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21.3" LCD Monitor Reviewed 250

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hardware-to-lust-after dept.
SLDave wrote in to plug his review of the 21" NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car? Update: 05/01 18:31 GMT by T : ARP has another idea, writing: "Here is a review of Samsung's 210T which is another 21.3" LCD. Not only is this cheaper than the NEC, but it also has DVI as well as RCA and S-video inputs that turn into a high-definition multimedia display."
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21.3" LCD Monitor Reviewed More

21.3" LCD Monitor Reviewed

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  • Give us your worst, /. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:28AM (#3443226) Homepage
    We thought in advance to disable the news generator on the front page, so it won't go down in 30 seconds like last time.

    Now it'll just take 3 minutes. :D

  • Your gettin' a Dell, dude (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:28AM (#3443231)
    Like Dell's got a 20" 1600 by 1200 for about $1600. No, I don't work for Dell, and yes, I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.
    • suck for motion?!!

      dude perhpas on a 5 year old POS laptop, but my 15in LCD on my HP laptop is so good, I can watch DVD movies and there is no blurr.
      • While I'm of course happy for you that you like your LCD, I'd recommend to wait before buying one for motion intensive applications, such as movies or games. Two recent reviews of 15" LCD on Tom's Hardware Guide were still quite negative on that issue. http://www4.tomshardware.com/display/02q1/020114/i ndex.html http://www4.tomshardware.com/display/02q1/020322/i ndex.html

    • Dude, dell's rippin' ya off too!
      TigerDirect.com has 19" [tigerdirect.com] and 20" [tigerdirect.com] LCD's for $999 and $1199

    • Re:Your gettin' a Dell, dude (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:52AM (#3443438)
      I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.

      That reminds me of the storage display teminals I would sometimes use in the early 80's. Some of these were huge, like a 25-inch TV. The CRT had a special layer that would permanently turn on any time the electron beam hit it. You could only add to the "on" pixels; the only way to turn off pixels was to clear the whole screen. The TTY output would add to the screen until you filled it up, but you couldn't scroll.

      I remember being able to view 400 lines of code at once on one of these. At the time, it blew away any other display technology at viewing code. The downside was, it really blew chunks at motion, since it was static. You could actually get some work done with a real line-based editor like TECO, though.

      • Hey, I grew up on Tektronix storage display terminals. Sure beat the hell out of a teletype or (later) DEC VT100 with their crappy 24 line display.

        And I was one of the people responsible for the old DEC OS/8 Teco. "make love" ... "not war?" OK, I wasn't responsible for that part ...

        Of course you were probably one of those lucky people running TECO on a real computer ...
    • I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.

      Seems to me that if you can afford one of these, you can also afford a CRT and a monitor switch, and then have the best of both worlds, albeit with a more crowded desk.

      As long as we're on the topic of displays, does anyone have any experience using big HDTVs as "monitors" for playing computer games? The concept of playing a flight simulator on a big screen sounds appealing, but it seems like there are real questions about the effective resolution you get. Do any TV-out solutions put out HDTV component video?

  • I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).

    The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.

  • Does anybody know if LCDs are capable of changing resolution in theory? My laptop is capable of 800x600(it's a 1024x768 screen) but it look... really really fugly.. I guess that answers my question, but can they do it and still maintain quality?

    • Re:Changing res (Score:4, Informative)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:44AM (#3443375) Homepage Journal
      LCDs have a fixed number of "pixels", and the only way to change resolution is for the pixel driver to interpolate or some other trick : It can do this perfectly for for direct divisors of its resolution (for instance a 1600x1200 display could do 800x600 perfectly, simply using 4 display pixels for every 1 incoming pixel).

    • Re:Changing res (Score:3, Informative)

      by ottffssent ( 18387 )
      Depends what you mean. There are physically 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels, so if you want 1280x1024, some of the logical pixels will be mapped to 1 physical pixel, some to 2. Now, there's various blurring algorithms to consider, but it still looks bad. You could do 800x600 perfectly (each logical pixel = 4 physical pixels), but why would you want to?
    • Only the operating system has the semantic information required to do a good job of rendering your display into a given grid of pixels.

    • Re:Changing res (Score:2, Informative)

      by Skater ( 41976 )
      They're getting better. My previous LCD was a 15" running at 1024x768, and it looked great only at that resolution.

      My new one is bigger (haven't measured it, probably 17") and its native resolution is 1280x1024, but I run it in 1024x768. Occasionally I'll see little text blur, but most of the time it's very good.

