THE BEST SCREENS FOR EVERY BUDGET
You now get more monitor for your money
A DECENT SCREEN has traditionally been one of the best, if not actually the very best, long-term investments you can make for your PC. In the past, that’s reflected the fact that screen technology has ambled along at a leisurely pace. Back in 2006, for instance, Dell rolled out its 30-inch 3007WFP. It wasn’t cheap at about a thousand bucks, but it took the better part of a decade for monitors to appear that made it truly redundant. Divide that $1,000 upfront investment by seven or eight years of use, and the annual price of having a fantastic display doesn’t look bad.
More recently, the monitor market has gone more or less mental. Over the last four or five years, the innovations have come thick and fast. Most obviously, the range of form factors has exploded. It’s amusing to consider how exotic the first 16:10 and 16:9 aspect widescreen monitors seemed now that superwide 21:9 monitors are commonplace, and
insane 32:9 screens can be had for about the same price as that venerable Dell.
Size has been on the up, too. Those 32:9 screens measure 49 inches across, while 27-inch monitors can be had for as little as $100. Then there’s resolution. Screens delivering the full UHD experience— 3840x2160 pixels—have recently slipped under the $200 barrier, while all kinds of crazy intermediate resolutions for superwide panels are available, and more conventional pixel grids, such as 1080p and 1440p, can be had seriously cheap.
If that’s sounds good, it’s just the beginning. Along with larger sizes, more pixels, and funky aspect ratios, you can now have your monitor with a curved panel. Both the appeal and utility of curved screens are arguably subjective. For some, they add to the immersion in games and movies, and make really large panels more ergonomic for desktop use. For others, curved screens just look silly.
Screens with amped-up refresh rates and adaptive sync technology are also now widely available. Both features are typically pitched as gaming-centric. That’s certainly true when it comes to adaptive synching, such as Nvidia’s G-Sync and the FreeSync alternative from AMD, which is increasing becoming the industry standard. It’s great for smoothing out gaming performance, but has limited benefits beyond that. However, higher refresh rates that involve an increase from the standard 60Hz to anything from 120Hz up to 240Hz offer a much broader utility. Whether it’s bumping apps around the desktop or scrolling documents and webpages, higher refresh rates make a PC feel slicker and more responsive.
That said, increased refresh rates put some serious load on your graphics subsystem; you need a video card capable of supporting the higher refresh rates. Increasing the refresh of a display from 60Hz to 120Hz doubles the bandwidth required from your graphics output. Consider that a 4K panel has four times the resolution of a 1080p panel, and it’s easy to see how driving 3840x2160 pixels at 120Hz makes huge bandwidth demands; 4K running 120Hz means 16.5 million pixels sent to the display every second. Right now, only the DisplayPort 1.4 standard can achieve that, although HDMI 2.1 will add further support soon. Likewise, remember that, in gaming terms, to make the most of a high-refresh monitor, you need a graphics card capable of cranking out frames at a sufficiently fast rate. There’s little point in paying more for a high-refresh monitor for gaming if you have to cut corners on your choice of GPU.
Another technology that’s set to have a wide impact, but has so far proved problematic on the PC, is HDR ( High Dynamic Range) rendering. In simple terms, HDR means both more brightness and darkness from a given display, thus a greater range of luminosity. The practical
implementation is more complicated. HDR standards applied to displays also widen the color gamut available. In theory, the result should be far more vibrant visuals. In practice, support for HDR from the Windows platform has been patchy.
The latest builds of Windows 10 do natively support HDR content. However, enabling that support currently has undesirable knock-on effects on SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) content, which includes the desktop. Long story short, HDR is not yet a seamless technology on the PC with no downsides. It still suffers from what we generously call some early adopter niggles. As it happens, HDR also makes more demands in terms of bandwidth from display interfaces. Combine HDR with high resolutions and refresh rates, and you have a bandwidth storm. Worth bearing in mind when considering your overall setup, particularly your choice of graphics card to complement the display.
QUANTUM SOLACE
There are further detailed advances, too, such as quantum dot technology, which improves color saturation via tiny flecks of photo-emissive material in the backlight, which rely on the quantum properties of electrons as they drop through energy levels when orbiting an atomic nucleus. As we said, the monitor market is innovationhappy right now.
Despite that, there’s an argument for saying the modern LCD monitor remains remarkably flawed. Yes, LCD tech has improved beyond recognition compared to the earliest passive matrix panels, but LCD remains a fundamentally bad idea for a full-color display technology. That’s chiefly because it’s transmissive rather than emissive. It requires a backlight, and in turn the ability to block and mediate that backlight, which LCD will never be able to do with absolute precision or complete totality. In other words, an LCD monitor with perfect contrast and viewing angles is a huge and perhaps insoluble problem.
