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High-resolution m Do you hanker after a really large high-resolution monitor for your PC? Maybe a 30-inch job with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels? Perhaps that’s too expensive and you may have wondered about using a 32-inch LCD TV instead? We wondered that too – so we purchased a Dell U3011 30-inch monitor and an LG 32LS5700 32-inch Smart TV and did a comparison. Who won? Read on! M ost staff members in the SILICON CHIP offices use two monitors with their PC, typically a 24-inch 1.6:1 aspect ratio hi-res (1920 x 1200 pixels) combined with a smaller monitor. For example, for the second monitor, I use an Acer 16:9 (1920 x 1080 pixel) in portrait mode. This mode is very good for reading emails, long documents or even scrolling through large directories. Indeed, given the format of most 18  Silicon Chip websites, portrait mode is more usable than landscape mode and the monitor takes up less desk space. Having two monitors means that you can have several files, directories and a whole bunch of stuff open and you can see it directly without having to use the Alt-tab key combination to switch between windows. It also means you can wipe over (select) a section of text and then drag it straight into a file you are working on. Anyway, enough of the advantages of having two or more monitors. Once you have worked in that way you will find working with a single screen is liking trying to touch type with one hand tied behind your back. But while 24-inch hi-res monitors are good, what about something bigger, say 30-inch? Six inches might not seem like a big increase but it gives a 56% increase in screen area, compared to a 24-inch (diagonal) monitor. And when you’re looking at websites with a lot of picture detail, like SILICON CHIP siliconchip.com.au monitor shoot-out In the red corner: LEO SIMPSON In the blue corner: NICHOLAS VINEN for example, that increase can make a big difference. But mere screen size is not the whole story. Ideally, you should have more pixels if you are going to a larger screen size, because otherwise the pixels are larger, which is a problem with fine detail material. Coarse pixels means that the fine detail of pictures tends to break up. That is why the 30-inch screen of choice, the Dell U3011, has a screen resolution of 2560 x 1600, compared siliconchip.com.au to a standard PC monitor’s resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels. That’s 77% more pixels and those pixels are smaller than the pixels on a 24-inch 1920 x 1200 monitor. More, smaller pixels means potentially much finer picture detail. Nicholas Vinen uses two 24-inch monitors in the SILICON CHIP office but uses two 30-inch Dell monitors when working at home (the show-off!). He likes the larger screens when he is designing large, densely packed PCBs or when he is programming. The larger The above photo shows an unretouched image, shot with a Nikon DSLR, of both screens operating side-by-side on my desk. They are displaying a typical double-page spread from the SILICON CHIP website. The LG 32LS5700 on the left; the larger (and significantly more expensive) Dell U3011 is on the right. Immediately obvious is the greater colour saturation on the Dell – but used individually, neither was a problem Also obvious (as you would expect) is the smaller image on the Dell. June 2013  19 . On the LG, access to the broad range of inputs is very good, as shown above and in the enlargement at right. There are the usual AV & component video inputs, a LAN socket, audio input and an optical audio output. At first glance the HDMI (4) and USB (3) sockets appear handily placed along the edge but its only when you plug in a cable – such as the HDMI shown above – that you realise they protrude past the side of the TV. higher-resolution screen can display many more lines of code. Problem is, not all computers can drive 2560 x 1600 pixel monitors. Late model desktops generally can but not via HDMI. Instead, you need a video card with a dual-link DVI output socket. This looks similar to a normal DVI socket but it has more active pins. dongle for the TV. Anyway, the additional cost was relatively slight so the deal was done for less than $500. Compared to the price of a 30-inch Dell monitor, that’s a bargain. Nicholas Vinen disagrees, as you will see elsewhere in this article. When I hooked it up to my Acer laptop, I was delighted. The Acer immediately recognised the LG TV when connected via a HDMI cable and the impact of that big bright screen is sensational. At a viewing distance of about 90cm, I can certainly discard the glasses and I am not in any way aware of the somewhat larger pixels (than on a 24inch screen). Another big advantage of using a TV set linked by HDMI is that you get sound as well. That means you don’t need to rely on the laptop’s internal speakers or separate powered speakers in the case of a desktop PC; less clutter on the desk is good. Having said that, the sound quality of virtually all flat-panel TV is generally pretty mediocre and the LG Smart TV is no different in that regard. Mind you, 30-inch hi-res monitors don’t come with in-built speakers so chalk that up as a big tick for the 32-inch TV set approach. Furthermore, the LG Smart TV’s LCD screen is an IPS panel (same as the expensive Dell 30-inch monitor). IPS stands for “in-plane switching” and was developed by Hitachi. IPS panels have advantages over the What about a 32-inch