      --RJ

  • Oooh! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Omnifarious ( 11933 ) <eric-slash AT omnifarious DOT org> on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:31AM (#3443258) Homepage Journal

    I've been waiting forever for a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. I do all of my work currently on 19" CRTs running at 1600x1200. And, for games, where you want a lower res, the LCD pixel averaging thing doesn't work badly at all. I've tested.

    No, when they get down to $2k, I'll start thinking seriously of getting one. :-)

    • Actually, what I really want is a 6400x4800 screen. Then I can have small fonts that are scaled fonts, not bitmaps, so I can get antialiasing too. :-)

      On a 21.3" inch viewable area, I should be able to get a good 220 characters across, which is 29 pixels at 6400x4800. That's plenty enough pixels for a high quality scaled anti-aliased font. I think monitors and CPUs will be up to it in 3-5 years. I can't wait.

      1600x1200 is just barely enough for what I want on a 21" screen. You have to do 7 or 8 pixel wide characters, which have to be painstakingly done as bitmaps in order to look right.

      And, yes, I like very tiny letters. :-)

      • Re:Oooh! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by roca ( 43122 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @11:05AM (#3443519) Homepage
        Sounds like you want an IBM T221. For only $8000 you get a 22" monitor with --- most importantly --- 200dpi resolution (overall 3840x2400 pixels). I've seen it running GNOME and there's nothing like it. The main problem is that the mouse cursor is a wee bit small, and so are the fonts in a lot of poorly written applications.

      • Re:Oooh! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nehril ( 115874 )
        ... 6400x4800 ... 1600x1200 is just barely enough
        I guess the nosegrease smeared across your monitor as you press your face against it to read gives you free anti-aliasing? Or perhaps the radiation will cook your eyeballs enough to give you free "anti-aliasing" ALL THE TIME??

        no offense, but I do like to keep my 19" monitor at a respectable distance, and 1600x1200 is just on the edge of overkill. Get a second monitor, or learn to use alt-tab!
        • If you were using a well designed interface then the increase in number of pixels would simply make the image sharper but WILL NOT decrease the physical viewing size.

          That said, I've yet to see anything out side of publishing that does this. OSX is probably capable, but I've yet to try it out.

          Gnome does ok, but you have to manually change the font, bar, etc. sizes. Still based on pixels, not a physical distance. Perhaps Gnome 2 will do this better?
        • > I do like to keep my 19" monitor at a respectable distance, and 1600x1200 is just on
          > the edge of overkill

          That says more about your eyesight than his common sense. At work I run a 22" NEC at 1600x1200, but at home I have a 19" using the same resolution, and I can comfortably see it from 2 feet away for extended periods. And no, there's no sebum coating my monitors--anybody who deposits skin secretions on my monitors dies.
    • See this page [dell.com]. Well below $2K, 1600x1200 and other good specs, on usenet (google groups) I found quite some happy users of this one. Of course 1920x1200 would be even nicer but too expensive IMO.

  • 1600x1200 (Score:2, Informative)

    by PastaAnta ( 513349 )
    I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time.

    I would feel good! Finally an LCD screen with a usable resolution. The resolution should preferrably be as high as possible. If you can't read the text then choose a larger font.

    If you are into fast action games you should probably buy a CRT anyway.
  • My friend has a SGI 20" CRT monitor he bought on ebay real cheap. The lowest res it supports is 1280x1024, which is a pity, because he can't play Diablo II anymore except in a window, and when he's booting up his machine, he can't see anything but a blur.

    His solution? He bought a two-port monitor selector, and hooked up his old 15" CRT as well, and just keeps it on the floor next to his desk for when he needs it for command-line stuff.

    However, the specs of this LCD show it goes down to 640x480 in portrait mode, which is cool by me.

    And if anyone feels like balking at the sub-80hz refresh rates, try finding something higher in an LCD screen. Mine is a 17" IBM LCD, and only goes to 1280x1024 at 70Hz.

    • Refresh rates? (Score:4, Informative)

      by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:43AM (#3443364)
      Perhaps that's because LCD's don't have refresh rates? The are not driven by an electron beam scanning back and forth?

      IF your LCD has a 'refresh rate' of 70hz that just means that the conversion circuitry that takes your analog VGA signal works at 70hz. There is absolutely no reason to make it work any faster, because the effect does not propagate to the visible screen...

