Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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224 of 229 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
great all-purpose / work monitor, January 19, 2008
This monitor is an amazing value (it can be found for $500).
I am a software engineer and bought this monitor for my home office.
It has a very large .309" dot pitch, which is exactly what I wanted, so text appears as large as possible at a given font size.
Not sure why some people whine about large dot pitches in monitors (and at the same time buy 50"+ TVs that naturally
come with humongous dot pitches).
This is an awesome monitor for a programmer or anyone spending a lot of time reading text.
The 1920x1200 resolution is ideal: it's more than 1080p (full HD) and doesn't need a fancy dual-link dvi graphics card. Any 32MB card can display full color at this resulotion. Unless you play 3d games, you can take full advantage of this monitor for web browsing, watching video, photo processing, presentations and so on with a $30 card.
If you go to a 30" monitor, you get a very small dot pitch (text will appear smaller) and will need a much fancier graphics card.
This page has an excellent visual presentation of how the font looks like at different dot pitches:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/658-1/lcd-tests-the-acer-and-dell-26-and-27.html
This monitor is dual input (vga and dvi/hdmi) so I've been using the VGA connection for my ubuntu linux workstation and the DVI for an apple laptop and can switch between the two from the monitor's menu buttons. Using 1920x1200 at 60hz I see no difference in quality between VGA and DVI (I was worried that VGA won't be good enough, but it is!)
The monitor has built in speakers that can be driven either by HDMI (if you hookup a DVD player for instance) or via a separate audio input. The monitor also has audio out, so you can connect better speakers (the built-in ones face backwards as they are on the backside of the monitor, so they have poor projection). They are ok for casual movie watching though.
Another thing I look for in a monitor is capability of low brightness. For a programmer, too-high brightness is a big problem. Many LCD monitor's are ridiculously bright and cannot go down to 100cd/m2 (at 100cd/m2, also called "print-level" a white screen is about as bright as holding a paper page in a well-lit room). Anything more than that is quite straining for the eyes, especially at night. Turning the brightness to 0, and the contrast to about 25, I get the "paper effect" with this monitor, although blacks are not as deep as I would like. It does better than most monitors, but not nearly as good as my older Sony 19" SDM-HX93 LCD which had an amazing backlight adjustment.
Another feature I miss is lack of presets. My old Sony had presets so with a single button I could switch from high brightness for day-time movie watching to low brightness late-night programming.
With the Hanns.G I need to go to the menus and turn down brightness and contrast (which takes about 10 key presses altogether). Not many monitors have presets though.
The only 27"/28" monitor I found that does is the Samsung 275T, but it costs double the money!
The monitor's stand is pretty good. It swivels left/right and can be tilted upwards (useful if you want to look at the screen while standing up).
My biggest gripe about the monitor is the poor vertical viewing angle. Looking down is fine, but looking up darkens things quite a bit. I like the middle of the monitor at eye-height, but this makes the top of the screen a little darker. I would have to lower the monitor so the top edge of the screen is at eye-height to avoid this problem.
There you have it. This monitor isn't quite perfect, but for the money it's a fantastic value. It's being marketed as a gaming monitor, but does a excellent job as a professional workstation monitor as well. It would also be a very good choice for anyone with poor eyesight due to the large dot pitch which makes fonts appear larger.
I would definately buy it again!
UPDATE: I discovered a way to lower the brightness in addition to the brightness/contrast controls. Go to "Color setting" in the menu, and turn down all 3 RGB colors; I set Red to 70, Green to 70 and Blue to 62. This lowers the brightness considerably, so I do not have to reduce the contrast too much to achieve the low brightness setting I am after for easy-on-the-eyes late night coding sessions.
You can take the RGB colors all the way to 0 resulting in a black screen; it's an awesome brightness adjustability!
This trick may work on other monitors too, please comment if you have the chance to try it on Samsung, LG, Viewsonic, or other monitors.
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51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best GAMING LCD out ther for the $$$$, October 17, 2007
This monitor has great color and the brightness is bit bright at stock settings for my taste. But with a little adjustments in the menu makes the LCD shine just right. I have used Dell 24" and Samsung as well. And this LCD keeps right up with them in picture and specs. The only thing this monitor is missing is a height adjustment with it. But the construction of this monitor is ROCK SOLID. It feels very strong and well built. Now for all of you GAMERS out there this monitor has it all. A 3ms response time is amazing, with NO ghosting effects at all. I am using 1 8800GTX card with a resolution of 1920x1200 playing Crysis DEMO is awesome. For a 28 wide screen, 3ms, great picture, this is a must for all of you gamers out there. Now if you want to spend $1500.00 for a 30" monitor make sure you have another video card to push it with it. So save 2k and buy this monitor for gaming with 1 video card you will be so happy you did..
And if you have a PS3 or XBOX360 play your BluRay or HDDVD on this LCD at a TRUE Res of 1920x1080P is always a plus...Because of the built in speakers you can use a HDMI cable to get video & audio when plugged into a PS3 or HDDVD player. I am very very happy with this monitor and I am glad I didn't waste my money on the 30" wide screen.
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44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Hanns.G from Amazon and I-Inc version from TigerDirect, December 26, 2008
First of all, these monitors are meant to give you the biggest picture available for the lowest possible price. With that in mind, they're not bad at all. I have three of these so far, one original Hanns.G model (from Amazon at $479) and 2 I-Inc models (from TigerDirect at $349.) All three worked fine right out of the box. I'm not a monitor testing shop, so these are my subjective comments:
The good: big, bright, sharp, reasonable color uniformity across the screen. All three came with VGA-VGA cable, VGA-component breakout cable, HDMI-DVI cable, mini-3.5mm to RCA L/R cable, mini-3.5mm to mini-3.5mm cable and a US 3-pin grounded power cable. CD included had display drivers for Vista (and Vista x64.) Interestingly, all 3 displays call themselves (via the drivers) a "Hanns.G HG281"
The bad: BIG (what else can you call something this big), hot (the I-Inc models get noticably warmer), some vignetting in the corners, and inconsistent color quality from unit to unit (I had to tweak the color settings to get two I-Inc models side-by-side to look the same color-wise.)
