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All of my test were performed on the following system:
Pentium 3 1ghz Slot 1
768mb PC133 SDRAM
Asus P3B-F
ATI Radeon 32mb DDR AIW
60gb Seagate
I also confirmed my results on my main Athlon XP and Ti4600 system.
The 172X produces very clear and crisp colours on the desktop and in everything that I threw at it. It is a bright screen that I found to be quite easy on the eyes when staring at it for hours. In this respect it beats both of my CRT monitors hands down. Neither of them can match how sharp my desktop looks when using this LCD. My review sample had no dead or stuck pixels.
The On Screen Display was simply to navigate and contained all the relevant controls such as brightness, position, and various colour controls.
I did, however, find a significant annoyance when
surfing the net. If you scroll down a page slowly
the text and colours become lighter in shade. I found
this quite distracting. To soften the blow, this effect
is really only noticeable with darker text on a light
background and is a phenomenon that, to some degree,
afflicts most if not all LCD screens. In fact before
the advent of low persistence phosphors, it was also
known to affect some CRT screens too, and is simply
a result of the individual pixels not being able to
switch between on and off quickly enough as the text
scrolls by at speed. As a result the text looses its
contrast.
My TV watching was not hindered by any ghosting whatsoever. In 4 hours of Star Trek I was unable to notice anything but the perfect rendering of my favourite television shows. The same can be said for my Terminator 2 and Lexx dvds.
Gaming has always been the bane of LCDs and hopefully Samsung has finally managed to conquer it with their 12ms models. I fired up a couple of rounds of Unreal Tournament, Need for Speed III and The Moon Project to get my impressions.
In a slower paced game like The Moon Project there was absolutely no noticeable ghosting nor any problems whatsoever. The day to night transitions were made easier by the sharp colours and bright display so I could spy my enemy more easily and turn their tanks to rusting scrap heaps.
My wild police chases remained unhindered by any ghosting effects. When racing down a straightaway there was no issue but when cornering sharply I could see the scenery blur very slightly until I straightened out again. If I were to sit down and play a couple of rounds of this normally I'd never have noticed the blurring but on close inspection it is visible. This blur effect seems to be normal for LCDs and can only be considered a fault of the base technology. Throughout my gameplay I was unable to notice any ghosting whatsoever.
UT gave me the same results as I found in Need for Speed. No amount of whipping around or crazy stunts could get this LCD to produce any ghosting. If it weren't for the blur I'd drop my CRT any day for this monitor.
The driver cd included two pieces of software used to calibrate the monitor and provide the best possible colour for the user. I went through the setup process for both and found them to produce no difference in my experience.
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