      • Re:Refresh rates? (Score:2, Informative)

        by WhaDaYaKnow ( 563683 )
        Perhaps that's because LCD's don't have refresh rates? The are not driven by an electron beam scanning back and forth?

        IF your LCD has a 'refresh rate' of 70hz that just means that the conversion circuitry that takes your analog VGA signal works at 70hz. There is absolutely no reason to make it work any faster, because the effect does not propagate to the visible screen...

        Well, it's not uncommon that total bullshit is moderated up to +5 informative here.

        Next time back up your stuff with some links [samsungmonitor.com] that supports what you are saying?

        LCDs DO have a refresh (or update) rate, and the pattern actually is similar to an electron beam in non-interlaced mode. The difference is that it's not as noticable (see link as for why). It's driven by a dot-clock which drives the speed at which the individual pixels on the LCD are updated.

        Your magic 'conversion circuitry' is what actually drives the dot-clock (at least in a properly designed LCD)

        The biggest issue with LCDs is lag of the pixels (especially when going from 'turned on' - black, to 'turned off' - white). It doesn't make sense the update an LCD much faster than the response time of the Liquid Crystal, but that all depends on the specific LCD.

    • He wouldn't have this problem if he had it hooked up to an SGI...

      I bought a couple nice 19" monitors from a dot com that went belly up for $40 each. Beats what you'd pay in just SHIPPING on eBay

      Granted, my monitors say SONY, HITACHI and GSAT on them, instead of having the SGI logo...

  • A Decent Used Car??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by hansendc ( 95162 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:33AM (#3443279) Homepage
    That is the nearly half the price for a modern luxury car [kia.com]!!! What more could you ask for?
  • I don't understand how NEC can charge so much for their monitors. The Samsung 21" LCD display is cheaper (More than $1000 cheaper!) and better.
  • "I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time"

    What's wrong with that? My 19in CRT is set to 1280x1024... I would love to have a higher resolution just for MS Visual Studio and all it's useful debugging windows. I could up the resolution on my current monitor, but my eyes don't like that. These big LCDs sound perfect though.

  • Poor specs? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JoshMKiV ( 548790 )
    300:1 contrast ratio, and no digital (DVI) inputs? Boggle...

    I'd rather two 17" Planars for just over $1000.

    Anyone else use a ThinkPad with 15" screen with native 1600x1200 resolution? My eyes hurt...

  • Refresh rate question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by iiii ( 541004 )
    Just reading the specs on this baby, and I notice that it doesn't support its highest refresh rate at its highest resolution. I've noticed this on lots of monitors. Can anyone explain why this is so?
    • There is no such thing as plain 'refresh rate'.

      There will be a maximum specified horizontal (measured in Khz) and vertical (measured in Hz) frequencies.

      Vertical is what you normally call refresh rate.

      Now, if you start putting, say, 1600x1200, that's 1200 scanlines per screen. Take your horizontal frequency, muliply it by those 1200 horizontal lines that have to be drawn before each vertical refresh, and you'll find where the limiting factor is.

      The monitor can't scan horizontally fast enough to keep up with it's maximum vertical rate at high resolutions.

  • swap? (Score:3, Funny)

    by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:35AM (#3443301) Journal
    Anyone want to swap an NEC MultiSync LCD 2110 for my car? It's a pretty decent '74 Mazda.
    Anyone?

  • Sun Microsystems (Score:2, Interesting)

    by adamjaskie ( 310474 )
    Sun Microsystems has a nice LCD monitor. It is 24.1 inches, 1920x1200, and can take input from many connectors (DVI-D, 13W3, HD-15 [with 13W3 adaptor] svideo, etc) it also has a built in 4 port USB hub. Havent checked prices anywhere, but it looks expensive.
  • Perhaps it would be more feasable to scale the GUI of applications to a more desireable or readable size? If changing resolutions is not practical for LCDs, perhaps we will see practical app zooming technology in new versions of all our favorire OSes (Or WMs). The one drawback is that everything would either be displayed as a vector, which would be a major step for anything besides TrueType fonts, and the bitmapped portions would need precious processor power to anti-alias...
  • Apple's monitor is larger, nicer-looking, high-resolution, and cheaper. Why is this POS worth a news story?
  • The resolution isn't forced upon you; you can divide each dimension's resolution by 2 and have 800x600 with the display doing any scaling and while using the entire display. I do this with my SGI 1600SW, although its reduced resolution is 800x512. Stil works fine.