LCD TV? Apart from needing a dual DVI signal, 30-inch 2560 x 1600 pixel monitors are expensive beasts, typically costing well over $1000. Not only that, they tend to be power hungry. That got me thinking about a 32-inch LCD TV. At home I run an Acer Aspire 5560G 2.4GHz quad-core laptop PC driving a Benq 24-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel monitor. The external monitor completely out-classes the laptop’s 15.6-inch screen which only has a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and inferior brightness and contrast to boot. Still, the combination gave me two screens and the advantages thereof. However, once we launched the new SILICON CHIP website with its 2-pageto-view presentation, it became apparent that a bigger screen than 24 inches was desirable for best viewing. Partly, the reason for that is that I need glasses for reading and computer use and I like to take my glasses off when browsing the internet – that is the advantage of a big screen. A 3220  Silicon Chip inch screen would be so much better, I thought. And so it was that after a good deal of internet research and price-checking, I ended up at the local branch of Harvey Norman to check out competing LG and Samsung 32-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel TVs. I should say at this stage that not all current 32-inch LCD models are 1920 x 1080 pixels. The cheaper models still tend to be 1366 x 768 pixels; OK for casual TV viewing but certainly not as a computer monitor. There was not much to differentiate between the competing LG and Samsung models so I asked the knowledgeable salesman which one he would choose. He directed me to the top-of-the-line LG 32-inch set, the model 32LS5700, a so-called Smart TV. It had a lot of extra features, most of which did not have much immediate interest but it had a 100Hz refresh rate instead of 50Hz and a feature called “True-Motion” which gives smoother rendition of rapid motion when watching videos. Apart from that it can be used to browse the internet in its own right, provided you can connect an Ethernet cable or have WiFi and a suitable siliconchip.com.au By contrast, the connectors to the Dell are not quite so accessible. They’re all there, of course, but you really have to lay the monitor flat on its face to be able to plug in any leads – it’s awful hard to do it when you cannot see the sockets! Fortunately, it’s not something you have to do every day. Here the choices are DVI (2), VGA, HDMI (2), component video, plus USB, audio and Displayport sockets. There’s also a power output for speakers. earlier “twisted nematic” types in that they don’t have marked colour shift when viewed off axis and their overall colour reproduction is better. Moreover, recent IPS panels have much faster response times; previously this was a disadvantage. Over-scan Still, there are traps and many 32inch TVs will disappoint when you try to use them as a PC monitor. One littleknown reason is over-scan. Most TV sets actually over-scan the broadcast signal by about 5%. What this means is that the edges of the “expected” picture are “lopped off”. This is a hangover from the days when all TV sets were CRTs (cathode ray tubes). Because the CRTs aged or the mains voltage varied, the TV set designers made sure that the broadcast picture always filled the screen by over-scanning. Over-scanning means that a Windows screen is likely to have the task bars at top and bottom of the screen only partly visible. That means that you cannot minimise an application or close it down using your mouse. To fix this problem you need to go into the TV’s menu system to select “Aspect ratio” or something similar. What you are looking for is “Just Scan” mode which means that a 16 x 9 picture will exactly fill the screen. Before purchasing a 32-inch flatpanel TV, you need to check that it has Just Scan mode or will not over-scan a 16 x 9 aspect picture. Latency problems, too When I started using the 32-inch TV as my main screen I noticed a strange problem. The mouse seemed to float siliconchip.com.au all over the place as I moved it but its motion was still precise on the laptop screen. When used with a desktop computer, the mouse worked fine when on the Benq 24-inch LCD monitor but became all floaty when I moved it over to the 32-inch screen. As an aside, I still find it fascinating to have the mouse move from one screen to another, as if you have a super-wide screen split between two monitors (which is essentially what you get when using two monitors in “extended” as opposed to “duplicate” mode). So what was going on? The problem became more noticeable when I happened to operate both monitors in “duplicate” mode (ie, same picture on both screens). When scrolling down the picture with the mouse the PC monitor would respond precisely to the mouse whereas the 32-inch TV would lag seriously behind. Ah hah! I had a latency problem in the 32-inch TV. Latency is really a problem for gamers because the screen may not respond quickly enough to the mouse or game console commands. The solution was to go into the set’s Picture menu and switch it to Game mode. Again, some or many 32-inch sets may not have this facility so you need to check before you buy. about 35W so with two monitors, that means 70 watts on top of that pulled by the desktop machine itself. Still, we have recently upgraded some of the desktop machines and they are more efficient (and much faster) than the old machines so the overall