Avera 40EQX10

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Nite_Hawk

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 3, 2005
Messages
69
Hi Guys,

Possibly against my better judgment I just ordered an Avera 40EQX10 40" 4K TV to replace my defunct Samsung 40KU6290. Fry's is having a sale right now where you can get it for $199.99 in store, but I was able to use google express with 15% off first order coupon for a total price of $187.67 after tax/shipping. I figure it nothing else it's a dirt cheap 4K TV to stick in the basement for the kids.

It should arrive some time next week so I'll try to give some feedback of how it compares vs the 6290 I used to have.

General thoughts based on Joshua Ruediger's and other reviews on amazon:

- Should do 4:4:4 chroma once "HDMI 4k" is set to "enhanced". Appears to support HDMI2 on 3 of the 4 HDMI ports.
- Sharpness and color are too high by default and must be reduced via the service menu (1 1 4 7 to get in).
- Might suffer from backlight bleed (and clouding?).
- Need to take a photo of the subpixel layout since it's still unclear what it really is.
- Joshua reports less black smearing vs Samsung (I definitely noticed this on my 6290)
- No idea what the input lag is, I don't have the means to test it accurately. Anecdotal reviews say "low".
- Bad sound (not a problem for me)
- Supposedly 178 degree viewing angles and 8ms response, but no information yet on the panel type.
 
AngryLobster said:
I have the 49 inch version. Service menu show it being a Samsung panel.

Other than the disgusting bezel and archaic firmware interface, not bad.
Click to expand...

Any opinoin on GTG response and/or black smearing during motion? I definitely noticed that on my 6290 before it broke. Too bad about the bezel. They use a picture of the 65" version in the description of the 40" version making it look much thinner than it really is. Still, for under $190 shipped it's hard to complain unless the panel is crap. Even if it lasts until the HDR displays are out that's a win.
 
jmandawg:

Just got mine this morning. I've been having trouble getting it to do 60Hz 4K, but that might not be the TV's fault (this is linux using the open source radeon drivers on a RX480).

Impressions so far: This thing is dim. On max (backlight) brightness it's about the same as the 3 year old 24" dell sitting next to it at 50%. Increasing "brightness" in the settings doesn't help, it just blows out highlights. The "HDR" claim is totally laughable. I took a look in the service menu (menu, 1, 1, 4, 7) and here's the system info for mine:

AT VERSION: 1.0.3
BUILD TIME: 2016-08-26 15:18:53
SW UPGRADE NAME: MSD3458_4M_AS358_33.bin
PANEL INFO: LSC400FN05_W
BOARD TYPE: BD_CVT_PC757
TUNER TYPE: MXL661_TUNER

Unfortunately I can't find any info on LSC400FN05_W. I'm going to hazzard a guess that this is the 99% RGB version of the LSC400FN05 based on this:

http://www.panelook.com/modelcompare.php?ids=29330,27905,26549,25151,25149

A couple of things I noticed while screwing around in the service menu:

- Turn sharpness down between 0 and 20. It helps dramatically with fonts.
- VIP darkens everything making an already dim image even darker.
- DLC makes the darks even darker, though only appears to have an effect if VIP is enabled.
- VIP (and DLC) really screw up black levels and gradients and seem to interact with other settings like brightness and contrast which also screw up levels.
- With VIP and DLC off I can get a semi-acceptable image, but darks are washed out even with an aggressive "dark" gamma curve.
- Still trying to figure out a way to make VIP look good. Might need modification to the color settings.
- There's a *lot* of stuff you can screw around with in the settings.
- GTG response time does in fact look like it's better than my old 6290, but the picture is notably dimmer and with less native contrast.

I'm going to keep screwing with it for now and see how good I can make it.
 
AngryLobster said:
To get 4K/60 there is a enhanced HDMI setting in the default menu (far right tab I believe) that needs to be enabled similar to Samsung TVs.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I do have that set, I imagine this is more related to the drivers I'm using under Linux. I'll see if switching to amdgpu-pro helps.

So in other news I'm finding that I can't permanantly disable noise-reduction and VIP. Every time I swtich inputs or turn the TV off/on it resets. If I can't figure that out this might be the end of the road for me since NR causing a lot of pixel flashing along high contrast boundaries.
 
My system info is exactly the same as yours:

AT VERSION: 1.0.3
BUILD TIME: 2016-08-26 15:18:53
SW UPGRADE NAME: MSD3458_4M_AS358_33.bin
PANEL INFO: LSC400FN05_W
BOARD TYPE: BD_CVT_PC757
TUNER TYPE: MXL661_TUNER

I can get 4:4:4 chroma on windows 10 with my rx480, but it is not crisp like on my JU6700.

