Arlen

First your monitor will flash the backlight for a fraction of a millisecond. Next, your monitor make the rest of the frame completely dark. That’s strobe. By cutting off the light before your pixels smear across the screen, your eyes thinks they’re looking at a crisp image. In practice, that means you get to trade … Read more

Before you know it, there’s that black bar. It bleeds past edge of your TV screen when title sequence starts during a movie. You set up a game capture, now there is these odd voids on each side, making the vertical video look like something went wrong. Moddern viewing is a geometry issue; and not … Read more

I mean you sit down in a darkened room with a monitor whose box said it had ten thousand to one contrast, and what do you get? Washed out gray soup, with the idea of black being something that simply swallows up all the light. It’s not so much that the panel sucks; it’s more … Read more

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a high refresh rate monitor in a dark room wondering why your text looks smeared like butter, you’re not alone. Gamers, graphic designers, and anybody else seeking crisp edges on their screens know this frustration all too well. Your pixel count isn’t really to blame, nor are your … Read more

You purchase a new monitor claiming to deliver smooth motion at high resolutions. But when you plug it in all you see is black. You try to use every available input source without success. And then it dawns on you: You’re using a DP 1.4 cable rather than a DP 2.1. Or you’ve plugged into … Read more

Now you buy a new 4K monitor. You see movies is sharp, but your desktop icons aren’t. Why? Chroma subsampling creates a tradeoff between display port and your graphics card. No, it’s not because you have bad eyes. No, it’s not because you used a bad cable. It’s because there is a limit to how … Read more

You start up your console, hit “Play,” and all you see is a black screen. The sound plays, but there’s no picture. You power it down and back up again; you recheck your connections… Still nothing. Why? Because HDMI isn’t just a data pipe. It needs to negotiate encoding standards, timing, and bandwidth that vary … Read more

By now you’ve probably witnessed some older TV clips in which something isn’t right. A human subject seem ever-so-slightly out of proportion. You notice their face looks slightly distorted, almost like it was captured by a curved mirror. No, this isn’t bad acting. This is an unsolved math problem. The image was captured into one … Read more

If you play a competitive shooter at an old school resolution on moddern monitor, it’s possible you’ll see character models stretched out across display. That’s no bug, in fact, it shows a compromise between visual comfort and horizontal field of view. When you put a square image into rectangle, you’re inevitably battling geometry, which means … Read more

You’re playing a game on a high refresh rate monitor, sitting in a dark room waiting for the next frame. On screen the average frames per second looks respectable, and your hardware seem to be doing its job. Then, mid-combat, the camera swivels slightly, and everything stutters, just for a fraction of a second. If … Read more

Gaming for long periods of time causes neck strain, and it’s a function of how far away your screen is from your eyes and what resolution that screen is running at on what sized monitor. It might be lit properly and have the perfect frame rate, but its sitting way up in your grill causing … Read more

Transitioning from a regular 16:9 monitor to an ultrawide display is like learning to drive a new vehicle. Your new monitor’s increased width increases your peripheral awareness, benefiting simulators as well as competitive shooters. However, if you don’t change any settings, the transition will feel a lot more like learning to drive a different car … Read more