• Abstract
  • Ultrasharp IPS vs gaming VA monitor funnies

Hello. As a programmer whose eyes are not young anymore (+1.5 glasses for working on the computer) I'm trying to figure out what monitor is right for me.

My wanted resolution (without scaling) is 2560x1440, and I have two very different monitors to play with:

  • a dell ultrasharp 27" 2560x1440 IPS (p2720dc) anti-glare
  • a dell gaming 32" curved 2560x1440 VA (s3220dgf) anti-glare

Now, the27" ips is nice and crisp and all, but it's on the small side for my eyes. So, black friday hits me with the 32" va which is big and curved and... blurry and strange when examined at pixel level:

  • when contrast is low, pixels seem to be lit 1/3 of height, see atached photos
  • when contrast is high, pixels seems to be 3/3 height
  • both cases text appears to be as some strange type of blur

I'm trying to understand, is this normal or has this monitor a funny panel...?

Attached are photos of both IPS vs VA text, and high vs low VA contrast.




  • KM likes this.

This is normal for VA. If you look at a single pixel they appear to have multiple regions for each sub pixel that are turned on/off as brightness requires.

Slowly banging my head against the wall... especially as it seems not all VA panels are like this.

Really wish they would put some warning in the specs.

Thank you. Stay clear of such VA panels...

Any ideea what's the best setting? High contrast low brightness or the other way around? Anything that can be changed in cleartype settings?

The blurriness is due to greyscale anti-aliasing.

As for the correct contrast setting, you only really need to set that once.. pull up a gradient image for calibration with black at one end and white at the other and adjust the contrast so that each one of the 255 level steps is as distinct as possible. This is easier for me to do because I always have my monitor at 100% brightness (it's an aging CCFL).

The information here about little portions of the subpixel being turned on or off is interesting to me and new. I have seen subpixels of all technology types many times, but I never questioned why many had little sections instead of one homogeneous block.

Now that I knew what to google for, found VA panels that light the three vertically stacked sub-pixels top-to-bottom and some bottom-to-top. And yes VA panels that just do the right thing. Sample pictures below, taken from pcmonitors' forum user pcm2 posts.



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