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For the longest time I really wanted to get a nice 27" IPS 2560 x 1440 monitor. The monitor I have now is 27" and while it has served me well, the lack of it being IPS has started to bug me as many other things in my life now have this technology (and much better viewing angles). I got a pretty sizable bonus this year that makes anything within the $800 price bracket or down an option (though cheaper is still better). However I can't help but feel that maybe 2560 x 1440 is on the decline with 4k being discussed. Would it be wasteful to drop big bucks on something like this now, when we may see cheaper and higher resolution monitors in a year or two? Do I have too high of hopes for what could happen to the desktop monitor market? Hoping some more informed souls could help guide me. Thank you.

Edit: Monitor recommendations are welcomed. I would prefer to stay with 16:9 ratio if possible. Thanks!

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ is a highly recommended reference when you're shopping for a new monitor. It does depend on what your specific needs are - gaming, video, color accuracy, viewing angles, inputs, budget - to pick a suitable display.

Personally, I'm not holding my breath for cheap 4k monitors. I have a feeling they'll command a price premium for a while. There's also the problem of OS scaling with high PPI displays - the implementations are still in their infancy. So I wouldn't wait for a 4k drop if you need /want a new monitor in the near future.

Having said that, what monitor are you using now? I'm surprised that a 27" 1440p monitor in this day and age is TN - was it a gaming monitor? If so, you might want to check out the response time measurements of any prospective new monitor at tftcentral.co before making your decision.

I went with a 4K display and was not very happy with it. It felt very hard for me to focus on the images on the screen. I'd stick with a 1080 display a little bit longer.

Voldenuit wrote:

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ is a highly recommended reference when you're shopping for a new monitor. It does depend on what your specific needs are - gaming, video, color accuracy, viewing angles, inputs, budget - to pick a suitable display.

Personally, I'm not holding my breath for cheap 4k monitors. I have a feeling they'll command a price premium for a while. There's also the problem of OS scaling with high PPI displays - the implementations are still in their infancy. So I wouldn't wait for a 4k drop if you need /want a new monitor in the near future.

Having said that, what monitor are you using now? I'm surprised that a 27" 1440p monitor in this day and age is TN - was it a gaming monitor? If so, you might want to check out the response time measurements of any prospective new monitor at tftcentral.co before making your decision.

Sorry I wasn't clear, my current monitor is a 27" 2048 x 1152 TN monitor. Pretty nice with good color accuracy for a TN, but not an IPS and I feel like I could use a bump up in resolution. I guess the other thing I need to consider is if going to 2560 x 1440 is worth it over say 1920 x 1080 @ 120hz. I mainly game and your standard email/web on my computer, but I have an HTPC for most of my movies hooked up to a TV.

Omniman wrote:

I went with a 4K display and was not very happy with it. It felt very hard for me to focus on the images on the screen. I'd stick with a 1080 display a little bit longer.

Interesting. I have never seen one IRL. Would you stick with 1080p over 1440?

Omniman wrote:

I went with a 4K display and was not very happy with it. It felt very hard for me to focus on the images on the screen. I'd stick with a 1080 display a little bit longer.

The entire point of a 4K display is that the images are super sharp. How would 4K prevent someone from focusing on images?

StuG wrote:

Interesting. I have never seen one IRL. Would you stick with 1080p over 1440?

I'd die if I had to go back to 1080p for my main display. Stick with 1440 or higher.

Do you game? Then stick with 1440 unless you plan on spending serious $ on a GPU(s).

If you don't game or have the GPU power then take a look at Dell's 4K Displays. The Dell UP2414Q is only $1,300. The upcoming Dell 28 Ultra HD Monitor will be under $1,000.

Keep in mind that the high-PPI situation under Windows sucks.

I switched to a 1440p screen and I love the added clarity, pixel density, and detail that came with it. Also, my 680gtx appreciates that I don't have to force super sampling to smooth out pixels.

I got a Qnix display from amazon for around $360 or so. Shipping was free as well (which is pretty good coming straight from S. Korea).

