I spent 5 minutes shopping for flatscreen monitors at a large electronics
store.  About 8 monitors where showing the same ad, which was a mixture of
still photos, vector based text, and movies.

Funny thing is that many of them seemed to be suffering from a color
displacement: it looked like the reds were 2 mm off, at least when showing
some stills.

Should I avoid such a brand where this happens EVER, or could it be an
electronic artifact in how an error in color shift occurs because of
sharing or splitting the output too many times?

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Greg M. Johnson wrote:
> I spent 5 minutes shopping for flatscreen monitors at a large electronics
> store.  About 8 monitors where showing the same ad, which was a mixture of
> still photos, vector based text, and movies.
> 
> Funny thing is that many of them seemed to be suffering from a color
> displacement: it looked like the reds were 2 mm off, at least when showing
> some stills.
> 
> Should I avoid such a brand where this happens EVER, or could it be an
> electronic artifact in how an error in color shift occurs because of
> sharing or splitting the output too many times?

The cause is probably the latter. If you're interested in a certain 
screen, have them hook it up to a PC with an output configured to fit 
the screen. Once the screen starts squashing images and getting 
deteriorated input, there's no way to tell if its only the messy input, 
or also a bad screen.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
aka "Tim Nikias"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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>I spent 5 minutes shopping for flatscreen monitors at a large electronics
> store.  About 8 monitors where showing the same ad, which was a mixture of
> still photos, vector based text, and movies.
>
> Funny thing is that many of them seemed to be suffering from a color
> displacement: it looked like the reds were 2 mm off, at least when showing
> some stills.
>
> Should I avoid such a brand where this happens EVER, or could it be an
> electronic artifact in how an error in color shift occurs because of
> sharing or splitting the output too many times?

2 mm off is certainly at least 5 or 6 pixels, probably nearer 10.  There is 
no way this could be possible inside the monitor, it would need to have 
additional circuitry to delay one colour channel a significant amount of 
time compared to the other channels.  You can get sub-pixel alignment 
problems if you are feeding it with an analog signal, but that just makes 
stuff look blurry (all colours are shifted) and can be easily fixed with the 
"auto" option on most monitors.  Feeding it via DVI digital doesn't have 
this problem.

I would say it's just the result of very crappy analog source and splitters 
being used...  Go to a different store!

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"Tim Nikias" <JUS### [at] gmxnetWARE> wrote in message 
news:47593429$1@news.povray.org...
> Greg M. Johnson wrote:
>>
>> Should I avoid such a brand where this happens EVER, or could it be an
>> electronic artifact in how an error in color shift occurs because of
>> sharing or splitting the output too many times?
>
> The cause is probably the latter. If you're interested in a certain 
> screen, have them hook it up to a PC with an output configured to fit the 
> screen. Once the screen starts squashing images and getting deteriorated 
> input, there's no way to tell if its only the messy input, or also a bad 
> screen.
>

Funny anecdote:
While I was at my local Wal-mart, they had some HDTV's hooked up, being fed 
from some common source.  The STUPID thing, was that they were all sharing 
some highly compressed video feed.  Artifacts were horrible.  It was better 
than YouTube quality, but worse than standard analog TV.  I couldn't figure 
any reason that they would be showing a demo video that made all their 
HDTV's look like junk.  Incompetence can be funny, I guess...

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Jeremy M. Praay <jer### [at] questsoftwarecmo> wrote:
> While I was at my local Wal-mart, they had some HDTV's hooked up, being fed 
> from some common source.  The STUPID thing, was that they were all sharing 
> some highly compressed video feed.  Artifacts were horrible.  It was better 
> than YouTube quality, but worse than standard analog TV.  I couldn't figure 
> any reason that they would be showing a demo video that made all their 
> HDTV's look like junk.  Incompetence can be funny, I guess... 

  One would assume that since they had HDTVs, they would also have bluray
or hddvd players and discs. One could also assume that at least some HDTV,
bluray or hddvd manufacturer would have some kind of demo disc for the
exact purpose of demonstrating what their device is capable of, and which
shops could use for this purpose (that is, in case the shop cannot show
some movie disc or HDTV broadcast because of copyright issues).

  I suppose either that was not the case, or they were just incompetent
and the nephew of the boss put some crappy wmv to play in those HDTVs...

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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