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Graphic Design Work

Color reproduction of a LCD is dependent on the orientation of liquid crystals and the orientation controls how much light passes through which is responsible for different color intensities. Because the rotation of a liquid crystal is a physical process, controlling color accuracy on a LCD is much more difficult than a phosphor mask releasing energy in the form of light. It is important in graphics work for a display to represent color accurately. We sought the opinion of our graphics opinion for her take on the color reproduction on the BenQ FP71G+ as she uses a Samsung 172x for work regularly and after a day of usage her brief comments were "The FP71G+ is definitely more saturated and the contrast is better than the 172x but is not too exaggerated so that the color representation is off."

Gaming

A few of the games we fired up were Half-Life 2, UT2k4 and DOOM 3. Refresh rate was set to 76 Mhz (the maximum for the FP71G+) and the ingame refresh rate was also forced to 76 through NVIDIA driver control panel. Half-Life 2 was chosen because it has some relatively fast scenes with the dune buggy and the boat. While on foot on the sand dunes level, action seemed crisp with no obvious signs of blurring. This was also true while riding around on the dune buggy. At the end of the airboat level with the chopper, there was some slight blurring with the large rocks scattered in the water. The color seemed lush and deep in game; again the saturation levels were very good. It was not overly distracting but it was not as crisp as a CRT.

The rocks in the middle seemed to get a bit blurry compared to a CRT

Unreal Tournament 2004 was also picked as a test candidate as it is one of those twitchy games where there is a lot of quick movement. Blurring was not an issue during some deathmatch sessions. Textures and movement felt quite crisp and during fast turns it did not feel like the FP71G+ was struggling to keep up. On previous 25ms screens and even on the 172x, we felt that UT tended to bring out a very noticeable amount of blurring something I attributed to its liberal use of the color palette.

The final game we looked at was DOOM 3. Colors (when it was not pitch black) were vibrant. Some of the swinging lights gave the metal walls an overexposed look but this seemed to be just an art decision and not a reflection of the display quality of the LCD as the effect was similar on a CRT.

Movies

We have a clip off of BMW's The Driver series of short films. The one that we examined was The Follow. Again in the movie there were no visible signs of blurring but there seemed to be some deficiencies with the grey scale reproduction. The contrast level just did not seem all the way there when compared to the CRT. In this particular scene, Clive Owne's leather jacket seemed a very solid black on the BenQ unit while there was more of a gradient with the CRT. A second problem was also noticed - the lights in the background had dithering problems on the BenQ where as it was smooth on the CRT.

Grey scale reproduction and dithering were two problems with this scene