The big, cheap monitor roundup

In the course of this roundup, a couple of monitors that didn’t quite fit the requirements crossed our desks. Here are the more interesting ones:

Zalman Trimon ZM-M220W 3D Display
Retail Price: $799
Street Price: $750
Supplier: Altech
Specs: 3D (!)
Pixel Policy: Class Unknown

One day, 3D displays will no doubt be commonplace. Zalman wants us to believe that today’s that day, but we’re not convinced.

The monitor uses interlaced polarising to deliver an image where every odd line is out of phase with the even lines. To the naked eye this appears normal, but with the provided polarised glasses, only one phase is delivered to each eye. This means that your graphics card can draw the scene from two eye locations rather than one, delivering each eye’s image separately to your eyes and this gives the scene a real depth.



Once you’ve calibrated it correctly to your own preference, it looks fantastic and feels just like the 3D displays at IMAX or a museum, if slightly smaller. Games do feel a lot more immersive and we constantly were looking over our shoulder instead of moving the mouse, forgetting we were in game.

But don’t pony up your cash just yet, there are some severe limitations. First of all, if you’re a Radeon diehard, stop reading now. 3D support is an exclusive club and at the moment, and only Nvidia is handing out the invites. The next hurdle is that games aren’t natively supported -- profiles for individual games are added by Nvidia. This means that newer titles aren’t supported until a new 3D driver is released (the last one came out at the end of March), and some titles don’t work at all.

While these issues mightn’t be a deal breaker for you, running in 3D mode causes a massive performance hit -- roughly halving your framerate as the scene has to be rendered twice. Even if you have multitudes of GTX 280's, you’ll have to drop the quality back from premium in order to saturate the native resolution of 1680x1050, and you have to be in the native res for 3D to work. This alone was game over for us, because in effect, you’re sacrificing one form of shininess for another at a price premium. It’s just slightly pointless.

There is another 19” 4:3 version of this screen, but if you’re buying this monitor it’s for visual effect you will want a big, wide monitor. It’s just slightly pointless.

In normal 2D mode, the monitor doesn’t really excite. You wouldn’t buy it as a 2D-only monitor, but when you’re not playing games it still is a reasonable piece of gear. The build is good and it tilts, swivels, and goes up and down like most other monitors in the price bracket and the speakers are reasonable (for speakers embedded in a monitor, anyway). Unfortunately, because of the polarised coating, the monitor is very reflective and you can’t have any light sources nearby or it acts like a mirror. Displaymate tests were also a little disappointing, with significant backlight bleeding and results that were on par with the lower end of this roundup.

If you have piles of money then this is a fun thing to try. For the rest of us it’s just not worth it - 3D displays just aren’t ready for the masses.


LG W1952TQ and W1942T
Street Price: $290 (W1952TQ), $240 (W1942T)
Pixel Policy: Class 1

These are the little brothers of the two LGs we tested, and apart from their size, are identical to their bigger brothers (which, in turn, are internally identical). Having used 22” monitors for this roundup, dropping back to 19” definitely felt cramped. For an extra $40, we would recommend the extra real estate that the 22” models give you.





One thing we did notice with these two is that they didn’t have the redness of their bigger brothers out of the box -- but that problem is really moot as you can correct it with a few button presses.


HP LP2480zx
Retail Price: $4288.90
Street Price: $4288.90
Supplier: HP
Specs: 30-bit colour, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI(DualLink) with VGA support, Composite, Component, S-Video.
Pixel Policy: Class 1
Resolution: 1920 x 1200

We’ll be honest here: we have no idea how to properly review this monitor. Its claim to fame is that it’s so awesome that the guys at Dreamworks used it to make Kung-Fu Panda – and we can see why they’d want to. While we’re not nearly set up properly to test this sort of gear, every test we threw at it returned perfect results. Even our graphics guys -- who deal in highly colour accurate industrial volume printing -- were astounded. It's a 24 inch ocular orgasm.



The LP2480zx gives you more input options than you could ever want, brandishing two VGA-compatible dual-link DVIs, HDMI, component, composite, S-Video and even DisplayPort. The OSD is smart and easy to use, but more importantly, it gives you complete and accurate control over every aspect of your image. It even reminds you that it needs 30 minutes to warm up before it starts performing at its best after you turn it on, and has timers that will tell you when it was last calibrated. Loads of different colour spaces can be specified, you can dial in a white balance to the nearest ten degrees Kelvin, you can specify your black levels... the list goes on and on.

Throwing out 30 (thirty!) beautiful bits of colour per pixel, this monitor can display over a billion different colours. For those of you playing the home game, that’s 64 times the number of colours your high-end CRT or LCD normally pumps at 24bpp. Because usually your graphics card also pumps out at 24bpp, a lot of those hues aren’t addressed; rather, they act as a sizable buffer to make sure those 16.7 M different shades are always possible no matter how you may calibrate it. The LP2480zx is also addressable in true 30-bit mode via HDMI and DisplayPort, but we weren’t able to test this.

All of this wonderment comes at a cost to make your eyes bleed -- if they haven’t already popped out of your head. At a cool AU$4,288.90 (inc GST) – almost $600 more expensive than if you imported it from the US – you definitely want a reason to buy it. In any profession where image quality matters, we recommend taking a look. We couldn’t fault it - but it is beyond us.

Move over CRT.