Glossy vs. matte

Which coating do you normally prefer?

  • Glossy

    Votes: 20 58.8%

  • Matte

    Votes: 14 41.2%
  • Total voters
    34
I tend to buy matte. I feel picture quality is better on glossy but the visual experience is worse. In the dark with no reflection it works best but even the monitor light can reflect off a shirt or face back onto itself and for me that is annoying.
 
Matte is all I've owned since moving to PC displays, always heard glossy was awful and all you'd see is reflections.

Then I got a C2 for my desktop monitor and everything changed. Glossy is game changing with how good it looks IF you can control room lighting. I'm 1000% glossy for monitors from here on out. Combined with OLED, its just incredible. Textures on things seem to pop off the screen like they never did with those blurry matte coatings.
 
Darunion said:
I tend to buy matte. I feel picture quality is better on glossy but the visual experience is worse. In the dark with no reflection it works best but even the monitor light can reflect off a shirt or face back onto itself and for me that is annoying.
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This pretty much sums up my opinions on the matter. I've used both, I just prefer using matte screens most of the time. I don't have to worry nearly as much about where I place my desk/monitor in relation to windows, etc. I still tend to place things where the windows don't allow light to hit them directly, but even doing that glossy can still be annoying under all but the most ideal conditions.
 
People usually like matte believing it somehow magically makes incoming light go away instead of just being distributed over the panel. The real problem is the light no matter what coating you have, but as mentioned above, the choice between matte and glossy is probably mostly depending on where the monitor would be.

Then of course there are different kind of matte and glare coating as well. My Acer X27 is matte but still has the best AG coating I have ever seen, so it not like all matte coatings have to be bad...
 
Glossy and it's not even close, for me. I just can't stand sparkly white pages or reduced image quality. Have used both extensively for years.

However my office is perfect for glossy, and there is almost never any glare.
 
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The glare and reflections from Glossy monitors annoy me quite a bit, which is why I prefer Matte at this point. In ideal lighting conditions, I do think that glossy looks slightly better.

I'm running 6 monitors in my current setup, all Matte. If they were all Glossy, it's guaranteed that I'd get an annoying reflection off at least one or more of them no matter what I did.
 
Since having LCD's I have always had matte. Now I have the LG C2 with the glossy finish, and I find it phenomenal. I do have the environment for it, which makes a huge difference.
 
Zahua said:
Glossy and it's not even close, for me. I just can't stand sparkly white pages or reduced image quality. Have used both extensively for years.

However my office is perfect for glossy, and there is almost never any glare.
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I always surprises me that even on more high end expensive monitors, the AG filter quite often seems like some last minute job on the way out of the door. Obviously there are AG filters can can make even non glossy monitors not have that dreadful grain/sparkle but for some reason few seem to be using them. For cheap budget monitors I can understand it, but on $1000+ monitors, can a good AG coating really be that big part of the price?
 
Glossy 100%

it's not always possible though, due to the environment... sometimes matte is better. However, take the environment out of the equation and I'll go glossy every single time.
 
Matte just scatters the light across the entire panel instead of it being focused to one point. It destroys the contrast of any monitor, not to mention making the image sparkle or blur. Glossy or glass all the way.
 
It would be really interesting to see some interview or similar with some experts from manufacturers on how they actually reason with regards to AG filters etc, as to me it seems completely random often. For a cheap office monitor I can understand if you think that it might be in a typical office space but If you manufacture a high end gaming monitor and still seem to assume that it would only be used in a super bright office environment, i just don't seem the logic. And obviously there are some AG filters that are much better than others, like the one on my X27, why still use all the crappy ones? At least I have returned monitors ONLY for the reason that they had matte filters that sucked, which seems very unnecessary.

Of course you still have the underlying physics to deal with, that you either have to reflect or "absorb" incoming light, but that problem has been known for a few decades now and there should be some base knowledge on how to handle it.

And how come we don't have solutions with detachable filters in 2024, perhaps not for extreme monitors like the 57" Samsung, but for a flat 27/32" it does not seem like mission impossible and then just let the user decide.
 
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I've had matte coatings that were awfully grainy, like the display was dirty all the time. I've also had matte coatings that were very subtle.

Glossy is fine but it can be an issue during the summer. Even a light reflecting off a wall showed up as an unusable section my LG CX 48" OLED TV because the light on the wall was so bright. The TV was not facing any direct light source.

For me the only dealbreaker is the grainy matte coating. It would be nice to have more glossy options, but for me it doesn't really matter that much.
 
Loved the matte finish on my old Samsung rear projector. Was just beautiful. Perfect. And was until the end.

I do love the glossy black on this CX. It's pretty incredible. I think Samsung might have pioneered the mirror black look on its TVs years before. It can be quite striking. Always a fan with regard to direct view displays...

I do wish Samsung would add a polarizer to QD OLED if that's the gap in this regard.
 
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