StuG wrote:

Sorry I wasn't clear, my current monitor is a 27" 2048 x 1152 TN monitor. Pretty nice with good color accuracy for a TN, but not an IPS and I feel like I could use a bump up in resolution. I guess the other thing I need to consider is if going to 2560 x 1440 is worth it over say 1920 x 1080 @ 120hz. I mainly game and your standard email/web on my computer, but I have an HTPC for most of my movies hooked up to a TV.

If you're a gamer, then high resolution (certainly anything over 1920x1080) is your enemy. Any online video card review will show the power of pixels to bring video cards low. 2560x1440 means at least a AMD R9 290 or NVIDIA 770 to enable most eye candy.

This is one reason why I prefer 720p Laptop screens; higher resolution is fine up to the moment you try to game on one.

WQHD is the current sweet spot.
$390½ +$18½ 27" 2560x1440 Monoprice 9579 IPS LCD monitor
$346 +free shipping 27" 2560x1440 QNIX QX2710 IPS LCD monitor

I do game and I have a GTX 680 Classified 4GB, so I can do decent with a higher resolution monitor. I also play games that largely aren't killing my GPU, rarely playing AAA FPS blockbusters. However one of the things I think I am the most concerned about is quality control. If I'm going to be throwing down real money, I don't want any light bleeding or strange hue's going on. I can't seem to find a monitor that runs at 1440 that doesn't seem to come with a huge slew of reported issues. Kinda disappointing for the price bracket.

Those Korean monitors scare me in the sense that you are largely flying solo, and I have had buddies get burned by em.

StuG wrote:

Sorry I wasn't clear, my current monitor is a 27" 2048 x 1152 TN monitor. Pretty nice with good color accuracy for a TN, but not an IPS and I feel like I could use a bump up in resolution. I guess the other thing I need to consider is if going to 2560 x 1440 is worth it over say 1920 x 1080 @ 120hz. I mainly game and your standard email/web on my computer, but I have an HTPC for most of my movies hooked up to a TV.

Are there any 120 hz IPS monitors compatible with lightboost outside of the cheap Korean monitors? Some of those monitors are pretty decent, but they generally lack amenities you expect from a modern display, such as hardware scalers, HDMI input, etc. Depending on your needs, that may not matter.

As far as I can tell, all the major OEM monitors that support Lightboost are TN (boo!).
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2330173

There are some ppl that use 120 Hz TV monitors to game at 120 fps. They don't have Lightboost, so will not have the full blur-reduction effect, but if you're not specifically after Lightboost, then a native (or overclocked) 120 Hz monitor might also work. Not sure if nvidia has fixed the issue with their drivers defaulting 1080p displays to reduced color depth yet, though.

As others have pointed out, going to 1440p means you'd better have a beefy GPU (then again, the same can be said of trying to run a display at 1080p120). Seems like there are caveats everywhere...

My beef with high-resolution monitors, and even many standard-res display formats, is that most software still completely fails to let the user adjust font and icon/image size to maintain a comfortable UI. I recommend spending some time visualizing what games and applications you use all being scaled down by whatever ratio you get from your current monitor vs. a high-dpi monitor to see if it's something you are okay with before throwing down any cash money.

Voldenuit wrote:

Are there any 120 hz IPS monitors compatible with lightboost outside of the cheap Korean monitors?

None of those support strobing. And they look utterly crap at 120hz compared to the real deal.

Voldenuit wrote:

As far as I can tell, all the major OEM monitors that support Lightboost are TN (boo!).

There's also a few other backlight-strobing technologies, like EIZO's 'Turbo 240'; Samsung has a similar technology.

Voldenuit wrote:

Not sure if nvidia has fixed the issue with their drivers defaulting 1080p displays to reduced color depth yet, though.

Only happens on HDMI; DL-DVI or DP are required to use 120hz.

As to the OP, either get an FG2421 for the amazing clear motion and 5000:1 static contrast (5x better than the best IPS), OR a large (2560*1600) 10-bit IPS for superior color reproduction and high resolution.

