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Do viewing angles lie?

S

selizo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
302
It seems to be that its a pretty subjective thing to measure and I have seen some lcds which hace decent advertised viewing angles but as soon as you move one cm from the center, one part of the screen grows darker. This is one thing that is preventing me from buying one. I'm not too sensative to the ghosting but the fact that I can't comfortably move my eyes around the screen without it shifting colors bothers me....
 
It's only TN panels that have very narrow viewing angles. IPS and VA are pretty good. Yes, manufacturers do lie when they advertise 160 degrees for vertical viewing angles of their TN panels because they don't measure it in a standard way.
 
"lie" is such a strong word... it more like "being subjective" or "relative" :D
 
How can you measure it differently? I always thought angle is angle ;) .
 
Icheb said:
How can you measure it differently? I always thought angle is angle ;) .
Click to expand...
The viewing angle value is not an exact number. I doesn't mean "the picture looks the same at 10 and 140 degrees because the viewing angles is 160 degrees". Manufactuers's specs take ONLY the changes of contrast into account so the viewing angle value says absolutely nothing about brightness and color shift that is introduced when you look at the screen from an angle. Standard method of measuring the viewing angles is the angle at which the contrast ratio drops to 10:1 in the center of the screen. Pretty useless, huh? To make it even more useless (and make their monitors look better on paper) some manufacturers use the contrast ratio 5:1 instead of 10:1. That's how it's possible to achieve 160 degrees in both directions on TN panels. Even though the actual viewing angles didn't increase, the specs on paper did and that's all that matters... to manufacturers at least.

If we were to measure the "real" viewing angle at which there is no colorshift and no drop in brightness and contrast, the vertical viewing angle of TN panels would be.... zero! Even if you sit directly in front of those screens, there will already be some color shift noticeable on top and bottom of the screen. Since we never "see zero", there must be some level of degradation that is considered acceptable. Unfortunetaly, it's the manufacturers that decide what's acceptable. The actual viewing angles of TN panels are unsufficient not only for any kind of work with colors but it's also annoying for web browsing and office applications. All IMO of course.
 
Answer to your question: YES, and big-time! The only panels you can look at without seeing a noticeable shift in colors or brightness are PVA/MVA panels, and to a lesser extent S-IPS. On the latter, at medium angles, blacks become purplish.
 
Yes, on IPS panel, it's only the blacks that shift in colour when viewed from the side. They are great. On the VA panels, while being even better than IPS, colours still shift at high angles. TN panels, however, are terrible with respect to angles. I would never purchase one myself, despite the fact that they are more responsive. Gaming isn't THAT important to me.
 
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