I recently picked out a 32in QHD monitor to pair with two 27in QHDs for a triple-monitor setup. After using the 27in QHDs for a few years I decided the pixel density was a bit too high for comfort so I decided to upgrade my primary to a 32in.
Both of my QHD screens are IPS monitors with 178 degree viewing angles, so I made sure the 32in monitor I picked was an IPS screen with a 178 (or higher) viewing angle. With a little color correction everything should look the same, but wow, this monitor really looks different.
When looking at the monitor straight-on from ~2 feet away the sides of the screen are dark. The best way I can exaggerate this is if I fill the screen with white and move my head side to side. The “bright” part of the screen stays straight in front of me and the rest of the monitor gets darker as it gets further away.
My other two monitors don’t do this. I can tilt both of them to an extreme angle before they start to appear dark. I don’t understand what is different about this monitor that makes it this way. The darkening is so extreme that, if the screen is filled with solid white, the edges of the screen appear “shimmery” as the angle from my left eye is getting a darker/brighter image than my right eye.
I thought maybe it was the “screen surface finish” but my two 27in monitors are “matte” and “glossy,” the new 32in is “glossy.” All three are IPS displays. All three boast a 178 degree viewing angle. Reviews for the 32in talk about how it looks great and I don’t understand how people can stand this. It feels like an old LCD TV, not a gaming LED monitor.
Does anyone know what attribute I need to look for?
The 32in is the “SAMSUNG 32-Inch Odyssey G50D.”
My two 27in’s are the “ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQ1A” and the "Acer Nitro VG271U."
According to Rtings, the Samsung has a notably worse viewing angle than your other two. Take a look at the graphs:
Samsung: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/samsung/odyssey-g5-g50d-s27dg50#test_1417
Asus: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/asus/tuf-gaming-vg27aql1a#test_1417
Acer: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/acer/nitro-vg271up-pbmiipx#test_1417
Not sure if that explains your experience or if there’s something more to it.
THIS IS A GREAT RESOURCE!
Thank you so much! Now I can measure and see exactly what I’m looking for! I can watch the little videos and see what I’m looking for in them. (This also makes it seem like saying you have a viewing angle of 178 is a complete lie)
The ASUS monitor has a 32in variant but unfortunately it’s not on Rtings. It’s apparently a VA panel and not an IPS, so not sure how it would look next to the others.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BHKSNR22
I’ll see if I can find a monitor that checks all my boxes that I can cross-reference with Rtings. I’ll also be testing out amazon’s return policy on opened monitors. Glad I kept the box intact.
Yes of course 178° is a lie and marketing B’s, just like “1 ms response time”. Keeping in mind that 180° is the theoretical limit of that number, as you would view it from behind if you’re above it. They are saying “you can see something if you view it from that angle”, not “the colors are unchanged at that angle”. Again, marketing. There is no regulation or “official” definition on what the technical spec “viewing angle” means for a monitor, so it’s whatever the marketing department decides it means.
Honestly, every Samsung product I have used for a decade has been trash.
Except SSDs
That’s actually a great point
I’m convinced Samsung is extremely compartmentalized.
Reading the comments here, seems like Samsung was a bad choice.
How can the pixel density be too high?
Because 12pt text becomes 8pt text and it’s a hassle to scale the entire UI… for the apps that even a allow that. Imagine playing Quake (why the hell not) at a gajillion by bajillion pixels: glorious resolution, but what’s my health again? Better to stay in the original SVGA or whatever it was. Exaggerating, but I’m sure you follow.
Exactly. I can scale individual programs but not everything scales nicely. I can scale the UI in system settings, but things will look funny unless it’s in even increments.
1440p makes everything small on a 27in. If I did a 4k on a 32in everything would be even smaller.
I use a 28" 4k display at work and it’s glorious. Outside of games basically every program scales correctly with system wide scaling. It’s just window games that struggle bad.
At home my gaming desktop has a 32" 4k display and I run it with no scaling. But for anything not gaming you need scaling.
So I have a 3-monitor setup, all 1440p with the 32" in the center and 27" on the sides. I’ve tried scaling for the 32" monitor, but windows “pop” to scale when moving them from screen to screen. It’s really great that I can configure each display to scale independently, but the pop is… peculiar.
If my center were a 4K screen then maybe scaling would help? According the the PPI calculator my 27" screens are 108.79 PPI and a 34" 4K would be 137.68 PPI. Roughly 110 and 140, pretty distant from being doubles of each other.
That being said, I did find some scaling options that made my 27" screens much more comfortable on my eyes, so if I increase the scale a little more a 4K might work out.
Since posting I’ve grown more comfortable with the larger screen, still not fully decided on it though. I wish there were more stores where you could just WALK IN and LOOK at monitors. The big-box stores around me all have laptops, chromebooks… groceries…
You’re never really sitting at a 90° angle for the whole screen, only the middle. For very large screens the effect can get quite pronounced. One possible solution is to look for a display with better off-center viewing performance in terms of colour and brightness shift. The other comment about rtings is a great resource.
Alternatively you can get a curved display where the entire surface area is at a perpendicular angle to your eyes (this is most common in ultra wide displays). These come with their own tradeoffs of course. One of them is the viewing sweet spot is not only from left to right, but also at a given distance from the screen. You can calculate the desired curvature based on display size and how far you will be sitting from the screen.
I’m not an expert but it seems like the sort of LED arrays used in IPS provide up a backlight coverage sweet spot up to about the 27” mark. At which point, from what I can tell from my own monitor comparisons, Is above 27” OLED becomes more necessary for more complete, even, backlight density.
Are OLEDs better now in terms of longevity? I don’t want to pay 3 or 4x the amount for a screen that’ll die in 5 years because I use it everyday.
I also hear a lot about burn-in and software to jitter pixels and whatnot.
