So, I got my new 24" display today. It quickly made friends with the previous leader, the 20.1" on the left. It named itself the Primary, the 20.1 its Secondary, and lacking enough graphics card connections for a Tertiary, the two proceeded to shun the 17", previously the Secondary. Witness its shame as it looks away from the two happily illuminated and vastly larger displays.

The new 24 incher is a real monster. As you can see from this crumby picture alone, it's vastly brighter than the previous reigning champion. See the large central gray portion in that lower right window in the left monitor? That's white, according to IBM tech from 2003. As you can see, the newcomer to the right manages to make a far brighter white-yellow than the old one's whitest white. That's the difference of 250 vs 500 cd/m^2 I suppose.

The colors are also richer-seeming. Though you might see the brighter greens of the aurora and figure that the darker monitor has better colors, that's just the case there because that part is supposed to be very bright. The other colors--like the blues--are very bright and look amazing. Looking at my 20.1 now, it's impossible to believe that just 12 hours ago I was fully satisfied with it. And yet I was.

This monitor isn't perfect. The right side and top right corner especially are visibly grainy--a very odd effect which is quite noticable if you look for it, but fortunately doesn't show up if you're trying to look at what's being represented (such as in a game or movie) rather than obsessing over detail. It has this annoying thing with the HDMI connection where if you switch to another connection and then back to HDMI, it can't see the incoming signal--at first I'd have to restart each time I wanted it to re-acquaint itself with the computer, though eventually I realized I could just keep the Display Settings window up in my secondary display and change the resolution (then change it back) to sorta shake the silly thing awake. The quality of the video inputs is a bit less than I'd been used to with my video tuner box--the image is much less smooth, the aliasing on its threefold-expanded pixels is rather noticable too, but at least it's progressive scan and deinterlaced when progressive scan doesn't work. I have to manually pick between full-screen (forced stretching to 16:10) and Normal (forced compression to 4:3) display modes, but that should become less of an issue as I move away from older games and more towards those which support Widescreen.

Ah well. Overall worth the $350 Newegg charges for it, though if I could get it without the graininess (nobody else noted this, only me) I'd much more strongly recommend it.