Snow and Other Discomforts

A short guide to configuring a LG 27MP33HQ monitor for a better picture follows after an account of how I ended up having to do so. Not what I was planning to write, but what else is new?

Yesterday morning greeted the residents of rural Yucatan with a small accumulation of snow. As I type this, more of the white stuff is falling leaving the yard a patchwork of green and white. Winter has shown up early in Southeastern Minnesota and shows no signs of letting go in the immediate future if the forecasts are to be believed.

That wasn’t the only sight to rudely greet me yesterday. Turning on my computer monitor revealed waves of green rolling through the right side of the screen. Having seen this before, I knew it was hardware failure. Still, doing all the right things to eliminate software driver and cable issues were undertaken to no avail. In fact, the not terribly old Asus VH236H decided to get worse by the minute.

Purchased less than two years ago, it failed with only a few hints starting a day before. Outlines of pixels had become slightly pronounced across the whole screen to my bafflement. This was something new for me and I should have known it would be a warning of things going bad.

2014 has been a rough year and failing or obsoleted electronics has been a lesser, although constant, part of the travails. Two sound cards, a laptop, a camera, a router, and now a monitor have had to be replaced. Can I be blamed for wondering what’s next to break down?

So in the midst of traffic warnings, slippery roads, and drivers acting like idiots due to the first snow, I headed out to buy a new monitor after casing Best Buy’s online site to see what was available locally. Two IPS LED monitors jumped out at me and a little research showed them to be excellent deals, but seeing is believing, right?

In the end, I went out for one monitor and came back with another. How did I go from wanting a 24” Dell to buying a 27” LG? Well, that was easy, the Dell list at just over $150 online was significantly more at the store and seeing the quality of LG’s other monitors persuaded me to take a risk by buying without seeing a demo model.

That and my eyes are getting old. Smaller is truly not better these days.

At $199.99, the LG 27MP33HQ is an almost unknown bargain with the only reviews out there being at Best Buy’s online site. The LED monitor is an IPS panel, meaning much brighter, more vibrant color able to withstand bright lighting and viewable at any angle. The last bit was something to be skeptical about, but I can verify off angles are amazingly clear to the point I could see it placed on a wall for constantly changing pictures in place of paintings.

It took me last night and this morning to get the colors and contrast to where I wanted them. Resorting to Nvidia’s control panel software for my video card made all the difference in the world. Since I have it in a high glare room, the lack of a glossy screen has turned out to be a pro rather than a con, making me glad the Dell wasn’t purchased instead.

To get great color and contrast out of the LG 27MP33HQ (and possibly higher number versions like the 27MP45HQ) in NVIDIA Control Panel, a few settings need to be enabled and tweaked. Remember that everyone’s eyes are different, as are lighting situations.

First, look under Display for Adjust desktop color settings. I skipped down to Apply the following enhancements section and played with Digital vibrance. Hue was left alone.

UPDATE: After using the LCD calibration screens at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ I tweaked things further. The monitor controls were not finesse enough to change what I’d already set, all adjustments were done with Nvidia’s control panel.

Under 2. Choose how color is set I ticked Use NVIDIA settings, then left Brightness at 50%, Contrast to 50% and Gamma left at +1.00. Digital Vibrance was brought back to the 50% default.

After doing this, the tests at Lagom for contrast, black level, and white saturation were passed at 100%. The overall brightness level may yet be tweaked, since this was done at night.

Digital color format is the default RGB after experimenting with YCbCr444 messed up desktop colors. The monitor menu settings for blacks was set to High and this solved all my contrast problems with the default settings making blacks too gray and not black enough. Now the display has black blacks while still having a good range of grays with white being white.

Under Video I changed How do you make color adjustments? to With the NVIDIA settings then only changed the Advanced tab. It is critical for movie watching to change the Dynamic range to Full (0-255). This works for RGB but not properly with YCbCr44 which is the range for Blu-ray players.

I also ticked Dynamic contrast enhancement, but not Color enhancement. The Full setting takes care of that anyway. After a lot of testing, I regretted what I’d selected and ended up disabling the dynamic option. Then I set the contrast to +60% due to too much flickering during streaming live action content. Using the dark bridge scenes in Godzilla (2014) for a stress test, that small boost seemed to bring out enough detail.

Adjust video image settings was next and this is something to be done to one’s individual taste. For the moment, my settings are for Edge enhancement +60% and Noise reduction at +70%. Mostly this applies to videos being scaled up such as DVDs and streaming video. Use inverse telecine is also ticked for DVD playback.

Going back to the built in monitor settings, Brightness is set at 70 and so is Contrast. That will be variable to room lighting and time of day, especially brightness which I haven’t settled on for a final setting. Being an IPS LED monitor, the LG can get very bright and puts to shame all older LCD technologies. There are brighter ones out there, but it is far more than adequate.

Gamma is set to Gamma0 and for the longest time I couldn’t get that setting to work. It turned out that cycling through Reader mode and disabling it somehow allowed me to change the gamma settings.

Color is set to Warm which looks better than Cool or Medium and I haven’t fine tuned the custom setting. The ability to do that is pretty comprehensive for a lower end monitor. Normally I’ve set color to cool or tweaked them to it, but it looks like this LG is different.

Response time is set to high, which gives 5ms gray to gray timings. This is primarily for games and action films to reduce afterimages during fast moving scenes.

After having tweaked the monitor, I can safely recommend it barring any longevity issues which only time will reveal. To my surprise, this is the best looking LCD monitor I’ve personally dealt with. Colors are excellent, contrast is far better than anything in this price range should be, and ghosting hasn’t been witnessed. A very small amount of light bleed in the left hand corner is present and far less than was expected from an LED panel.

One annoyance is that dynamic contrast is built into the monitor, like most that are put out today. Sometimes you can see an image changing before your eyes and there is no way to disable it on the LG.

I’d been a proponent of the theory that once you hit 27” in monitors that the resolution needs to be higher than 1080p or 1920 x1080 pixels. No longer do I feel that way after seeing all the detail I’d been missing at that resolution on a 23” monitor. Most people may love the natural antialiasing that occurs when you stuff too many pixels into smaller displays, but I’m finding detail in photos that I wasn’t seeing before.

I don’t find the base shaky like some, though I deal from vibrations of the laptop stand it sits on. Note to myself, find a way to reinforce that and stop throwing unread notes under it.

Controls are straight forward, easy to use, and well labeled. Only two inputs are VGA and HDMI. That cost me extra money since I don’t have any spare HDMI cables lying around. Only a VGA one is included, so be prepared to spend more money than on the monitor itself.

Oddly there is a headphone jack in back next to the inputs. Given the size of the monitor and location of the jack (dead center), it is useless. Other than that, there are no speakers for which I am grateful.

A lot of superlatives could be thrown around, however this is simply a fantastic monitor for the money. Aging eyes will love the upgrade, gamers will find it more immersing than smaller monitors, and streaming HD looks amazing whether it be live action or animation. The latter looks especially good and is a brutal test for a display due to the well defined line and colors.

I may have to break out my Blu-ray of Zulu to test it further. That classic movie will show off what an HD monitor or TV is really able to do thanks to an impressive Technicolor restoration and high bitrate.

Now I’m tapped out financially, but at least I can see what I’m typing. The LG 27MP33HQ was worth the cost.