  • Sorry /., but an 89 ford tempo is not considered a good used car by most people :P
  • Don't they do 1600x1200 or whatever appropriate scale? Its a lot bigger and about the same cost, give or take 600 bucks.

  • awesome (Score:3, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:41AM (#3443348) Homepage Journal
    I can't wait until these things are affordable enough, and high res enough, to replace CRTs. And when I am old I can talk about the "bad old days" when we had these huge power-hungry things we had to lug around. It will be analogous to people talking about punch cards today.

    Also, CDs will no longer exist: pervasive networking will have replaced removeable media.

    And no keyboards, replaced by voice/thought recognition.

    And "paper" will only be used by some backward governments and lone survivalist types.

    We will all wear white pants.

  • 1600x1200 all day?? (Score:4, Informative)

    by qurob ( 543434 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:42AM (#3443354) Homepage

    (From the specs)

    Resolutions Supported:

    Landscape:
     720 x 400 @ 70 Hz
    640 x 480 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    800 x 600* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
    832 x 624* @ 75 Hz
    1024 x 768* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    1280 x 960 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz

    Portrait:
    480 x 640 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    600 x 800* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
    624 x 832* @ 75 Hz
    768 x 1024* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    960 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    1024 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
    1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz

    • Re:1600x1200 all day?? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Diamon ( 13013 )
      (From the review)

      The last issue we had was that the display looked perfect at 1600x1200, but if you scale down to any other resolution everything started to look pretty bad.
      • Which is the case for ANY LCD panel. Even my 15" dell laptop looks like CRAP at any resolution other than 1400x1050.
      • I have an Thinkpad T21. Native resolution at 1400x1050 is great. Scaling down to most resolutions is awful because of pixel interpolation. However, 640x480 looks just fine since the pixels are simply doubled. This leaves a black border around the screen but it is nice for games since the 3d graphics are too hot on this rig.

        I would guess that the one resolution that would look great on this monitor is 800x600, since it would only require pixel doubling rather than some ugly interpolation. They don't mention whether they actually tried this resolution, and I am guessing that they didn't, because it would have surprised them. It would look just fine. Of course 800x600 is so small that it would be pretty useless for anything other than gaming with a crappy 3d card.

    • (also from the specs)

      *Due to the interpolation necessary for
      operation of LCD panel resolutions at
      full screen, it is recommended that LCD
      monitors utilize the full resolution
      capability of the panel and are operated
      at their optimal or maximum resolution
      when text or fine lines are being viewed

      Recommended Resolution:
      Landscape: 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
      Portrait: 1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz

  • Howzabout 24" for $4500 (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From Sun:

    http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hw/perip he rals/monitors.html

    24.1-Inch LCD Flat Panel Monitor

    * 24.1-inch LCD (equivalent to 27.5" CRT)
    * 0.27mm pixel pitch
    * 24-bit color, 256 gray scale levels, 16.7M colors
    * Up to 1920x1200 @ 60Hz (16:10 aspect ratio mode)
    * DVI-D, 13W3, S-Video and C-Video Input connectors
    * Detachable Cables included:
    o 3-meter detachable DVI-D
    o 2-meter detachable 13W3 video
    o 1.8-Meter detachable 13W3 to HD-15
    o S-Video, C-Video and USB (upstream) cables
    * 4-port USB hub
    * 588mm(W)x518/468mm(H)x277mm(D) w/stand
    * Weight: ~29.5lbs., Power ~95W

  • Analog interface? Feh. Maybe they have improved in the last 3 years, but after my first analog-interfaced LCD monitor, I said 'never again'.

    All digital, all the time, baby. I purchased two SGI 1600SW's in 1999 and 2000, and have never looked back.

  • Can you hook your decent used car to your computer as a display?
  • Thats nothing! i bought my 79 Buick Regal for $200! and my muffler only fell off once!
  • This monitor is over THREE THOUSAND US DOLLARS and it doesn't even have [slcentral.com] a DVI INPUT?!

    What the hell was NEC thinking?!?!
  • This monitor can be used in Portrait or Landscape Mode, so if you need that feature, the higher price might be justified.
  • ...use the font tag with absolute size values that break resizing by some browsers. (Netscape 4.x has this problem. Galeon, based on Mozilla, doesn't.)