electricity consumption in the SILICON CHIP offices has not changed by much. So how power-hungry is the LG Smart TV? Answer: it is quite good. In standby, it draws a piffling 180mW (milliwatts) or thereabouts. In normal use, it pulls less than 50W although you can reduce that by playing around with contrast and brightness settings. If the laptop goes into sleep mode, the LG will display “no signal” on the screen and reduce the power draw to 30W. Ultimately it drops into standby (ie, 180mW) after a while. To resume operation when the laptop wakes up you have to press the power button on the infrared remote or on the bottom righthand edge of the screen. Just in case you think 50W is a bit high, the Dell 30-inch monitor pulls about 160W. This is mainly due to the fact that it uses fluorescent back-lighting. The LG uses LED edge-lighting. This may not be quite as uniform as the Dell but it is perfectly acceptable. Energy consumption So after tweaking some of the picture and sound settings, I was happy. At least I was until I tried watching TV while I worked on emails. That was when it didn’t work, due to severe interference from hash radiated by the HDMI cable. It turns out that this is a well-known problem. The While having two monitors on a desk is good from a productivity standpoint, it does mean more energy consumption, something I am very conscious of as electricity tariffs continue rising. Benq 24-inch hi-res monitors pull Watching TV June 2013  21 solution is to make sure you have a well-shielded and terminated antenna fly-lead and a shielded HDMI cable. In my case though, the shielded cable was not the complete answer because there was still some interference on the channels that I most wanted to watch: SBS and ABC. That’s Sod’s Law at work! I was able to get some improvement by snapping a couple of filter inductors over the HDMI cable but there are still times when I simply must disconnect the HDMI cable if I want to watc h TV while I work on the laptop. when viewing the same programs via my laptop. Why? I have not been able to work that out. Given that I am quite happy with using this TV set as a large monitor, I asked Nicholas why he decided to spend so much more on a display which is actually smaller. His response was to quote Top Gear presenter James May (never a good sign): “As you would expect, I have done this properly.” At the risk of getting a detailed and tedious response (a la James May), I shall let him take over and explain. He even sounds like James May.... (In fact, he is even hirsute like J. M.) Smart TV operation Of course, if you have a “Smart TV” why not use it as a smart TV? That’s what I thought too but so-called Smart TVs can be anything but “smart”. I have two smart TVs in my household and they are supposed to be good for video on demand, watching YouTube videos, Skype video and number of other services, besides being able to be used for general internet surfing. However, you don’t have to use the Smart TV for these functions for very long before you quickly come to the conclusion that a good laptop or desktop PC is far superior in virtually every aspect. For example, when using Smart TV functions you quickly find that the standard TV remote control does not function well. You need a pointing device and if you are surfing the internet, browsing though YouTube videos or searching for shows on SBS or ABC iView, you need to be able to enter text. With that in mind, I purchased the matching LG AN-MR300 remote control. This so-called “Magic Remote” is a UHF (2.4GHz) device with a matching USB dongle which plugs into the back of the TV. The LG TV finds it as soon as it is powered up and you get large red pointer on the screen. The remote has a MEMS chips so as you wave it, the pointer moves from side to side. You can then hover the pointer over a section or block on the screen and click the scroll wheel to select it. If you place the pointer in a section of the screen where text has to be entered, you just click the scroll wheel and it brings up a keyboard on the screen. You can then enter text laboriously, by “hunting and pecking”. 22  Silicon Chip Nicholas responds: LG’s futuristic AN-MR300 remote control. It’s called a “magic” remote but we didn’t find it too magical . . . Life really is too short for this sort of nonsense. The scroll wheel is supposed to let you scroll down menus and screens but it only works some of the time. Considering that the LG’s Magic Remote costs over $70, it is far from being a magic device. I have also tried two 2.4GHz keyboards which are supposed to be ideal for use with Smart TVs. One had a trackball and scroll wheel while the other a touch pad for mouse operations. Both used used a tiny USB dongle which plugged into the rear of the LG TV set. But both were less than satisfactory. Sure, the LG TV recognised them both and brought up the same large red pointer on the screen and you could move it around somewhat better than with the LG Magic Remote but neither would let me use their keyboard to enter text. Why? Dunno. Maybe that will be fixed in the next series of Smart TVs from LG. All of which would persuade me that the “Smart TV” in its present stage of development leaves a lot to be desired, especially when comparing the same functions via a PC. The only apparent advantage of the Smart TV is that it gives a better quality picture when viewing programs on iView and SBS on Demand than it does The difference between the two monitors is really