High-res monitors are definitely worth it, in my opinion. There is only ONE occasion that made me regret buying my 30" display, and I discovered that while traveling over the holidays... trying to remotely use a 2560x1600 system from a 1366x768 res laptop is truly terrible.

I access my dual 1440p system via TeamViewer remotely all the time. Really it's quite fine. I even gave someone isk in Eve Online once.

I believe some are over emphasising how much 120Hz/LightBoost matter unless you are part of the group that's super sensitive motion blur. For everyone else it's quite a balance between color/quality and motion. My Qnix (I have 4) at 96Hz looks pretty great. 120Hz doesn't normally work too well on the Korean IPS/PLS monitors, the backlight cannot actually keep up.

On the matter of the FG2421 which might seem like it's a best of both worlds beast, it's not - the image quality is actually worse than the best TN displays:
* The reds tend to be pinkish colored
* The clouding issue - this one eventually effects all of the displays but it's a panel lottery at best
* The gamma shifting - all VA panels suffer from this, but this one is a bit worse
* The Turbo 240 reduces the image quality and produces oddly enough flickering outside of games.
* Blacklight bleed in dark games
* Some get crosshatching (really badly)
* Oh and in general according to people in the HardOCP forums, the monitor seems to fail much higher than other monitors, specifically worse than the Korean displays.

Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm not sure where this conversation got pushed towards lightboost and what not, but it is fairly unimportant to me. I play mainly Eve Online, BF4, and War Thunder. Games that while they are a bit twitchy, will likely be totally fine with a tad bit of lag. Not a professional CS:GO player or anything. I think my current selection has been slimmed down to ASUS PB278Q vs ASUS PA279Q. I know the ASUS PB278Q is faster but I am personally still leaning towards the ASUS PA279Q. Any input there?

keltor wrote:

I believe some are over emphasising how much 120Hz/LightBoost matter unless you are part of the group that's super sensitive motion blur. For everyone else it's quite a balance between color/quality and motion. My Qnix (I have 4) at 96Hz looks pretty great. 120Hz doesn't normally work too well on the Korean IPS/PLS monitors, the backlight cannot actually keep up.

It has nothing to do with the backlight! (； ･`д･´) You appear to have no idea what you're talking about. Your credibility is nothing; your entire post is nonsense. I'd send you a PM to discuss this further since it's offtopic for this thread, but I don't think anything positive would come of it, so I won't bother. I just want others to know that your post is garbage.

StuG, my understanding is that the PB278Q uses a PLS panel which does not quite match the standard for the proper ProArt ("PA") series for color reproduction. However, you may not actually about that. It's still a very nice panel and will look great while gaming and such. That said, from my understanding, the higher-end IPS monitors from Dell tend to include a "game mode" which dramatically improves input lag and response time, at the cost of some color accuracy. Have you looked at those?

I'm sure they've been recommended to you elsewhere, but I've never heard a bad thing about the Ultrasharp series. People these days get real worked up about QNIX and Yamakasi and Achieva, but reviews show that while these monitors are pretty good value, they come with some serious compromises I personally am not willing to make. I shamefully convinced my poor girlfriend go in for $550 on a CATLEAP 2B model -- the overclocking specific one -- and after extensive experimentation it really wasn't worth the money. (Of course, I've never told her that, and she doesn't know the difference anyway.)

StuG wrote:

Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm not sure where this conversation got pushed towards lightboost and what not, but it is fairly unimportant to me. I play mainly Eve Online, BF4, and War Thunder. Games that while they are a bit twitchy, will likely be totally fine with a tad bit of lag. Not a professional CS:GO player or anything. I think my current selection has been slimmed down to ASUS PB278Q vs ASUS PA279Q. I know the ASUS PB278Q is faster but I am personally still leaning towards the ASUS PA279Q. Any input there?

