Performance
Initial Impressions
Initial impressions couldn't have been better, both using DVI and analogue connections. Quick trips to Microsoft's ClearType tuner had the display looking its best on each input, no other adjustment to the display via its OSD was necessary. Big, bright and clear were the overriding thoughts when first using it and they still apply now, typing this out using the display. Using the preferred DVI-I input gives no subjective advantage in display quality in my opinion, over using the analogue input, but it does make setting the display up easier if your graphics card doesn't quite get things right first time, in terms of analogue output quality from its DAC.DVD Performance
DVD performance was great. No anomalies were spotted, bar slight discomfort watching DVD quality video sources on such a large, multi million pixel display. To put it bluntly, it's too good for DVD video. Television is the preferred display device for DVD video for a reason. The actual display was great, there was no ghosting or artifacting while playing DVDs, even high action, fast motion movies. Thumbs up, but you're wasting its talents as a DVD display conduit in all honesty, like all large, high quality LCD displays.Gaming Performance
This is the make or break item for many. These days, 2D quality, DVD performance and the like are all taken for granted. It's fast motion gaming performance that's key to many new LCD buyers. And to put it bluntly, it's not as good as the 20ms panel in the 920 PRO. It's possibly a side-effect of having an LCD panel that large, or maybe it is actually down to pixel refresh performance, but like the LG panel, I didn't have to stare too hard to see slight residual displays in certain places in certain game titles. Mainly dark games where there are flashing elements to the graphical scene (think blinking neon lights on a dark level in UT2003 for example) and where the viewer 'camera' can be moved really quickly.Overall, you can certainly play games on the 191 BLK, it's brilliant for that purpose. Games look very good at the panel's native resolution (a possible benefit of it not being 1600x1200 or other higher resolution since you can play games with better performance), and the contrast level helps things look their best.
It's just not as good as the 920 PRO which was close to perfect in my opinion. Insert the usual caveat of 'my eyes aren't your eyes', it's a subjective opinion at best.
Displaymate Multimedia Edition
We've got our hands on DisplayMate finally and while I'm still learning how to use it properly, I have been able to use it to evaluate the 191 BLK's performance in some respects. DisplayMate has a massive set of geometry tests and as you'd expect with a modern, expensive LCD display, it passes them all with flying colours. Colour reproduction performance, including some tests that highlight the differences between gradiated colour blocks, evaluating a display's ability to show all the colours in a certain colour range, was also spot on. I couldn't find fault in it in that respect.Thumbs up in all the limited DisplayMate tests, I'll hopefully have it completely mastered by the time I come to evaluate my next display device.