  • Repeating myself and others.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blankmange ( 571591 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:54AM (#3443449)
    $3800.00 for a monitor (that has limitations pointed out by the rest of /.) is ridiculous! No DVI, fixed resolution, plus it is an LCD (cannot match CRT/Trinitron for crisp text, motion, etc). I would love to see their sales projections on something like this. Granted, there will be that handful of geewhizzers who jump on this, but the rest of us can make a complete system with $3800.00... easily!
    • okay, no DVI was bloody silly, there should be at least 2 DVI-I ports but lcd's are fixed resolution, thats just a limitation of the system. A ferrari can costs hundreds of thousands of pounds but can't go off road reliably, why dammit, for that kinda money I expect the thing to fly!

      you see my point? they aren't trying to deceive anyone but it's well known that lcd's have a fixed resolution and tend to look ugly in any others.

      crisp text? I've yet to see a CRT with text as crisp as an LCD. each pixel is discrete so text is as crisp as can be. old lcd's were crap at motion, thats agreed but new lcd's can be extremely good. the fastest pixel refresh rate I've seen is 25msec. my screen refreshes at 35msec and I've played quake on it with no problems (apart from my gfx card struggling a bit at 1280x1024 :). the display seemed perfectly able to keep up.

      yes, it's expensive but it's also bloody big. there is a limited market but I'm sure it's not aimed at the consumer, but at business where they have the need and the money for these things. as time goes on these things will get even better and even cheaper but bleeding edge stuff always costs a packet.

      dave

  • Dell 20" LCD is MUCH cheaper... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gslobber ( 146327 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @10:56AM (#3443456)
    I use a Dell 2000fp at work (21.1", native 1600 x 1200 resolution). It's an amazing display and can be had for as little as $1270 (see here [gotapex.com] for details). Even without the special offers, the list price is $1,599 -- half the price of the NEC.

  • 1600x1200? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by br0ken by design ( 576303 )
    I'd like to have a 3200x2400+ 19" display. The thought of not needing to antialias
    anything because my screen is 150+ dpi makes me want to sp00ge.
    My main complaint against LCDs right now is that they aren't very high resolution for the
    price. I'm definately not going to drop $3k for a display that only does 1600x1200.

    But hey, I'm a rez freak...I run my 19" CRT at some odd resolution like 1920x1200[1]
    just to squeeze out a few extra horizontal pixels at a reasonable refresh rate.
    Why? Because information wants to be wide.

    :wq
    [1]Yes, the aspect ratio is screwed up. So I compress the image vertically, much like
    letterboxing a widescreen movie...works pretty well if you don't mind text being small.
  • It only cost me $1150, and it's worked better than I could have imagined. I had my doubts about how games/video would look, but it's only slightly worse than a standard display. UT runs great at 1600x1200. Also, the 2000FP has four different inputs, D-SUB, DVI, SVIDEO, and COMPOSITE.

    I would recommend the 2000FP over this piece of junk NEC anyday.

  • Dead pixels (Score:5, Informative)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @11:10AM (#3443546) Homepage Journal
    In the article, the author complains about dead pixels (though not loudly) and expresses a wish that NEC ship monitors without dead pixels.

    It won't happen. Almost all lCD monitors have dead pixels.

    An LCD monitor is, in effect, an IC that is several inches square. One flaw == 1 dead transistor == 1 dead pixel. Most LCD manufacturers will quote some number of dead pixels as "acceptable" - if your display has less than that many dead pixels they won't accept it back as bad.

    The only way around this is to increase the number of transistors on the display, and design some redundancy - if one transistor dies, the others for that pixel will take up the load. However, since a transistor can die on or off, it gets to be very difficult to design the circuit such that no matter how the transistor dies, the circuit works.

    • Re:Dead pixels (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @11:26AM (#3443657) Homepage

      As a point of reference, Apple's official pixel tolerance count for the new 15" LCD iMac screen is six -- you need to have six (6) dead pixels before Apple will replace the screen. That's why I always suggest to my friends who are interested in LCD monitors (or new iMacs) that they go to a store and check one out before purchase. LCD monitors are expensive enough that any decent salesperson wouldn't blink an eye if you said you wanted to unpack the merchandise and hook up the screen before plunking down your hard earned cash. If it were me, I'd even bring a burned CD with one of those LCD checking utilities that cycle through the RGB colors (then white and black) to give it the once over. Dead pixels are annoying.