10-bit colour/wide colour gamut (which the PA279Q has) is excessive unless you actually need it for professional reasons, as far as I'm aware - and you generally need to manually switch between Adobe RGB (for "pro" work) and sRGB (for everything else). It's certainly not a -bad- thing to have such a well-calibrated and capable monitor, but unless you're sure it's worth the ~$250 extra to you, I'd go for the cheaper PB278Q.

Sorry to steer away from what you directly asked, but how good is your eyesight when it comes to computer monitors? I ask because you'd be going from a monitor with a Pixels-Per-Inch value of ~87 to a PPI of ~109. I actually struggled when I moved from ~94 PPI to ~109 PPI (Dell 2408WFP @ 1920*1200 @ 24" to Dell U2713HM @ 2560*1440 @ 27"), and you'd be making even more of a jump. It's something to consider anyway. The quality of the screen will almost certainly destroy your current screen, at least .

I ended up keeping the U2713HM, but I had to set Windows to size everything to 125% of normal and increase font sizes in my browser etc or my head just started pounding. Still vaguely pondering selling the 27" and going for the 30", which is about halfway between at ~100PPI.

Oh and for what it's worth, my U2713HM has "worse" response times/input lag/magic fairy dust production than either of the screens you're looking at, and my distinctly non-professional gaming isn't any worse (or better) than it is when I occasionally use the 24" 120hz BenQ XL2411T on my other machine . I primarily play World of Tanks, Guild Wars 2, a little BF3/BF4 and some strategy games.

Oops, rambling post. Hope it's of some use, anyway.

Mentawl wrote:

StuG wrote:

Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm not sure where this conversation got pushed towards lightboost and what not, but it is fairly unimportant to me. I play mainly Eve Online, BF4, and War Thunder. Games that while they are a bit twitchy, will likely be totally fine with a tad bit of lag. Not a professional CS:GO player or anything. I think my current selection has been slimmed down to ASUS PB278Q vs ASUS PA279Q. I know the ASUS PB278Q is faster but I am personally still leaning towards the ASUS PA279Q. Any input there?

10-bit colour/wide colour gamut (which the PA279Q has) is excessive unless you actually need it for professional reasons, as far as I'm aware - and you generally need to manually switch between Adobe RGB (for "pro" work) and sRGB (for everything else). It's certainly not a -bad- thing to have such a well-calibrated and capable monitor, but unless you're sure it's worth the ~$250 extra to you, I'd go for the cheaper PB278Q.

10-bit color also requires a quadro or firepro workstation card - this feature is locked out at a driver level on consumer Geforce and Radeon. At least, that's my understanding. So, it's not worth paying fot a 10/12/14-bit display unless you have a professional workstation card. 8-bit panels with 10 (or 12) bit look up tables work and look great on consumer cards, however.

I'm kept away from high-res monitors mainly by the extra GPU horsepower that is needed. You need to invest a significant amount more in your graphics card, and probably upgrade more often as well. I'd much rather have a display with a very high refresh rate and G-Sync

auxy wrote:

keltor wrote:

I believe some are over emphasising how much 120Hz/LightBoost matter unless you are part of the group that's super sensitive motion blur. For everyone else it's quite a balance between color/quality and motion. My Qnix (I have 4) at 96Hz looks pretty great. 120Hz doesn't normally work too well on the Korean IPS/PLS monitors, the backlight cannot actually keep up.

It has nothing to do with the backlight! (； ･`д･´) You appear to have no idea what you're talking about. Your credibility is nothing; your entire post is nonsense. I'd send you a PM to discuss this further since it's offtopic for this thread, but I don't think anything positive would come of it, so I won't bother. I just want others to know that your post is garbage.

StuG, my understanding is that the PB278Q uses a PLS panel which does not quite match the standard for the proper ProArt ("PA") series for color reproduction. However, you may not actually about that. It's still a very nice panel and will look great while gaming and such. That said, from my understanding, the higher-end IPS monitors from Dell tend to include a "game mode" which dramatically improves input lag and response time, at the cost of some color accuracy. Have you looked at those?

