This seems like a pretty good monitor for gaming (compared to CRTs) and an excellent one for graphics work and text reading. It's expensive, like many of the fine things in life, but I figured something was wrong in that my headphones were worth more than my monitor. The only real annoyance I found was a bit of blurring when moving in Portal (but not Quake III Arena), and additionally the panel supports only VGA and DVI-D (and HDMI via DVI); there may be a limit to the refresh rate possible as a result.
Seems great for:
Sheer real estate, fine detail without needing to squint (the pixels are much larger than on my previous 20" at a similar resolution), viewing angle with no color shift and only a little shift in light intensity, low input lag, critical color work (certainly at least semi-pro Photoshop and amateur photography; have no colorimeter and not experienced with color space matching so no opinion on that), any games with either highly saturated graphics with low movement (i.e. Joe & Mac - Caveman Ninja and most any other arcade game, though note no natural scanlines and this is a native PC signal running at the set's preferred rate; see "not sure about" for info on other framerates) or some games with high movement and similar colors (I didn't notice any ghosting in Quake III to speak of).
Seems reasonable for:
Image quality between frame transitions of unfiltered games with lots of movement or shades of gray (i.e. Valve's Portal; Half-Life showed up some different frames in a 1/125 second camera test but it could just be the shutter speed needs to be lowered and that it was catching the frame's last frame fading out and the next coming in when in reality they don't appear onscreen at the same time) - not tons worse than my 104b in this regard at the least.
Not sure about:
Didn't sync immediately or at all with many resolutions, such as the XRGB2's; panel stretches out non-widescreen resolutions except for a few listed in the manual as being centered (i.e. 640x400). VGA 640x480 as seen in the BIOS is blurry, and 1600x1200 is not. I have not seen a pillarboxing option yet. Additionally some people report color banding when using 1080p sources, which seems like no surprise.
Caveat: This is my first true pro LCD monitor, and I believe my first non-Twisted Nematic (TN) panel, and the first that's probably been both in its prime (not counting various pro-spec CRTs I've used) and suitable for gaming. I can't really compare it to other products, other than lousy and much cheaper low-quality TN panels.
My panel states its firmware is version 1.00PGGK0.
Better than:
The "gaming panels" I've seen. The Planar is a early 2007 product and holds up very well after a few years, soundly beating out (when fed an appropriate signal) the panel in my 2007 Asus G2S-B2 "gaming laptop" for actual input lag, and probably also trouncing the SyncMaster 204b which was my main display for many years (since sometime after 2006).
Part 1. BORING BACKSTORY BALONEY
Around Thursday, my folks had their PC blow up. I had been suggesting it was time to replace it literally the week before; no foul play was involved, and I am sincerely sad at the machine's passing because it was the only machine in the house that seemed able to play Soldier of Fortune at the time it died, Intel P945 Integrated Graphics and all. I'm still hoping it's not really dead. The ancient, terrible Sony 2003 LCD monitor (plug those words into the Google and you get the exact model; check out the blinged-up soft silver-finish stand and the mirror-finish black rim around the panel - a ghastly exercise in Apple-addled 2000s product design excess) would not give a picture on the HP slimline (staying true to Compaq after all these years). That monitor had been purposefully run at the wrong resolution on the computer for many years; it somehow looked better than normal even after taking into account the more natural DPI it was run at.
To immediately get the new machine going (and also because my main XP box was having some trouble, which cleared up pretty much by itself; I blame Firefox), I donated my SyncMaster 204b and set about looking for a modern upgrade.
My thought processes on video have changed a lot since I got the 204b. I got it before I had any experience with the crazy world of photography, arcade video, or arcade boards; just lots of being mentally disabled by the use of emulators instead of anything else. I had simple goals, though: I wanted to be able to be able to rotate the panel to play MAME stuff on at a more "natural" size, though of course the SyncMaster TN panel's color inconsistency only gets more pronounced and now moves from side to side when it's rotated and shoots that feature down. Otherwise, it was a relatively decent 1600x1200, TV standard 4:3 ratio panel, and at the time I still preferred those for compatibility with many older games; besides, pillarboxing a first-person shooter with the video card's output is an annoyance. It didn't seem terribly slow to me at the time, either. Now I feel like testing that but that's for another time.
