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Hey everyone,

I've been trying to find the reason for the price difference between these two monitors. I've had mixed luck with off brand monitors before (the korean IPS craze gave me about 50/50 results, but currently running a great 27" 144hz IPS AOC monitor), so I'm trying to be a little more careful this time.

Both are relatively cheap, but the GN32DB is $100 cheaper and I don't know why.

32DB link:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 004Y-00031

32LD link:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 004Y-00017

Both seem to be:
144hz
1440p
VA panel
Curved (1800r)
Freesync



Also, coming from an IPS will VA be a noticeable downgrade? I do some graphic design, shader stuff, level design (amateur game dev stuff) so color reproduction is important but not critical. Consistency and viewing angle is more important. It drives me up a wall when one monitor has significantly different color balance than the other. I'll be getting two of whichever I decide on, and these aren't the only two I've been looking at, just the two best deals.

The DB version has max brightness of 250cdm and DCR 1M:1 whereas the LD is 280cdm DCR 5M:1 with a height-adjustable stand. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they use the same Samsung VA panel, just different backlighting.

Considering the DB version is only $330....that's hard to ignore. When you get up to the $460 range, the chart-topping Samsung C32HG70 for $460 is the better buy.

As someone who works with professional artists and graphic designers every weekday, I can 100% guarantee you that the difference between a calibrated monitor and an uncalibrated monitor is far more important that what technology the panel uses. Regardless of the panel type, a colorimiter (either buy one or borrow one) will make the biggest difference.

VA has narrower viewing angles - gamma and colour shift happens in the horizontal plane, notably at around 45 degrees - and that is utterly irrelevant if you're working directly in front of the monitor. In terms of gamut coverage and deltaE colour accuracy, VA panels are generally very good - they can usually be calibrated to a deltaE of under 2.0 across the board, some of them even under 1.0 across the board (but that is a generalisation and there are still innacurate VA panels out there)

IPS has inferior contrast - 1000:1 native instead of 3000:1 native of VA, and this will mean that you need to crank up the brightness and work in a brightly-lit environment to accurately work on dark artwork. Colour accuracy is generally good for 8-bit panels but not so great for 6-bit eIPS panels. Honestly, a 6-bit IPS panel may have deltaE values over 5.0 but they're okay to work on because the 'error' is due to the colorimiter not dealing with FRC dithering. Your sluggish human retina will not perceive the deltaE error as significant, though you will experience some gradient banding and noise if you work on very subtle gradients over a large area.

Yeah that's kind of what I was thinking, regarding price range. Once you get up to the ~$500 range there's a lot more options.

I guess I'm also really worried about the colors, since that was my huge beef with the Korean IPS's that I picked up. Is it reasonable to expect a company like Samsung to do their own color balancing? I can only assume that the off brands don't really bother. Colorimeters look a little expensive, so they may not be an option.

Can you borrow one? Few manufacturers actually factory-calibrate their monitors. Dell Ultrasharps are my go-to if you want a calibrated consumer display.

I don't know anyone that has a colorimiter... most of the tech folks I know are IT or gamers. I haven't met anyone that does graphic design or cares much about display quality.

Truth be told, having perfect reproduction would probably be lost on my skill level. The majority of the stuff I do doesn't require super high color coordination, it just needs to be consistent across both monitors. Working in UE4 and Affinity Designer side by side (primarily for UI stuff thats largely vector based or simple pixel stuff), its mostly important that both monitors look close enough to the same.

Is calibrating something you would need to do even with a nicer brand name one?

For the sake of learning, if I did get the cheaper monitors and a colorimeter, what's the process of using it to adjust the colors? It might be a neat skill.

Several years ago, I bought a ColorMunki Smile and used the software that goes with it. $90 and it made a big difference to me. Now I calibrate anything I use regularly and it seems like colors are consistent from one device to the next.

There's not really any skill to them. You follow the instructions to hook them over the top of your monitor, you run some wizard-based software and it spits out a colour profile and asks if you want to set your OS to use that profile by default.

You don't have to buy the colorimeter at the same time as the monitor though; Get a monitor, manually adjust it to your liking, with the assistance of sites like lagom.nl and then see how good it is to work on.

If you notice that colours are off you can usually get halfway towards a calibrated display just by manually tweaking it whilst comparing to another display that has a known colour accuracy. Find a half-decent display that you have access to from this list and adjust your display as best you can to match the phone display. If the phone display isn't perfect, at least that site will detail the limitations of that display, so you can mentally adjust when matching your display to the phone if you know that the phone is cooler (bluer) than the full sRGB gamut.

You could always try using a smartphone as a ghetto colorimiter, though it'll be limited to the accuracy of the camera in the phone. COLOR GRAB and CAMERA COLORIMETER are two apps that look promising but I've used neither so can't comment on how well they work. Failing that, even a budget colorimeter is a good investment if you're actually trying to produce colour-accurate work. Sypders aren't too expensive (just over $100) though you'll need to buy a patch card to get the best out of them (another $50).

Cool! Thank you for all the feedback and advice. I'll watch these deals and think it over.

I love 32" of workspace. I have dual 32s at work and its a nice step up.

FWIW, my Samsung C27HG70 came with a factory color calibration report in the box.