• Hardware

  • Random Find: Use this KVM significantly helped with Win 10 symptoms

simplex Best to forget about the work machine entirely as it has both policies and risk attached with touching it. The EDID lives inside the monitor and KVM. The solution here is to simply use any of his personal machines connected to the monitor to retrieve it from there and/or the KVM. This way there are no compliance worries.

This would be only for curiosity.. the EDID will only say what timings it is using to set the refresh rate and resolution, and possibly the colourspace (RGB vs YCbCr). Often some blocks for audio output as well.

I am interested in this thread in part because right now I am sitting with two keyboards and two mice in front of me.

      Sunspark The solution here is to simply use any of his personal machines connected to the monitor to retrieve it from there and/or the KVM. This way there are no compliance worries.

      I don't install software on my home machine. It is as bare bones as you can get and I lock it down to prevent any random changes from rendering it unusable for me. All my actual computing is done in a virtual machine and I doubt any hardware identification would work through the VM layer.

      I am interested in this thread in part because right now I am sitting with two keyboards and two mice in front of me.

      For $35 (and one of the most generous return policies on the planet) why not try it?

        4 days later

        I got mine finally and plugged it in, but it didn’t like the hdmi to vga adaptor I’ve been running to my old dell 2407 monitor and wouldn’t output a signal.

        I’ve used the hdmi to vga for ages in the hope it would lessen the eye strain. Not that it seems to do much of anything at the moment. I’ll try hdmi to dvi though I’m not optimistic.

        I did try hdmi straight to an old dell 2410 monitor and it still had lots of eye strain.

        So not too promising so far but I’ll keep experimenting.

        DisplayPort to port type adapters generally tend to be better because they have more bandwidth to work with but there are still caveats.. one dock I have won't work with dual-mode adapters.. needs to be single-mode.

        Try changing your refresh rate to 50 Hz. See if that changes anything for you.

        a month later

        madmozg

        I have it but haven't tested it yet. I've been trying some light therapy from a doctor for the last few weeks (syntonics, some vestibular exercises, and also prism glasses) so trying not to mix too many things. I'm also just mentally worn out from all of this and have a hard time getting myself to try new screens/solutions etc. lately. I'll post when I give it try.

          a month later

          (maybe?) WORKING FOR ME! thanks @ensete ! lets bump this. this is something like patching we need to get a bunch of folks trying. [edit] I still think it's worth trying, but im getting a little dizzy…

            Could be a lot of things.. if it's an active adapter then the video signal is processed from one format to another, like displayport to hdmi, etc. They don't all use the same chip. And while I don't have a KVM I am using an adapter.. my PC has DP and HDMI outputs, but I'm using an DP to HDMI adapter because the HDMI output on the PC doesn't look as nice. It was the same thing with the Dock I have for my deck.. the HDMI output from the dock's converter wasn't as good as a DP to DVI adapter I got.. so, the switch probably just has a chip or something that doesn't suck.

            Another could be the video timings.. there's the timing that is stuffed into the monitor EDID, and there are other timings for the same resolution but use slightly different values.. switch might use timings from its own tables instead of just copying what the monitor or OS provided. I know timings does make a difference because I spent awhile in Linux manually entering timings and comparing them.

            4 days later

            I wish someone can test for dithering with and without the adapter

            async I find that YCbCr mode shows most evident gradient banding when dithering is switched off. RGB, at least on my monitor, does almost nothing when dithering is switched off, maybe some minor artefacts appear and that is it.

              You will see the banding without the use of ditherig as well. Not sure if this is a compression artifact, or a dithering thing.

                Sunspark Well smooth transition of grey color to my understanding means that screen generates more grey tone variations, which also would mean more dithering. So seeing banding is a good thing, as it implies at least there is no aggressive temporal dithering. Spatial is kind of tricky one.

                  Sunspark

                  When Intel drivers are set to spatial dithering on a 6-bit panel (NOT temporal!), and you scroll down on a page, even a "still" spatial dithering pattern can cause photos to slightly flicker as you scroll.

                  This is because the image "interweaves" with different parts of the pattern as the image moves downwards, causing the pattern to appear like it's alternating back and forth, even though the pattern itself "technically" doesn't change.

                  On most e-ink screens like BOOX, it's even "worse" as the pattern itself regenerates in a very obvious way whenever there is movement, even though it's still when there's no motion. (This might be a solvable problem in the future, as I've heard the Modos open source e-ink monitor project implemented a different dithering method that tries to keep the pattern still…)

                  However, there's an interesting situation (especially if the display is a TN) where I've observed the "checkerboard pattern" created by spatial dithering at times having the side effect of "accidentally increasing LCD polarity pixel inversion flicker" in that area -- depending on the pattern -- as the checkerboard sometimes lines up with the same kinds of conditions that cause LCD inversion to be visible.

                  This kind of "accidental pixel inversion" means a spatial dithering pattern can occasionally still increase flicker(!) even if the pattern is not supposed to "intentionally" be changing!

                  Finally, Intel's version of spatial dithering sometimes decides to slightly alter the hue of a pixel to increase precision further even on grayscale content (the reason why they do this is that adding a slight color can "perceptually affect brightness" in a more fine-grained way). This is distracting to me because sometimes different gray shades in a UI can subtly look reddish or bluish when they're all supposed to "just be gray".

                  If the panel is good, I agree that spatial dithering is generally fine in most cases and it doesn't cause that much of an issue (especially compared to temporal) but there are still reasons to disable it.

                  In my case, I prefer disabling it because I have my screen set to grayscale often and I get distracted by the subtle color tints on certain shades of gray.

                  The flickering while scrolling as a photo interweaves with the pattern also definitely becomes noticeable enough at times to become annoying (especially when I'm scrolling very slowly)

                    dev