In the search for my monitor, I first plugged in the names of some "lag-free" monitors I had seen mentioned here, but what I searched generally reviewed poorly (I like good color so having ugly crap or no viewing angles for the sake of good framerates is a bit more of a compromise than I wanted to live with). I then spent some hours looking through the newer reviews at the websites http://www.tftcentral.co.uk, and the German website Prad.de. After a couple hours looking at reviews of sets in the $200-$300 range, I found nothing that seemed to jump ahead of the competition; they all had terrible compromises, and the mainly professional monitors looked at may have had good color but terrible gray-to-gray response times, and usually people noticed input lag whenever I could find mention of gaming attempts.
I was having visions of searching for the last new 204b in a dark Bombay alley when I noticed TFT Central has a TFT Selector to guide you through selecting a monitor. Prad.de also has a similar item on their main page labeled "Monitor-Selection"; the Planar isn't in their database though, which is a shame and perhaps surprising since it's a European company, though TFT Central notes this model is US-only. My criteria at the time:
The only entry: The Planar PX2611W.What screen size would you like?
>24 inch (no sense crippling this from the start)
Do you want a wide screen monitor?
Don't mind
What is your price range?
£300 - 500 (I forgot that it was in pounds sterling, whoops)
What is your primary use going to be?
Gaming (duh, though actually office-style work is important to me)
What is your secondary use going to be?
Photo Work and Editing (please, no horrible color)
Do you need wide viewing angles, or will you be mostly using the monitor on your own and able to view it head on?
No, it won't really matter, I can view it head on
Are you very fussy about needing a DVI connection?
No, not if the VGA is good anyway (these are the actual poll choices, and anyways, I remembered that DVI is bandwidth limited anyway)
Would you like any extra functionality?
Not bothered about any in particular
If I had chosen a lower price range I wouldn't have found anything at all. I put the idea of buying some other computer components or replacing my annoying car radio to the far corners of my mind, swallowed hard, and confirmed that Amazon's price was lower than Newegg's.
Part 2. Initial tests of the actual monitor.
Some crap games that came with Windows 7 helped me pass the time, including one called Mystery PI: The New York Fortune that came bundled with the new slimline computer, as HP gets money shoveling onto their boxen with five-year-old graphics chipsets before sending them off to unsuspecting buyers, and which would have been much kinder on my eyes on this new monitor.
The first thing I did after getting the monitor was marvel at the box's sheer size. Then I took out the monitor and marveled at that considerably more. Packaging is minimal; there's just one paper item inside, the sharp but plain paper manual; the only color is a bit of dark purple on the cover. The monitor comes with its stand folded up underneath it, bottom flat against the side of the box, like a leg pulled in. Thus folded, it could be a table for multiple lesser LCD monitors, and even my pretty dang big 17" Asus G2S-B2 would fit on top of it with room to spare, with none hanging over the frame, and almost sideways. That suggests the next thing I did: Since the Planar's native resolution is 1920x1200, and the G2S-B2's panel is 1920x1200, I figured it was time for a shootout to see which was faster.
I set up my camera (1/125 second shutter speed @ f4 aperture, automatic ISO sensitivity) next to my circa 2007 Asus G2S-B2, which has had some problem with the hinge or panel leading to green TV snow-like crap filling in black parts of the screen. This is nothing new but it's returned from early this year and seems here to stay until serviced. (If anybody's interested I can post the pictures here later.)
My test was one that I anticipated many years ago before I even knew what an LCD monitor was: Gordon Freeman's Haybale-Chop Hoedown Extra-vaganza, or the crowbar swing. I plugged the new monitor into the laptop's HDMI port with a supplied HDMI-to-DVI-D cable (other cables: VGA to VGA, and DVI-D to DVI-D; there's also a DVI-A port in the Planar) and booted it. The new monitor doesn't seem to pick up all signals right away, though the manual lists an awful lot of them. I've had trouble with that laptop's HDMI and my XRGB2, which both output modes that theoretically the monitor can handle. I also noticed that the tiny stub of a power button needs to be pressed a while before it registers, but the nub d-pad control on the monitor is not nearly as bad as the TFT Central folks suggest. You shouldn't press it in before you use it, which I can't believe they couldn't have figured out. It's not super precise and wrong presses are possible, but it's not really *that* bad. About the crowbar swing test: Since the crowbar swings through much of the screen, it's easy to see which panel is faster (I am still slightly suspicious of my methodology, but I can't think of any reason it shouldn't be correct). Immediately I noticed that the image on the new panel was "tearing" noticably, i.e. there was a noticable seam partway down the screen (at different heights, I think) which could be seen even without the camera (the camera has picked it up as well, though).