Hanns.G HG281DPB versus I-Inc iF-281DPB in one sentence: they appear to be the same exact display, with perhaps a slightly less efficient power supply on the I-Inc (it runs hotter) and a piano black (Hanns.G) vs. matte finish (I-Inc.) Otherwise, I can't find any other differences. (Well, the power LED is a circle with a G in it on the Hanns.G vs. a plain rectangle on the I-Inc, the base comes in the box separately on the I-Inc and you have to attach it with three allen screws (key included!) and the Vista "Certified" sticker is in a different place...)
Details: You HAVE to run this at 1920 x 1200 to appreciate the clarity and sharpness. That said, the analog VGA input does suffer from some minor softness, with color artifacting around single white pixel columns next to black columns. No such problem found with the DVI/HDMI input. I did notice that the initial out of the box setup was better with the I-Inc models than the Hanns.G (they are no longer so VERY BRIGHT by default.) Strangely, the auto-sync of the I-Inc panel running off of the VGA input didn't get a good clear picture the first time; I had to kick off another auto-sync and it cleared right up.
I've verified that hard-powering these off and then back on (as you'd do with a power strip in a home theatre) does have it power back up (at least in my short 30 second test.) It found the input that was connected and sync'd up in no time.
The Hanns.G model I got ran quite a bit cooler than the I-Inc models. I noticed this shortly after powering them up. A quick scan of the manuals shows one difference in spec between the Hanns.G and I-Inc: power consumption of <=64.5w on the Hanns.G vs. <=100w on the I-Inc. The I-Inc aren't HOT per se, but the top edge (where the cooling vents are) measured 112F vs. an ambient of 68F.
The speakers are an afterthought; they should have left them off altogether. (both models)
I had no hot or dead pixels on the Hanns.G in the first two months of using it.
I had 1 hot red pixel about 3" down from the top and 6" from the right on one of the I-Inc models. Pretty much right in your field of view, but you don't notice it unless you have a fairly dark region in that part of the screen; otherwise it's not even noticable. No amount of rubbing or tweaking seemed to make this one turn off.
The second I-Inc had no hot or dead pixels at all.
The onscreen menu has changed between the Hanns.G I got back in September and the I-Inc models I got a couple of weeks ago. The manual for the I-Inc still shows the menu used on the Hanns.G (and I can only assume the earlier I-Inc models? It's a cyan, white and magenta color scheme.)
The new menu is white text on a bright green background, most all of the same settings are there, with the exception of a new "X-CONTRAST" setting (on or off.) When set to on, the overall brightness seems to ramp up and down with the content fed to the display. On a mostly dark background, like a movie, the display lowers the overall output considerably. When I first saw it I thought the backlight was going out! When you feed it a mostly white background, the levels ramp up accordingly. When you turn "X-CONTRAST" on, you can't set the brightness or contrast controls anymore. Overall, I'll pass on this feature (leave it off) as I can't quite figure out what they're trying to do with it.
One other feature of the new menu (I can't remember if this was in the Hanns.G model or not): pressing the i key brings up a source selection menu that allows you to switch between HDMI and VGA easily.
Overall, these are EXCELLENT displays with a nice BIG, BRIGHT picture. It's not a TV, so if you're using it to watch movies directly from a DVD or other source you will probably be dissapointed. There's no remote, the speakers are not worth the weight they take up, and your input sources are limited. However, if you think of it as a basic MONITOR, you can probably integrate it into your home theatre setup quite nicely. With a video switching receiver upstream, and this as simply a MONITOR (and not a TV) this would be a nice configuration. You could even power it off of a switched power outlet on the back of the receiver (my Sony ES has several.)
But as a COMPUTER DISPLAY, I find that two of these hanging off of the back of a laptop (1 via DVI and 1 via VGA) makes for an incredible 3840 x 1200 display. The slight signal noise on the VGA panel wouldn't be as noticable if it wasn't next to a DVI/HDMI fed one for comparison's sake. I'm still debating whether these would be better stacked 2 high vs. 2 wide, or perhaps 2 wide but 90deg rotated (for a 2400 x 1920 desktop.)
One last warning: make sure you have a big desk, and plan on a small fan to move air off of these behemoths.
All-in-all, very satisfied! I'm picking up another one for a spare!
I've been told that TigerDirect has had these for $300 at times, but currently they're listed at $329. Still a great deal, even with tax (damn NC!) and shipping. I saw it on Amazon one day for $300 (with the seller as TigerDirect) so I don't think I'm breaking any rules mentioning the prices and seller. One ding against TigerDirect, they are showing a diagram of the display with 28" as the viewable picture dimension (it's 27.5" actually, says so right on the box.)
Longevity has yet to be seen. Given that the AC->DC power supply bits are internal means disecting it after warranty if you have to fix this. I'd almost prefer an external brick for ease of replacement. The warranty on the HannsG lists as 3 years, on the i-Inc. as 12 months.
I'd recommend checking the operating temperature and putting a small fan behind these if your heat is anything like mine. I'd like to get a few years out of these, so anything to help keep them cool can't hurt.
Good luck! As with everything, your mileage may vary... :)
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