      ~jeff

      • Re:Dead pixels (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Overzeetop ( 214511 )
        More annoying than dead pixels are "hot" pixels - or those that are always on. Actually, I believe the image in the article shows a hot, rather than dead, pixel. IMHO, a dead pixel in against a field of white is far less noticable than a hot pixel on a field of black.

        6 dead is a pretty loose number if hot pixels are counted, and no adjacent/near/location sensitive data is considered. Six hot green pixels near the middle of the screen would be practically unworkable.
        • Maybe my knoweldge of LCD displays is lacking, but wouldn't a pixel that's always displaying white be always off?

          It was my understanding that the liquid crystal filtered the white light from the backlight to produce the desired color.

  • Might be worth the price (Score:3, Insightful)

    by billh ( 85947 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @11:14AM (#3443569)
    I purchased an NEC MultiSync XP21 years and years ago. It was $2500 or so, way, WAAAAY out of my price range at the time. I thought at the time that not getting headaches and retaining my vision were worth the price.

    Well, they were. Although it is a little dimmer than it used to be, I still use the monitor daily, at a high refresh rate, and my vision is still what it used to be. The only time I get eyestrain is when I am forced to work on smaller monitors, or on a system with a low refresh rate.

    Sometimes things like this are worth the price.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I have an Inspiron 8100, and I concur.

      I have the 15.1 inch XGA+, I believe, running at 1600x1200 at 32 bit color. It is probably the BEST display I have ever used. I will probably never go back to a standard monitor.

      Most people don't see the benifit of a high resolution, but I think that I prefer a high resolution because I use multiple small windows instead of one large one at a time.
  • The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time

    Yeah, I love how the LEDs on Apple displays resize themselves whenever you switch resolutions!

  • Spend $500 more and get a 1920x1200 24" Samsung (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @11:24AM (#3443642)
    NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car?

    I just bought a 24" 1920x1200 resolution Samsung SyncMaster 240T for $4200 (literally, I just got it yesterday).

    If you are spending $3800 on a big monitor, for goodness sake spend the extra $500 and get an extra 3 inches in size and the ability to support true 1080i HD resolution up front. I work on 1600x1024 monitors during the day, and let me tell you, the added space 1920x1200 gets you is worth the price difference alone. The extra size (21" vs. 24") is also well worth the price difference.
    And unlike the Apple monitor, it has standard video interfaces (analog VGA, DVI-D, s-video and RCA video, though the latter two are IMHO unimportant) without a troublesome dongle.

    Driving 1920x1200 through a DVI-D port from an NVidia card under XFree 4.2 on a gentoo GNU/Linux makes watching those old Babylon 5 divx's a real treat (even if the increased size makes some of the artifacts visible :).
  • I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time

    Getting an LCD doesn't mean you have to give up your old monitor. While 1600x1200 native mode on a DVI output is fantastic, I also like to play games. My Dell fp2000 (just over $1200 shipped during the last special) is running out of my Radeon 8500 DVI out. While I could play games at a lower res, (with only a little screen tearing -- the Dell is a *fast* 25ms pixel refresh) I also have my 19" CRT hooked up to the same card. So for games -- CRT. For everything else - dual screens, but mainly the Dell. Make the CRT your primary and you don't have to do anything - just start the game up and it deactivates the LCD.
  • How exactly is $3800 "scant"?

    scant

    adj : less than the correct or legal or full amount often deliberately so; "a light pound"; "a scant cup of sugar"; "regularly gives short weight" [syn: light, scant(p), short] v 1: work hastily or carelessly; deal with inadequately and superficially [syn: skimp] 2: limit in quality or quantity [syn: skimp] 3: supply sparingly, with a meager allowance [syn: stint, skimp]

    • c.f.

      sarcasm ('sär-"ka-z&m)

      1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain ["tired of continual sarcasms"]
      2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm ["the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800"]

      synonym see WIT
      source: Merriam-Webster [webster.com]
  • Maybe i'm missing something, but i don't really understand the logic behind purchasing a monitor like this. arguably, it's foot print is probably smaller (in terms of depth) and there may be some power saving issues (i wouldn't know) but, on the whole, it just doesn't make sense to me.

    I looked around at larger monitors for a long time- including LCDs, and the conclusion i came to is that it's just not worth it. for a quarter of the price of this monstrosity i can get two 17 inch monitors and a couple of nice video cards and run a dual display that gives me more screenspace. i just think it's a better solution.

    That's exactly what I did almost two years ago and i haven't regretted it since. i don't think i could ever go back to a single display at home- it would drive me nuts.