The laptop's panel reports a refresh rate of 61 or 62 Hz or frames a second (I forget which), and I think that is to blame for the video cloned to the monitor tearing (I didn't look at the laptop's second monitor settings through the display control panel in Windows, though I ought to have). Both panels showed parts of up to about three frames at a time (i.e. three fragments of the crowbar being swung, with the ones to the sides fading (twisting) in and out). Strangely, I noticed that the actual positions of the crowbar were often different from each frame, despite them covering the same range. Possibly once again a synchronization issue, with the monitor possibly being fed frames from a different point than the laptop (this doesn't make sense to me but whatever).
In any case, there were other immediately notable differences: The colors were much, MUCH better and purer on the Planar (I used UDpixel to flash solid red, blue, green which looks almost lime, and other colors to check for dead pixels or subpixels; good so far), and the viewing angle was extraordinary, with white text dimming just a little bit when viewed from above. I can't tell if some color shifts are due to slight reflections on the matte panel, or actual color shifts due to a polarizing filter in the monitor. You can read this thing at any angle. The new panel also comes out bright and vivid in my photos, whereas the slightly upwards-tilted laptop screen almost looks turned off by comparison (at my settings, and with the light starting to fail at the time I did this test, the Planar's bright white looked gray, but at least a consistent gray).
After reviewing a lot of pictures of output (using the crowbar mainly, but also some other tests like firing the game's MP5) it was not only clear that the two panels were of different speeds, but to my relief (I suppose) the crowbar was consistently further along in the swing on the Planar than in the gaming laptop's own integrated glossy TN panel. I don't know whether to be overjoyed or disgusted - a bit of both really.
Part 3. A CHALLENGER APPEARS!!
Hauling the new prize over to my XP box, and suddenly rather nervous about the tearing I had experienced, I plugged it in. The 640x480 VGA BIOS screen showed, blurry; the XP desktop set to 1600x1200 showed up, slightly stretched, but with pixels that appeared pretty sharp regardless. A quick setting change put that right.
Using the panel's menu again I noticed that the thing reports a 59.9 Hz refresh rate; the manual shows it being run at 1920x1200 and 60 Hz. Likely nothing to worry about; it's about as small a difference as between NTSC and 60 FPS i.e. the change made to video framrerates in firmware to some Canon HD video DSLRs recently. Now under CFL lighting instead of the fading sunlight from before, I set the color gamut to sRGB and the classic mode XP desktop's blue immediately improved.
Of course, the only game I have in Steam is Portal, and I belatedly realize typing my stuff up to this point would have been a good opportunity to start loading some other game from my Steam list in. I figure I'll give it a shot.
[Some time passes]
Well, that was unusual. Many dead radios later, I don't see any tearing whatsoever (having made sure to turn off screen blur and checking that vertical sync was on). The transition from frame to frame could be better, but it's not terrible. Despite the slow movement speed, I think that Portal was a decent choice due to the relatively high contrast of many areas.
MAME next, via MAME Plus.
Seemed pretty good. I'll have to see through some playing later if this affects my playing positively by much, but the bright colors of a lot of arcade games look highly improved already. Joe & Mac looks done in bright acrylic paints almost (except not shiny). If I can find the space, I might try a side-by-side comparison with my old monitor eventually.
Quake III I already loaded to a menu, and while it breaks my heart not to play more Headhunters right away, I wanted to see if any new video options are a part of the Steam demo (and thus of the version on Steam). It wasn't meant to be, despite this game's code having been GPL'd for ages. (Actually, I wrote that before I loaded the game to confirm it - nothing seems changed, including the funky non-standard widescreen resolution that nobody will use except for it forcing the game into a window, which 1600x1200 doesn't). That said, looking around I see this is actually a pretty easy fix, but I see Steam doesn't offer much convenience over my old CD copy.
Update: Quake III looks brilliant (playing the HeadHunters mod) and plays smoothly. Amazing. Was doing exceptionally well, I felt. Maybe it's just observer bias, but the video portion felt perhaps more responsive than normal. I guess not having to squint helps speed things up as well, though.
For an idea of the size of the monitor, the whole second portion of this post (after the quoted segment) covers the Firefox window with a bit left over, which it would with any 1920x1200 monitor, but it's also about a foot tall by 1 and 1/2 feet+ wide (the actual viewing dimensions of the monitor are 55x34 centimeters).
A note at the end of the standard timing table (list of all supported modes), it notes that "DVI signal can not support ... 1920x120@60 non reduce mode." There are two DVI spots on the monitor but I don't think it does dual DVI. I'd say that limits the future-proofing of the monitor a bit, but it's still performing great and I'm not sure what the performance reduction is, if any.
