Benchmarking

I've always been fascinated by the concept of alternate universes. I imagine various universes in which an Eric Franklin does not work for CNET in San Francisco, but instead still lives in his hometown of Chicago and owns an import video game/comic book/action figure shop.

Or maybe, instead of refusing to join his high school football team at 16 as I did, Eric Franklin No. 3213 not only joined the team, but became an NFL superstar. Hey, athleticism runs in my family so that last fantasy ain't so far-fetched.

Although my chances of becoming a god … Read more

Luckily for me, there isn't much in between monitors and displays. Luckily for you (I hope), I'll be answering any and all questions pertaining to computer monitors on Thursday, September 17, from 11 a.m. to noon PDT (2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern). Here is the link in advance.

Show up early or late, whichever floats your boat, and I'll see ya there.

Vendors want to sell you stuff! There, it's finally been said. Don't believe me? Well, you wouldn't be the first, but thankfully, I have evidence.

Within the last year I've seen a new spec, called dynamic contrast ratio (DCR), tossed around for computer displays. If you didn't know before, contrast ratio is simply the difference between the darkest blacks and the brightest whites a given display can produce.

Typically, computer displays have a contrast ratio of about 1000:1. However with DCR, you'll see numbers like 4000:1, 10,000:1, and higher. Basically, it's just a way for Company A to proclaim, "Don't buy Company B's monitor because it has a much lower DCR than our monitor." Since more and more vendors have been pushing this, I want to delve further into how they're getting these numbers. I also covered this topic in less detail (but with a sexy voice thrown in) in episode 2 of the Inside CNET Labs podcast.

Before a monitor is released to the public it goes through a bunch of testing in the vendor's own lab. These tests produce the specs that the vendor will then publish with the release. Specs like maximum brightness, pixel pitch, pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dynamic contrast ratio are all determined in the vendor's own lab.

When testing normal contrast ratio, vendors use a device that measures light to determine how much light is emanating from a display while it's showing both a completely black and a completely white screen. They then take each number, do a bit of math, and come up with the contrast ratio. … Read more

So last Friday (7/11, "iPhone day") I'm getting ready to do some performance testing on the iPhone 3G. Well, if by "getting ready" I mean stealing pizza and pop (hey, I'm from Chicago) from the poor saps--I mean fellow CNETers that were in the office since 4 a.m. that day to cover the second coming of the Second Coming. Don't hate. This is how I roll at CNET, and my colleagues respect me for it. I mean, why else would they suggest I do First Look videos like this?

Anyway, my … Read more

Twnety-six-inch displays are not the most common size of monitor out there, but Viewsonic is doing their part in changing that. Today they announced the Viewsonic VA2626mw for a price of $530. This price makes it cheaper than Dell's 24-inch model, but still more expensive than some of the others we've reviewed. I mean you are getting two extra inches here, though...

You're also getting a DVI, VGA, and HDMI input for your video connection needs and two built-in 2.5-watt stereo speakers.

Viewsonic claims a native resolution of 1920x1200 and a dynamic contrast ratio of 6,… Read more

OK, I admit it. I want options, even though, most of the time I don't have much use for them. Take pocket-size external hard drives, for example. I want them to be compact, light, pretty, bus-powered, and especially I want them to support USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800. (I would take eSATA, too, though, that wouldn't make sense until it's bus-powered capable). However, the truth is, I've used mostly just the USB 2.0 connection for personal purposes. So today, I decided to find out if FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 are worth … Read more

A couple months back I attempted to test two 30-inch displays--the Samsung SyncMaster 305T and the Gateway XHD3000 Extreme HD-- at the same time using CNET Labs' current distribution amplifier (DA), the Extron Electronics D2 DA4 DVI D2 DA4 DVI. This device allows up to four displays to simultaneously view the same video signal from one system. For years we've used this device to not only speed up testing, but to do accurate direct comparisons as well. Unfortunately the native resolution for the aforementioned 30-inchers is 2,560x1,600, and the maximum resolution the Extron supports is only 1,920x1,200. So, without a means to test them simultaneously at their native resolutions I was stuck in a bind. I could have tested them one at a time, but since our testing--which includes DisplayMate--has a high level of subjectivity to it, it's always best to do direct simultaneous comparisons, instead of testing one display today and then waiting a couple days to test the next. Testing them simultaneously allows you to see the exact differences between the displays.

So I delayed the testing and the review for a few weeks. In the meantime I got in touch with a colleague at DisplayMate, Ray Soneira. He put me in contact with a company called Kramer. Kramer manufactures a number of distribution amplifiers including the Kramer VM-2DVI. This particular DA is Dual Link compatible and supports each 30-inch display's 2560x1600 resolution. So now I could test both 30-inch displays simultaneously at their native resolutions in DisplayMate and in our current games test, World of Warcraft. However whenever I attempted to run either our Kill Bill Vol. 1 DVD or our Swordfish BD on both displays at the same time, the DRM gods reared their ugly heads and denied me salvation. So when testing how each display handles disc-based movies, I was forced to evaluate each display one at a time. The Kramer VM-2DVI is not advanced enough to circumvent DRM tomfoolery, unfortunately. That said, we're still very pleased that the VM-2DVI allowed us to do the bulk of our testing as fairly and accurately as possible.

The issue of not being able to view certain disc-based movies simultaneously on two or more displays may not be an issue for long, as CNET Labs is considering moving away from using movies--and even games-- to evaluate the quality of a display. The reason being that video images generally move too quickly to do a picture quality comparison, whereas static images such as high-quality photos can be studied as long as necessary in order to examine their quality. No decision has been made as yet, though, but look for more on this in a future Inside CNET Labs post.… Read more