I’m looking at getting a blu-ray drive for my PC, primarily because whenever I want to watch a blu-ray movie that the wife has no interest in, and the kids should not be around for, I have to watch it on the PS3 downstairs right under where our bedroom is, and then I have to be super quite. I HATE watching movies and having to be super fucking quiet.
Also, I have that ASUS Xonar Xense setup on my PC, so I presume movies will sound very nice.
However, I currently have an older 22" 1680x1050 monitor, so I’d like a new monitor that can pull out 1920x1080 resolution natively, and probably be 24" at that so it’s a bit more of an upgrade (since there isn’t really anything wrong with my Samsung).
Should I look at the LED backlit monitors? Are they better/worse/same than a regular LCD? It looks like the very high end LCD’s are NOT LED backlit, which I found puzzling, and led me to ask this question?
So, any suggestions? I’m going to be gaming primarily, to be clear, so it can’t be a monitor just good enough for movies, it needs to game well, too, and I don’t want to drop more than $200-250 on it, I just can’t afford that much AND the Blu-ray drive (AND Game of Thrones, the catalyst for this purchase)… I’m willing to stick with 22" though, if the screen is brilliant/amazing, it doesn’t HAVE to be 24" or anything.
LED-assisted LCDs in computer monitor sizes are all edge-lit by LEDs, as far as I know. It’s inferior to proper LED backlighting, and it sells at a premium (to CCFLs) despite costing the manufacture less to produce.
24 inches also comes at a curiously high premium compared to, say, 23 inches. Like, a 25% cost difference for comparable models.
You’ll also hear people rave about IPS panels, but I think its at least half placebo, at least in the scenario of a desktop display.
In short, I’d just get an Asus unit like this one. 23.6-inch diagonal for $150 after mail-in rebate. The customer reviews over at Newegg generally rave about these Asus monitors.
Also be aware that Blu-ray player software that’s bundled with drives is usually pretty shitty. Apparently the codec license is expensive (and VLC won’t decrypt it), so you have a poorly-designed interface and missing attendant A/V features (like AC3, or Dolby Digital II, or 3:2 pulldown, that type of thing). The solid software costs around $100. Buying a home theater Blu-ray player for your computer can easily cost less than the BD drive, since a BD drive kind of requires the purchase of third-party software to bring it up to par.
I must say that I love IPS panels now that they are quite affordable, especially for their color correctness. TN panels would drive me crazy, when I would read a webpage and have the background colour and thus text contrast change significantly from the top to the bottom of the panel.
Agreed, Qmanol. There is a real difference. FWIW, I gave a mini-review/comparison of two budget priced IPS monitors which I also compared to my Dell U2412M. In short, the Dell is an obviously better monitor when you look at the images side-by-side, but in practice you can get away with a cheaper model and still have the benefits of an IPS unless you’ve got a very picky audience (meaning you).
As an aside, I get zero bleed from the Dell, no noticeable lag, and excellent colors … but it also costs a lot more than the two I reviewed.
I picked up the 2312HM on discount last month, and it’s amazing (LED+ISP, 23" 1920x1080). It’s a beautiful monitor at the price range, and I can’t think of anything bad to say about it at all.
PowerDVD and WinDVD are usually the 2 only/shitty options still. Well, there’s ArcSoft and Nero. But that’s it I guess. So quaint, when they expected physical discs to be the centre of a media library.
I looked at that model, but passed because I need Display Port inputs. I settled on a trio of ASUS VE276Q 27" monitors instead. They should be here Monday.