I'm using the "quick brown fox" chroma test page and cannot get all the sections clear. http://www.avsforum.com/attachments/9759

I'm sure it is fine for gaming or movies but as a pc monitor it blows. I'm starting to wish i spent an extra $100 for a better one... Sometimes you can't trust the amazon reviews.
 
jmandawg:

I see the same thing with the test image, but I think I might be only doing 4:2:2 right now. I dumped the EDID info under linux and saw:

"Supported color formats: RGB 4:4:4, YCrCb 4:2:2"

Not sure if it matters but this is on HDMI 4. Can you check to make sure you are doing 4:4:4 RGB and not YCrCb? Apparently the ATI drivers under linux recently started liking to default to YCrCb if it's available. It doesn't appear to be easy to change in Linux but I think you can just set an option in the windows drivers. I'll see if I can override it in Linux tomorrow using a hacked EDID bin. Having said that, I more or less agree with your conclusion. This thing isn't shaping up to be a particularly great monitor. I doubt the contrast is anywhere close to the advertised 4000:1, and it's not that bright. It's really easy to get a terrible looking image if you have the wrong combination of brightness, contrast, color, VIP, DLC, and gamma. With enough tweaking you can get it to look "ok", but the contrast is still low. Even at that, I can't get it to persist some of the display settings in the service menu when switching inputs or power cycling.

Even if we manage to get it to do 4:4:4 chroma the other downsides are pretty serious. The only thing it has going for it over the KU6290/KU6300 is that the grey-to-grey response time does appear to be much lower (at least based on what I can recall from the KU6290).
 
I'm sure it's on RGB 4:4:4 there is an option in the radeon driver other settings on windows 10. Also tried YCbCr 4:4:4 and no difference. AMD had an issue with chroma 4:4:4 @60Hz in their old driver, and it seems they finally got it working 6 months later, but i'm not sure fixes trickled down to the linux drivers yet. There are multiple reports but you can start here: https://community.amd.com/thread/204227

Nonetheless i've tried with the 1060gtx on RGB 4:4:4 and it's the same, mess of pixels close up.... I think i'm going to return this and just pony up the cash for a KU6290 or wait for a deal on one.

btw, i have the same issues of some of the settings not saving after the TV is turned off, and i have no clue what the "Picture Curve" settings are for, they only take affect if you actually modify them. I've come to the realization that besides being able to adjust the sharpness, the service menu is useless.
 
So the weirdest thing, in the driver settings I put the display to portrait mode and the chroma test looks perfect, put it back in landscape mode and it looks like crap.
I suspect these displays are supposed to be used in portrait mode (maybe that is what the "-w" on the end of the panel id means) maybe they got a discount on them or something since nobody needs portrait displays.

Also the subpixel layout is V-BGR (vertical) on the Avera, on my JU6700 it's BGR (horizontal).

Time for bed. Let me know if you figure anything out.
 
jmandawg said:
So the weirdest thing, in the driver settings I put the display to portrait mode and the chroma test looks perfect, put it back in landscape mode and it looks like crap.
I suspect these displays are supposed to be used in portrait mode (maybe that is what the "-w" on the end of the panel id means) maybe they got a discount on them or something since nobody needs portrait displays.

Also the subpixel layout is V-BGR (vertical) on the Avera, on my JU6700 it's BGR (horizontal).

Time for bed. Let me know if you figure anything out.
Click to expand...

I just went through and rotated my screen back and forth a bunch of times (losing some of my service menu settings each time). At times in both portrait and landscape mode it felt like it was "better" (not really true 4:4:4 though), and other times it was more like straight 4:2:2. I couldn't consistently tell why it looked different, though I did have VIP and NR switch on (and then I turned it off) each time I rotated it.

The ku6290 is definitely better than this display, but it's not perfect. The GTG is notably bad, and I suspect the PWM was getting to me on it. The Avera claims to be doing 25KHz PWM in the service menu (adjusting the frequency appeared to change it) which so far seems to be affecting me less. It also wasn't waking up when the system wakes up, at least on my system.
 
Well the adventure is over for me. Tonight I packed the Avera up and dropped it off at UPS to go back. I didn't really get any further with it. Between the dim backlight, the NR and VIP resetting every reboot I got pretty tired of bothering fiddling with the other settings. I think I got it looking about as good as you can get it without redoing the color settings. Even at that it looked pretty bad next to the old 24" Dell IPS sitting next to it. I will give it that the GTG transitions looked quite a bit better on this than the KU6290 I had, but that was about the only thing going for it.

I have a feeling I'll either be going for BenQ or LG 32" next, but we'll see.
 
Nite_Hawk said:
Well the adventure is over for me. Tonight I packed the Avera up and dropped it off at UPS to go back. I didn't really get any further with it. Between the dim backlight, the NR and VIP resetting every reboot I got pretty tired of bothering fiddling with the other settings. I think I got it looking about as good as you can get it without redoing the color settings. Even at that it looked pretty bad next to the old 24" Dell IPS sitting next to it. I will give it that the GTG transitions looked quite a bit better on this than the KU6290 I had, but that was about the only thing going for it.

I have a feeling I'll either be going for BenQ or LG 32" next, but we'll see.
Click to expand...


I ended up returning mine as well, the blue saturation was horrible. With the amount of time i wasted on that TV, i could have gotten a nice one. I'm going to wait for a quality 40-43" 4k TV. This thing is just not monitor quality.
 
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