The obvious alternative is OLED. That has clear advantages, including fully switchable pixels, each of which are their own light source, and essentially perfect viewing angles. OLED technology is already common in smartphones and ramping up in HDTVs, but it’s taking its sweet time to transition to PC monitors, more’s the pity. The other obvious shortcoming with today’s displays involves native panel resolution. There has recently been a trickle-down effect courtesy of UHD TVs that has enabled a wide range of affordable PC monitors with 3840x2160 UHD or 4K pixel grids, which is thoroughly welcome. And yet it’s also
notable that truly high-density desktop PC displays still don’t exist. At least, not for a remotely affordable price they don’t.
Again, the uncomfortable comparison here is smartphones. A basic smartphone with a display panel packed with at least 300 pixels per inch can be had for relative pennies. Ditto tablets with high-density screens. As for high-end smartphones, their displays commonly cram in over 500 pixels per inch. But PC monitors? UHD or 4K sounds impressive, but stretched out over a 40-inch panel, those 3840x2160 dots make for just 110 pixels per inch. Even on a 27-inch monitor, you’re only looking at a little over 150 pixels per inch from a 4K grid. The closest thing we’ve seen to a true high-density or high-DPI PC monitor is Dell’s 32-inch 8K monitor, the UP3218K, which works out at 275 pixels per inch—or roughly comparable to an entry-level smartphone.
Granted, it’s true that ergonomics have a part to play here. Smartphone screen viewing distances are typically shorter than those of desktop PC monitors, but not enough to make up for the huge gap in pixel density. Consequently, something is surely amiss when the fonts on a cheap smartphone are infinitely crisper and cleaner than a megabucks PC monitor.
If that’s how far screen tech has come, and a few thoughts on what it hasn’t yet achieved, how do you choose from the huge range of monitors on the market today? What, in other words, really matters? For starters, a quality panel and some decent electronics still go an awfully long way. By way of example, it’s all very well having 144Hz refresh support, but if the monitor has a low-resolution TN panel, no amount of fast refresh is going to make it a great display for desktop productivity.
So, the first thing to do is understand your panel types. TN tech remains the fastest, so has plenty going for it in games, but is weak by just about all other metrics. For everything else, IPS or VA is your best bet. The former majors on color accuracy, offers the best viewing angles, decent response, and reasonable contrast. VA is the undeniable daddy when it comes to color saturation and contrast, but it can’t quite match IPS for accuracy, and is the slowest option of all for pixel response.
THREE BECOME ONE
Admittedly, as LCD technology in general has progressed, the three major panel types have converged, so there are no hard and fast rules. But gamers generally prefer TN or IPS (though some of the very latest VA panels offer gaming-centric capabilities), content pros want IPS, and everyone else should go for IPS or VA, the latter being a good choice for movie buffs.
Once you’ve picked a panel type, you need to decide on form factor, resolution, and refresh. Gamers should remember that higher resolutions and refresh rates make huge demands on the graphics subsystem. Right now, 1440p or 2560x1440 pixels still looks like a very good compromise between detail and playability. Make that 3440x1440 if you prefer superwide aspect ratios. For productivity and general use, you might think going bigger is always better, but if you don’t up the resolution in parallel with the panel’s proportions, the result will be big, fat ugly pixels, and no additional desktop elbow room. Meanwhile, really high resolutions on smaller displays can
make for increased pixel density, but run into scaling problems, both with the Windows interface and the web. Our general advice is don’t go smaller than 27 inches with a 4K monitor, unless you know exactly what you are doing, and likewise don’t go bigger than 27 inches with 1440p.
As for HDR support, for now it’s a niche pursuit on the PC. It’s nice to have, rather than a must-have for gaming. Ditto for movies. For everything else, the technology needs to mature a little further. That said, support for HDR generally indicates a screen with greater basic fidelity, so bought on those terms, rather than necessarily to watch HDR content, such screens can make sense.
On a related note, it’s worth understanding the broader color depth categories. Avoid monitors that are natively 6-bit per channel, even if they support 8-bit color with dithering, sometimes referred to as FRC; 6-bit indicates a very low spec panel. Color pros may want to consider panels with 10bit support, but if you’re not fully familiar with these terms, you don’t need anything beyond 8-bit per channel, so long as the panel supports that natively, as opposed to via dithering. It’s a similar story for color space support. If you’re a content pro, and you know your target gamut, you won’t need our help. For everyone else, paying a premium for extended color space support probably isn’t worth it.
Our final factor is the display interface. The best bet is to think end-to-end. You need support from both the display and the video card. If your graphics card is old enough to limit your screen options, think about changing GPUs. Remember, if you don’t game, you won’t need a megabucks graphics card. You just need something recent with decent output options. For maximum future-proofing, go for a card with both DisplayPort 1.4 and USB-C. DisplayPort 1.4 offers the maximum available bandwidth today, including 4K at 120Hz, and supports the widest range of monitors. USB-C is very appealing, too. It effectively outputs DisplayPort in an alternate mode, but can also transmit data and power. So it’s great for minimizing cable clutter, and definitely the interface of choice if you’re driving your screen with a USB-C capable laptop PC.
And that pretty much covers it. For more specific advice, check out our segmented categories, but as a general rule, we advise maxing out your display investment. It will last you for years, and you’ll be glad you spent the extra money every time you use your PC.