I'm sure they've been recommended to you elsewhere, but I've never heard a bad thing about the Ultrasharp series. People these days get real worked up about QNIX and Yamakasi and Achieva, but reviews show that while these monitors are pretty good value, they come with some serious compromises I personally am not willing to make. I shamefully convinced my poor girlfriend go in for $550 on a CATLEAP 2B model -- the overclocking specific one -- and after extensive experimentation it really wasn't worth the money. (Of course, I've never told her that, and she doesn't know the difference anyway.)

I have read a lot about the Dell Ultrasharp series, and they seem to be a roulette game right now. They have really bad QA standards with really good parts...if you are willing to go through 5 of them you'll end up with a great product. Something that costs this much seems like it should have better QA then that. I would really like to get the best color possible, which is why this decision hasn't been clear cut for me. However, the Dell U2731H has really terrible lag even with game mode.

Mentawl wrote:

StuG wrote:

Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm not sure where this conversation got pushed towards lightboost and what not, but it is fairly unimportant to me. I play mainly Eve Online, BF4, and War Thunder. Games that while they are a bit twitchy, will likely be totally fine with a tad bit of lag. Not a professional CS:GO player or anything. I think my current selection has been slimmed down to ASUS PB278Q vs ASUS PA279Q. I know the ASUS PB278Q is faster but I am personally still leaning towards the ASUS PA279Q. Any input there?

10-bit colour/wide colour gamut (which the PA279Q has) is excessive unless you actually need it for professional reasons, as far as I'm aware - and you generally need to manually switch between Adobe RGB (for "pro" work) and sRGB (for everything else). It's certainly not a -bad- thing to have such a well-calibrated and capable monitor, but unless you're sure it's worth the ~$250 extra to you, I'd go for the cheaper PB278Q.

Sorry to steer away from what you directly asked, but how good is your eyesight when it comes to computer monitors? I ask because you'd be going from a monitor with a Pixels-Per-Inch value of ~87 to a PPI of ~109. I actually struggled when I moved from ~94 PPI to ~109 PPI (Dell 2408WFP @ 1920*1200 @ 24" to Dell U2713HM @ 2560*1440 @ 27"), and you'd be making even more of a jump. It's something to consider anyway. The quality of the screen will almost certainly destroy your current screen, at least .

I ended up keeping the U2713HM, but I had to set Windows to size everything to 125% of normal and increase font sizes in my browser etc or my head just started pounding. Still vaguely pondering selling the 27" and going for the 30", which is about halfway between at ~100PPI.

Oh and for what it's worth, my U2713HM has "worse" response times/input lag/magic fairy dust production than either of the screens you're looking at, and my distinctly non-professional gaming isn't any worse (or better) than it is when I occasionally use the 24" 120hz BenQ XL2411T on my other machine . I primarily play World of Tanks, Guild Wars 2, a little BF3/BF4 and some strategy games.

Oops, rambling post. Hope it's of some use, anyway.

Your post actually helped quite a bit. The U27113HM was an option before, and maybe I should re-consider it. My biggest worry there is the reports of crosshatching....which sounds terrible. Do you have any on yours? Your gaming largely matches up with mine, so your opinion on the lag is really nice. I find all the time that I want a more refined display and things look pretty big on my 27" now, so I think going to a bigger PPI won't be a huge issue.

The Egg wrote:

I'm kept away from high-res monitors mainly by the extra GPU horsepower that is needed. You need to invest a significant amount more in your graphics card, and probably upgrade more often as well. I'd much rather have a display with a very high refresh rate and G-Sync

I have a GTX 680 4GB Classified, I think I will be fine for now given the games I play. However I typically upgrade every 2 years to a good ~$450 video card anyway....so hopefully that habit will be fine with this new resolution.

StuG wrote:

Your post actually helped quite a bit. The U27113HM was an option before, and maybe I should re-consider it. My biggest worry there is the reports of crosshatching....which sounds terrible. Do you have any on yours? Your gaming largely matches up with mine, so your opinion on the lag is really nice. I find all the time that I want a more refined display and things look pretty big on my 27" now, so I think going to a bigger PPI won't be a huge issue.

