Viewing Angles - Is this normal?

[dhar2285]

I have a Sony SDM-S74 (DVI, Sapphire 9600XT), and I find the viewing angles to be pretty horrible when sitting right in front of the monitor at a distance of 24-30". The top of the screen is noticeably darker than the bottom, and there's always a sort of gradient present. What's really bugging me, though, are the left and right sides. The color white tends to yellow-brown toward the edges and achieves nominal brightness and purity if I reposition my head to look straight at it. The viewing angle is thus effectively 0 degrees at a normal viewing distance, and I'm extremely less than impressed. There's really no sweet spot at all. Are most 17" LCD monitors like this?

The problem is noticeable with just about any light color, but it's especially apparent with light yellow. For example, see the background (RGB(255,255,248)) at Tom's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/

Scroll to the bottom, and there's a nice empty area in the bottom right corner. With the IE window maximized, and looking straight ahead at the center of the monitor, this area is noticeably darker than the rest of the background. It lightens up when I move my head directly in front of it.

 

[Goat]

My L90D+ also suffers from the bottom being brighter than the top resulting in different shades of the same color. I would like an explanation too.

 

[dnenciu]

Any TN-Film display like the one used in the L90D+ (don't know about the sony one) is going to have bad viewing angles. That afects the colors between the top and bottom of the screen. Thats the price you pay for having an 8ms panel.

Read any review on this display and also compare the viewing angles posted and you will see what I meen. Also those panels do not display a ful 16m colors they only display 262k colors and the companies use technics to simulate the rest so that they can put in the specs that it displays 16.2m colors ( a real 24bit panel displays 16.7m).

 

[Roger]

Yes, that's normal for TN screens. Often people say "well, you're not going to look at the screen from anywhere but in front of it". What they don't realize is that the viewing angle spec only relates to the contrast ratio drop, not the color shift. IPS and PVA panels have MUCH wider viewing angles AND much less color shift. It's not "just 10 degrees difference compared to TN" as some people think.

 

[danbanger]

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=828113

 

[dhar2285]

Yes, that's normal for TN screens. Often people say "well, you're not going to look at the screen from anywhere but in front of it". What they don't realize is that the viewing angle spec only relates to the contrast ratio drop, not the color shift. IPS and PVA panels have MUCH wider viewing angles AND much less color shift. It's not "just 10 degrees difference compared to TN" as some people think.

Just to be clear, I was talking about being directly in front of the screen, 24-30" away. The good news is that I mostly got rid of the "fade to brown" anomaly that I was observing on the left and right sides when viewing from this position. When I first got the monitor, the colors seemed washed out, so I played around with the monitor's backlight/brightness/contrast/color temperature/gamma until I got colors reminiscent of the Trinitrons I've been using these last 10 years. Today I decided to start over, so I reset the monitor, and I found that playing with any of these but the backlight and color temp tended to exacerbate these problems I've described. I had better luck changing the video card settings. Can't seem to do anything about the top-to-bottom gradient, though.

Resetting the monitor also corrected the weird flicker I described in my earlier message here, Sony SDM-S74 DVI Flicker. While the monitor supports three fixed gamma values, I find I can reproduce this problem at will by changing the video card gamma; I expect if I were to plot the flicker intensity vs gamma value, I would get something like a sine wave. I'm wondering now if the flicker depends on both gamma and pattern color, so that for example, a blue version of this pattern would flicker for a gamma value at which the yellow version is quiet.