like night and day. To start with, the Dell U3011 has twice as many pixels as a 1080p display; 2560 x 1600 = 4 million compared to 2 million. So if you have reasonably good vision and sit within about half a metre of the screen then you will get crisper text, better-defined graphics and overall, can fit more content on the screen before it becomes unusable. As mentioned earlier, this is especially apparent when doing a task such as PCB layout where you can zoom out and get a wider view of the PCB while still being able to differentiate the tracks, read component labels and so on. But it’s also useful when working in a text editor, viewing or editing photos or any number of other tasks. Also, the pixels on Leo’s TV are so big that with my (relatively) young eyes, when sitting close to it I can see the individual red, green and blue subpixels. That’s very distracting, especially when dealing with high-contrast situations like word processing (black on white text). The U3011’s viewing angle is excellent at 178°, both horizontally and vertically, thanks to its in-plane switching (IPS) panel. While some dimming is apparent if you are viewing it from an extreme angle, there is no colour shifting. That can be a real problem with cheaper panels (even some IPS types) and having a good viewing angle is critical with such a large monitor because if you are relatively close to it, no matter where you park your head, you will be looking at some of the screen at an angle. siliconchip.com.au Full range of PICAXE products in stock now! PICAXE Chips, Starter Packs, Project Boards, Experimenter Kits, Books, Software and Accessories. PICAXE 2x16 and 4x20 OLED Displays OLED displays provide much brighter displays, better viewing angles and lower current consumption making them a great alternative to LCD’s. PICAXE Starter Packs available for 08M2, 14M2, 18M2, 20M2, 28X2 and 40X2 Microprocessors. This module allows PICAXE projects to display (yellow on black) text interfacing via one single serial line or I²C bus. PICAXE-18M2 chip is provided pre-programmed with the open-source AXE133 firmware. For pricing and to shop online, visit www.wiltronics.com.au Ph: (03) 5334 2513 | Email: sales<at>wiltronics.com.au Also, as mentioned earlier, being back-lit rather than edge-lit, the Dell monitor has good brightness uniformity despite its large size. Colour accuracy There’s also the issue of colour gamut (ie, range of colours which can be displayed) and colour display accuracy. Unlike many cheap LED-backlit LCD monitors, this one has very good colour reproduction although it does have a significant warm-up time (a few minutes) to get to full brightness and during this time, colour display will be less accurate. In theory, CCFL backlights don’t have as long a life span as LEDs but I have an older 76cm Dell (3007WFP) which has been in constant use for over five years (at around half brightness) and does not show any obvious signs of backlight dimming or significant colour shift. Anyway, getting back to why my monitor is so much better than Leo’s... its gamut is 99% of the Adobe RGB colour space and 100% of the sRGB colour space. While it isn’t calibrated for topnotch colour accuracy (like, say, a very expensive Eizo monitor), it does have fairly strict specifications for initial colour accuracy and comes with a graph showing both greyscale and spot colour accuracy from the factory. So for jobs like photo editing (or even just viewing) it’s pretty good and certainly way better than your typical TV or monitor. siliconchip.com.au Also, I much prefer its 16:10 aspect ratio to the 16:9 aspect of widescreen TVs. Sure, they are great for watching TV shows and movies shot in 16:9 or 2.35:1 but when it comes to doing work on it, I find the taller aspect more appealing (it’s close to the golden ratio!) and also more practical, as things like text documents in portrait mode fit better. It’s also closer to the 3:2 aspect of photos from an SLR camera. Consider that a few years ago, a typical 56cm (22”) monitor had a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels and now most in this size are 1920 x 1080; while the prices have come down, you get 10% fewer vertical pixels to work with. In fact if I were to buy a 56cm (or similar size) monitor I would probably get a 16:10 model, even if it cost more. But you want the larger 76cm (30”) set if you can afford it – 56cm just looks so puny by comparison. My monitor also has an anti-glare coating which can be very helpful if you are going to be working with bright lights behind you, such as with an open window during the day. Shiny screens may look nice in the store and are admittedly a bit easier to clean but the reflections can really be a problem under some lighting conditions and will interfere with your viewing of what’s displayed on the screen. As Leo said, the Dell does consume more power than his TV (which has LED backlighting) but indoors, you probably won’t want to run it at full brightness – I certainly don’t. With a large monitor, when the screen is mostly white (eg, in a word processor), it feels a bit like you’re being interrogated (you know, like in the movies, with a light shining in your face). With the sort of brightness levels I actually use, its power consumption drops below 100W. If you consider that it has roughly twice the screen area and pixels as a 56cm (22”) monitor then by comparison, that isn’t bad at all. No lag Then we get to the delay.. or lack of it. Since