Unfortunately, from my experience, the quality control on the U2713HM leaves a bit to be desired, and considering I'm on my second replacement (so third actual monitor), I don't think I could recommend it. My first screen was flawless, but after about 4 months, something appeared actually between the layers of the LCD (it was behind the pixel layer but in front of the backlight) - looked like a good-sized (4-6 pixels worth) bit of dust. It can't have been anything I did (besides, the monitor was just sitting on my desk, not like I was throwing it around in a truck or whatnot), so must have been something loose inside the screen that eventually dropped between the panel layers.

I got it replaced with a screen that was far from ideal - serious cross-hatching and a high-pitched whiney buzz whenever I viewed a screen consisting primarily of text (odd one, but it's a known issue apparently, and has been fixed in the latest revisions with a replacement PSU). So that one went back too.

The third one is visibly flawless - no pixels out, no cross-hatching, no PSU noise. I'm just praying nothing goes wrong with it . I've invested in a carrying kit from GearGrip for the odd occasion when I have to move it, just to try to keep it safe.

I can't fault Dell's warranty people, they happily replaced the screen twice for me, quickly and relatively painlessly (as these things go). I was just disappointed, as my old 2408WFP went for 5 years without a hitch - I was hoping for the same quality again. Oh well . You will definitely eventually get a nice monitor by buying a U2713HM, and they may well have fixed all the problems in the latest revisions if you order new stock, but no reassurance from me that it will be smooth sailing I'm afraid. Good luck whichever you end up getting, hope you get a flawless screen .

StuG wrote:

Thanks for chiming in everyone. I'm not sure where this conversation got pushed towards lightboost and what not, but it is fairly unimportant to me. I play mainly Eve Online, BF4, and War Thunder. Games that while they are a bit twitchy, will likely be totally fine with a tad bit of lag. Not a professional CS:GO player or anything. I think my current selection has been slimmed down to ASUS PB278Q vs ASUS PA279Q. I know the ASUS PB278Q is faster but I am personally still leaning towards the ASUS PA279Q. Any input there?

I went with a ASUS PB278Q a few weeks ago and got a GTX780 to drive it. I am very happy with it. The input lag is not noticeable to me and the picture is great: colors, angles, etc. There is slight backlight bleed at the corners on a black screen but it's not bad at all and I personally dont even register it unless i am consciously looking for it.

Mentawl wrote:

...10-bit colour/wide colour gamut (which the PA279Q has) is excessive unless you actually need it for professional reasons, as far as I'm aware - and you generally need to manually switch between Adobe RGB (for "pro" work) and sRGB (for everything else). It's certainly not a -bad- thing to have such a well-calibrated and capable monitor...

I don't mean to threadjack, but this is something I've been curious about, since I dabbled in graphic design in college way back when. I know that we've been using "deep color" workstations for some time now, like old SGI Reality Engines, or Pantone calibrated screens for print work, but why did 10 bit color gamut never catch on in consumer level displays like TVs or regular computer monitors? Surely we've got the compute power now to make it a non-issue. Is it just a price thing, or because it would make broadcast TV streams much larger? Just curious why it's been deemed excessive, unless you need it for work.

... I know that we've been using "deep color" workstations for some time now, like old SGI Reality Engines, or Pantone calibrated screens for print work, but why did 10 bit color gamut never catch on in consumer level displays like TVs or regular computer monitors?.... Is it just a price thing, or because it would make broadcast TV streams much larger? Just curious why it's been deemed excessive, unless you need it for work.

A 10 bit panel is more expensive to make. Also it makes the size requirement to transmit or store the information much higher. Now we do have movies encoded at 10bit(shown at 8bit ie blurays/broadcast) and most high level home theater equipment has 10bit capability. So we could move 10 bit for home theater gear easily. In fact after 4K Home theater enthusiasts want either a wider color gamut( How many colors you can express) or a higher bit depth ( How fine those levels between a color can be expressed; also how fine the level between two separate colors can be expressed). /threadjacking