So, I have been waiting on a review of this monitor yet no one has took
the plunge to buy it. I bought one from best buy. It wasn't on display
but they had it in stock, so I said why not. They don't have restocking
fees so I picked one up. I rushed home and unpacked it. Setup took less
than 10mins. However one thing is important. You need the drivers either
from the disc or from LG's site. Windows 8 doesn't automatically detect
this display yet. It will give you a generic driver from 2006. Really
Microsoft???
There's HDMI, DVI, and VGA connectors. It only comes
with a VGA cable. The buttons for the OSD are touch sensitive. Yes, not
actual buttons but touch sensitive. They are very accurate and don't
take much effort at all. It has a very small dim red LED light under the
LG logo which isn't at all distracting.
Moving on. I first used
HDMI to hook up this monitor. I am not that much of a fan of using HDMI
on my monitors due to color issues and slight lag with gaming. To my
surprise HDMI looks great on this display. However, I like DVI better.
So, after switching to DVI blacks improved with out the need to tweak
anything with the black level settings via the OSD on the monitor
however they still weren't inky enough and colors weren't deep enough to
my liking. This is NOT an issue if you use HDMI and change the black
level setting to "low" in the OSD settings. Most monitors need some sort
of calibrating out of the box, this is a normal thing. To the average
person these default colors would have been brilliant for them but for
gaming I wanted to slightly alter them.
This is were the Nvidia control panel comes in....
So
if your PC has a nice graphics card you more than likely have the
Nvidia Control Panel or the ATI Catalyst or something similar. I have a
EVGA GTX 670 FTW Edition graphics card.
Here are my settings under the "adjust desktop color settings" option in the Nvidia Control Panel
Brightness 50
Contrast
somewhere between 55-60 (this gets rid of any greyish looking blacks be
careful not to add too much or you will have crushed black level)
Gamma: 1.00
Digital Vibrance between 52 and 55 (this add a little more intensity to the colors).
Now
blacks are blacker with no crush or wash out. Colors pop just a tiny
tad bit more. Skin tones maintain and in games lighting has that "glow"
to it which you get automatically with a glossy screen. However this
screen has a very nice matte finish that's not overdone. I don't have to
worry about light reflecting on the screen.
This is an IPS
display. I have tested viewing angles and could barely see any color
shifting to the left right top or bottom while looking from different
angles. Another thing that I must applaud this monitor for is the lack
of back light bleeding. I have none... I mean absolutely NO back light
bleed. It's insane. On a completely black image I can barely see where
the screen starts and where the bezel starts. It's no bleed on either
side.
As for gaming the response time of this monitor is
incredible. It's reported 5ms however it feels faster than my other
monitor which is 3ms. Ghosting is absent from this monitor in lit or
dark areas and scenes at even the fastest moving game I played which was
Crysis 3.
This is a great monitor with great picture quality and
very crisp. After calibrating it's like you could stick your hand
through the screen.
If you are interested you should go to your
local best buy and pick one of these up. They don't have restocking fees
and they are NOT on display so you have to ask for one. Take it home
install the drivers and calibrate it. Hopefully Amazon will get them in
stock because 5-7 weeks is too long to wait when best buy has them on
the shelf for the same price.
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