of 22 milliseconds. The manufacturers are obviously trying to get everything from the market by releasing only RTC-less models in the first wave of TN-based 24” monitors. In a little while, they will proudly announce new series of fast 2ms and 4ms monitors.