it’s designed as a monitor, the Dell updates at 60Hz and there’s no internal processing so the delay from the computer updating its memory frame buffer to the pixels changing on the screen is only about 20ms, which is unnoticeable. The response time of the pixels themselves is 7-17ms which is pretty good and these days, virtually all LCD monitors have a fast enough response time for any application. Certainly there is no sign of motion blur with movies or games on this monitor. Even in games mode, Leo’s TV still has some lag although it’s much better than it was when he first hooked it up – it was so bad then that you’d move the mouse and then wait for the cursor on the screen to catch up with you! While it isn’t a TV, the U3011 does have a pretty good set of inputs including two digital video interfaces (dual link DVI – required to get the full resolution), two HDMI inputs, DisplayPort, VGA and component video. June 2013  23 In fact if you had a set-top box and external audio amplifier you probably could watch TV on it. HD videos look great, played back through the connected computer. Oh, and by the way, the U3011 has a built-in 4-port USB 2.0 hi-speed hub and compact flash/SD card reader. That’s a pretty common feature on monitors these days but TVs, not so much. Drawbacks There are a few things I don’t particularly like about the U3011 though. After you press the power button, it takes several seconds before the backlight turns on. There is a similar delay when performing other tasks such as switching inputs. Oh, and when you press the buttons, the monitor tends to flex and rotate on its stand which can be annoying. Also, you can’t get native resolution via HDMI, even if your laptop (or other signal source) supports HDMI 1.4. This is partially fixed with the new version of the monitor which is now on sale (see below). The best way to drive these monitors is still either Dual-link DVI or DisplayPort; Dual-link DVI is common on newer desktop computers and DisplayPort (or its mini version) is normally present on Apple laptops but with other brand laptops you may have trouble driving the monitor at its full resolution. We should also mention that while we find the high-end Dell monitors to be fairly reliable, if you do need to get it serviced you will have to go back to Dell for service, as access to service manuals and spares is poor. But you get a 3-year warranty with these monitors and they also have a zero dead pixel guarantee. So at least you’re covered for the first three years. update the electronics, adding USB 3.0 support, changing one of the HDMI inputs to Mini DisplayPort and upgrading the remaining HDMI support to version 1.4, so that it can handle the full resolution and not just 1920 x 1200. But we have heard that some users are reporting that they can’t get the full 60Hz refresh rate at 2560 x 1600 over HDMI and are stuck with about half that (even though HDMI 1.4 should support this resolution at up to 75Hz), so it seems like the HDMI input issue has not been fully solved. By the way, laptops with the Intel Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge chipsets generally have HDMI 1.4 outputs so are capable of driving monitors up to resolutions of at least 2560 x 1600 pixels. We expect the panel in the U3013 is similar to or even identical to the one used in the U3011. By the way, you can also get 76cm monitors from other manufacturers, such as Apple; some may be cheaper than the Dell and others more dear. The backlight, input selection and other electronics will vary between the different manufacturers. Why did we buy a Dell? Mainly because we got it for a good price... What’s the damage? List price for the U3013 is AUD $1800 but Dell periodically have sales on monitors. We got our new U3011 for under $1200, direct from Dell. This was just before the U3013 was introduced and was probably intended to get rid of old stock but we expect that the U3013 will eventually go on sale too. Even at full price though, if you use your computer a lot, especially for graphically intensive tasks, we feel that it’s money well spent. If you can’t stomach that price, a number of manufacturers (including Dell) offer 68cm (27”) monitors in a 16:9 aspect with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. I still prefer the 16:10 aspect and like the extra pixels but the difference in cost can be huge – the 27” monitor may be half the price of the 30”. And while the same provisos apply regarding the difficulty in driving a high-resolution monitor with some PCs, I would definitely go for one of these if I couldn’t afford the larger unit. SC New model Since we bought the U3011, that model has been discontinued and replaced with the U3013. As expected, they have moved to LED backlighting which reduces power consumption (down to 120W max, 60W typical) but have managed to maintain the excellent colour gamut. Presumably this is through the use of high-quality, wide-gamut LEDs. They have also taken the time to 24  Silicon Chip If you have a two-monitor setup, having one of them in “portrait” mode can not only save you desk space, it will give you a more readable display for things like correspondence, file listings, even some web pages and much more. The biggest problem is that not too many monitors these days have the hardware to mount in portrait mode, even though it’s easy to set up via the Windows (XP, 7 etc) “screen resolution” tab (right click on a blank screen). siliconchip.com.au