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Games Links

"Like a circle, there's different ways of navigating it depending on your gaming style, but there's only one way out" - Roman Vincent, director of 4X.

centrefold

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from Inside Sport

tips

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How to Buy a Monitor
   - PC Authority, July 2002

When buying a monitor most people arm themselves with scant knowledge of what they want, aside from the screen size (17, 19 or 21 in), and in extreme cases, resolutions and refresh rates. This lets the salesperson, who probably knows the monitor specs only a little better than the buyer, sell them something that both of them think the buyer might want, but can't be sure.

Not any more. Here's PC Authority's quick guide on what to look for when you go monitor shopping, including a few simple tests to perform. Forewarned is forearmed.

Contrast and Brightness

At risk of stating the obvious, contrast and brightness are two of the most important aspects of a display, as they regulate the overall image 'viewability'. A cheaper monitor will usually be lacking in either or both of these, so it's a good idea to check them out.

Bring up a display of white text on a black background. Turn the brightness control up until it is at its maximum. The text and the background should have brightened simultaneously, without the background washing out or the text merging too badly with the background. In some monitors the background will stay fairly dark - this isn't good.

Turn the brightness back down until the background is perfectly black, and then slowly adjust the contrast. You should noticed a difference between the white writing and the black background: on a good monitor the gradation should be gradual, but on a bad monitor there will appear misregistration where the black and white intersect.

Picture uniformity

Pop up a full screen of colour (changing the desktop background is fine). Here you're looking at the corners of the screen to make sure that the screen has uniform brightness. Quite often the corners will be dulled on a cheaper monitor, and sometimes the colours may even be distorted. Another test is to drag a small window of small font text (ie, something typed in Notepad) to the corners - check for colours appearing on the edges of the text, or for loss of clarity.

Screen Regulation

This isn't the most effective way of testing as it requires a quick eye, but will do in a pinch. With the background set to black, open up a white window (such as a blank Internet Explorer page - press F11 to display as much white as possible), and then quickly minimise and maximise it.

Look at the corners of the screen: as it changes from white to black you might notice the screen size shrinking and expanding. This is because white demands more video bandwidth than black, and the monitor needs to adjust it's overall levels on the fly. A good monitor will move scarcely, if at all.

OSD

The on-screen display is quite often overlooked, as most monitors are set-and-forget types. Depending on your needs, it's a good idea to have a look at the complexity of the OSD. Some feature the bare minimum of features, such as brightness and contrast adjustment, and basic screen sizing and positioning controls, but better models feature detailed screen geometry adjustments.

These are particularly helpful if you run games or applications that put your display through a resolution and refresh rate obstacle course when they run. Changing from 1280 x 1024 desktop and 800 x 600 for the intro movie and then back 1024 x 728 for the game can leave your monitor a bit rattled, especially when you exit back to the desktop.

A good monitor should be able to handle this with aplomb, but some will have truncated screen sizes afterwards, requiring manual adjustment.

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