Originally posted by wolfywolfbits
What's up with some LCDs having 600:1 contrast ratio???
I don't know if I believe them! Sony's top of the line LCDs have contrast ratios of 350, like Apples.
Also I'd like to see more about Apple response times, 40ms sounds WAY to high, if you can get 16ms else where. I know some manufactures cheat and put only the up time or down time to make it sound better than it is. The normal measurement is for a pixel to go up and down, so 16ms might in fact be 32ms+
I've used LCD displays for over five years, and have been very aggressive about learning what's important about them, who makes them, how they work, and so forth. Here's what I've learned.
"Pixel Response Time," "Brightness," "Contrast Ratio," and other manufacturer's published specs for LCDs are the most questionable and near-useless metrics I've ever run into with any hardware, insofar as giving any real indication of how well they actuall look and function, in real life.
I've owned and heavily used each of Apple's LCD offerings, since the first transluscent 15-incher to the latest 23-inch Cinema. (not the 20-incher, yet...). I've owned and used displays sold by IBM, Sony, LaCie, and a dozen others... and I've shopped or used dozens of others.
There are dozens of tiny little manufacturing details contributing huge variables to how well an LCD "looks" that are not, and cannot be expressed in industry standard specifications. I have a ProView 17-inch monitor sitting here now that has better published contrast, brightness, and even pixel repsonse than my 22-inch Cinema Display. But, guess what? The picture looks just horrible! But, I have a pair of two-year-old IBM 16-inchers here with "specs" even slightly less impressive than the 23-inch Cinema's, and they still look absolutely gorgeous, even after somewhere around 8 to 10,000 hours of use.
Now, when I buy LCDs, I've adopted a strict, "try it efore I buy it" method, where I go look at one before purchase.
This even applies to blurring and streaking when playing fast gaming images. I simply cannot find a reliable corrollation between published pixel response rates and the actual artifacts I can really see on any particular LCD. For instance, the cheapo ProView here has a spec of "32ms." This should be good, and clearly better then my 22-inch Cinema (with a "40 to 60ms" spec range). It's not. Both show some streaking on fast objects, but the ProView is noticeably worse.
I am a dedicated audiophile, and its ingrained in my nature to pay close attention to perfoamnce specs on hardware decisions. But, I have grown to learn that LCDds are a lot like loudspeajers in this regard: go play with them before you break out your credit card. Many times the specs are misleading... sometimes they are very, very misleading.
