heywood on 21/4/2012 at 04:50
We've all seen some TN screens with really bad viewing angles, mainly on laptops, but they're not all like that. Some of the best screens I've seen are TN panels used in high end Sony and Apple laptops.
And my old 24" HP monitor had no colour shifting, no light bleed, and good blacks across the full screen when sitting in front of it at normal distance. It had a TN panel. It would go bad if you sat on the floor and looked up at it, but who does that? The Dell IPS I have now crushes all shadow detail to grey and looks bad consistently from wider angles. It's hardly an improvement.
The importance of panel type is being WAY overstated in this thread.
The response time of an IPS panel is usually just fine for gaming as long as it's not over-driven strongly enough to produce inverse ghosting. PVA panels are worse, but the only ones I've heard of that were really bad enough to be unsuitable for gaming were the Samsung S-PVA panels used in the Dell 2405/2407/2408 and some Samsung models.
Vivid colours have nothing to do with IPS vs. PVA vs. TN or 6-bit vs. 8-bit. There are wide gamut monitors that cover the full Adobe RGB spectrum using TN panels and there are IPS monitors which can't even cover sRGB. And frankly, when many people say they like "vivid colours" they are really talking about saturation and contrast ratio and not colour gamut or accuracy.
Some TN panels use spatial dithering to map 8-bit colour to 6-bit voltage drive levels and you can easily see the pattern in dark areas. Other TN panels use a form of pulse-width modulation to generate the in-between levels and you can't see it except with test patterns.
IPS panels have a fixed pattern noise artefact that some people perceive as sparkling, some perceive as the screen door effect, and some don't notice at all.
The quality, type, and number of backlight(s), the design of the light diffusor, the anti-glare coating, the mapping of panel drive levels onto the colour space, the use of overdrive, the monitor software & settings, calibration, and the quality of the panel make more difference than the panel TYPE.