  • My demo 2110 review (Score:4, Informative)

    by lhand ( 30548 ) on Wednesday May 01, 2002 @12:19PM (#3444148)
    What timing. We had NEC send us this very same monitor to demo for a month. Several of us are checking it out. The guy before me had it for a few days and decided he'd better not keep using it or he'll get too used to having it and won't ever be able to give it back. He loved it and now he's back to his 18" LCD monitor. I'm five days into a review of this thing and have mixed feeling about it.

    I also have been using an 18" NEC LCD monitor until now and am impressed with the huge size of this thing. While the previous user used it on Windows 2000, I'm using it on XFree86 4. I like the amount of real estate it gives me to work with on the screen, but I noticed that it makes the bad fonts I have look even worse. (I don't have the antialiasing setup yet.)

    I also, like the reviewer, noticed the abundance of dead pixels on the screen. A quick count shows fifteen I see without really hunting around. I kept trying to wipe them off until I realised that they wern't dust specks, duh :). I hope that this is not a QC problem, but just a beat-up demo problem. I think the dead pixels are a real negative.

    Would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got the money to burn and find one with good pixels. Will I buy one for my personal system? Not anytime soon. Would I prefer to keep this to my current 18" LCD? No. The 18" is just fine for me. Plus, I'm planning to add a second monitor and Xinerama for the extra real estate.

    We're ordering some of these for our network guys, though. For them, the extra space on the screen will allow them to better visualize the network status. I don't think the programming staff (me) will be getting any soon.

    And that's fine with me.
  • How can anybody complain about too much resolution? That's like complaining about too much money.
  • Never mind that it's not much of a review--listing all the features printed on the box and in the manual and making a couple of comments hardly qualifies as a review. But the guy doesn't event know the first thing about LCD monitors. His two main gripes are the dead pixels and the interpolation necessary for lower resolutions.

    Dead pixels suck, and a zero-dead-pixels policy is an admirable goal indeed, but not an economic reality. Anyone familiar with the issue would know that and not even bother bringing it up--unless the review sample had 20 dead pixels or something.

    Interpolating lower resolutions is a fact of life for discrete pixel devices and will look nasty regardless of how it's done and by whom. Again, not something worth bringing up, unless witnessing a display that can miraculously do it with perfect quality. Using sub-pixel addressing might improve interpolation quality somewhat if done right, and there are better and worse approaches to it, but in the end it's still a hack.
  • A) Didn't read the article.
    B) Completely missed the point.
    C) Is the goatse.cx guy.
    D) A & B
    E) All of the above.

    I believe the correct answer is D, although arguably it could be E. Why am I bitching about CmdrTaco [goatse.cx] this time? Because of quotes like this:

    "I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time."

    Really, how much of an idiot can this guy be? First of all, it's a huge screen. The whole point of a large display is to use really high resolution (ie 1600x1200). Things do not look unusably tiny at that resolution on 19" and higher monitors. Of course, if you have a monitor that size then lower resolutions are a total waste! If that's not his complaint, then he should have noticed that it is a "MultiSync" monitor. That means it can handle different frequencies and hence, different resolutions. So you're not stuck in 1600x1200 as Taco [goatse.cx] erroneously complains. The article gives the specs, stating that it can go from 640x480 up to 1600x1200.

    Please... this is a news site for nerds. At the very least CmdrTaco [goatse.cx] could not say something so stupid that he sounds like his mommy bought him a 'puter for Christmas. "Why are the icons so small? I don't like that!"
  • Where do you live Taco? For $3800 you'll be driving a bile colored 1998 Oldsmobile Delta that smells like an ashtray.
  • Without wanting to show off, I just pushed by 19" CRT to one side to fit one of these [iiyama.com] as my primary display in a multi-head setup. And in the UK it cost only £1,100, which means that I can't see you yanks paying more than $1,800 or so for the same (YMMV).

    Apart from the pain of trying to find a card that will drive the DVI interface at UXGA (most top out at 1280x1024, a Radeon 8500 should do it) then I've got to say that it's a very nice screen (no dead pixels so far), and I have no problems with 1600x1200 - I've always preferred a higher resolution (that's what adjustable font size if for). A CRT may have truer colours, but the rock solid, flat, matt image is fine for me and emacs...

    --
    T
  • The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car?

    Ok I went out and bought a used car, now can anyone tell me how to replace my monitor with it?

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