The V3D231 is a 60 Hz, TN-panel 23” display with 1080p resolution that
also does 3D. Most will be happy to hear that it has a matte finish on
the display, but due to the passive 3D technology, it also has a
patterned retarder on the screen. This is necessary to produce the
polarized image to allow for 3D with the included glasses, but it also
produces a texture to the display that is clearly visible from normal
distances. Some people might not be bothered by this, but I know that I
always have been. It’s more apparent on bright images I find, but as
most monitors will be used with web pages, word processors, and
spreadsheets, there are a lot of white backgrounds that will accentuate
it.
Gallery: ViewSonic V3D231 Exterior Gallery
Since passive 3D only needs simple polarized glasses, ViewSonic has
included both a pair of glasses and a clip-on polarizer for people that
normally wear glasses. The clip-on option is very nice as many active
glasses do a poor job of fitting for people that have to wear glasses in
daily life, making 3D hard for them to watch at all. I wish they had
included an extra pair of the regular glasses so two people could watch
something at once, but given the screen size they might have thought
that was an unlikely situation. ViewSonic has also included a copy of
the TriDef3D software that enables most of your games to take advantage
of the monitor.
The inputs on the ViewSonic are what you might expect, with HDMI, DVI,
and DSub, along with both audio in and headphone out audio jacks. I
still don’t understand why all manufacturers continue to place the
headphone out on the rear of the monitor where it is hard to reach
instead of on the bottom or side of the display, where you could more
easily access it. The only ergonomic adjustment available on the display
is tilt, but it does have VESA mounting holes if you wish to add your
own stand for more adjustments.
The OSD is controlled by four buttons located in the center of the
monitor. ViewSonic has had the same menu control system for as long as I
can recall, and nothing here has really changed about that. The Up
Arrow also functions as a shortcut to the 3D mode selection, and the
Down Arrow is a shortcut to the volume control. Little labels to
indicate this would have been nice to have on the front panel, so you
didn’t need to look it up in the manual or discover it accidentally. I
should also note here that the bezel of the monitor is a very glossy
black, which does reflect back a decent amount of glare as well as
attract fingerprints. All of the controls I would typically look for in
an OSD are available, including being able to set a custom white
balance.
The tilt mechanism of the ViewSonic is pretty stiff and takes some
effort to move it to where you want it, which also makes fine
adjustments hard to do. I’d also prefer that the markings for LED, HDMI,
and 1080p on the front of the monitor be removable once the buyer has
the monitor at home, but they seem to be silkscreened onto the bezel.
It’s curious that they have those, but no label that mentions it is a 3D
display.
Overall, the passive 3D feature is the main feature that sets the
ViewSonic V3D231 apart from other displays on the market today. Pricing
is higher than non-3D displays, but it's also quite a bit less than
active-3D 120Hz displays. Of course, whether it's actually a better
display or not is what we want to determine.
The V3D231 is a conventional TN display, which means the viewing angles
are not fantastic. In day to day use they didn’t bother me, but as soon
as you start to move off axis too much you get very large contrast and
color shifts. This might be why they only provided the single set of 3D
glasses, as when I was testing I found I needed to be in the exact right
spot or my viewing experience would vary dramatically.
Gallery: ViewSonic V3D231 Viewing Angles
Uncalibrated, the V3D231 performs no better or worse than most displays
I have seen. The best thing about its results is that it offers a much
more linear grayscale than most non-professional displays, with the peak
dE error being around 12 instead of the 14-16 that I commonly see. This
is still very poor performance, but in comparison to many consumer
displays it is slightly better. I did my testing uncalibrated in the
sRGB mode, which was the most accurate but also will not let you adjust
the brightness or contrast when selected. Since the sRGB standard has a
target of 120 nits and not the 200 nits we usually use, this will look
darker than what you might like. If you don’t have access to any
calibration equipment and want the most accurate picture out of the box,
it is the mode that I would choose.
Using ColorEyes Pro and an i1Display2 colorimeter, I then calibrated
the ViewSonic to our target values: 200 nits of light output, a D65
white point, 2.2 gamma, and minimum black level. This resulted in an
average dE less than 2 with a fairly linear grayscale. The ViewSonic did
not do well with shades of blue, and the error there was some of the
highest from all of the displays we have reviewed. Here again we have
decent performance, but nothing outstanding.
To test how the ViewSonic would perform for print work, I once again
used ColorEyes and the i1Display2, only this time I chose a target of
100 nits instead of 200 nits, which is closer to the level of light
output you would get reflected off the printed page. Once again we have
an average dE of under 2.0, but if you look at the chart you will see
that the grayscale is far worse than any other display we have tested
recently. Apparently the V3D231 has issues with calibration down to 100
nits, perhaps caused by the use of the patterned retarder on the screen
for 3D. Regardless of what causes this issue, the ViewSonic is not a
monitor I would consider using for print work as any other monitor we
have reviewed does a much better job with grayscale quality.
When I reviewed my last 3D monitor, it was an active 3D display that
needed far more light output due to the nature of the 3D technology.
With the V3D231, while each eye is only getting half of the light output
from the screen, that is still far more than the ~25% you might get
from an active 3D display. With a pure white screen and all controls set
to their maximum values, the ViewSonic managed to put out 272 nits of
light. Cut in half this would only be 136 nits, which some people might
find a bit too dull for their normal gaming, especially if there is much
ambient light. It has plenty of light for 2D work, but ViewSonic would
have done well to use a more powerful backlight for 3D.
With the backlight set to the minimum, the V3D231 put out 61 nits of
light. This would be considered plenty of range to use for both normal
use and print work, but as we saw on the 100 nits calibrated results,
the ViewSonic is not a display that should be considered for print work.
The ViewSonic uses an LED lighting system, but it doesn’t seem to have
any sort of zone controls built in. Zone controls would enable you to
have far better black levels in areas of the screen that are pure black,
but they are also more expensive to produce. The black levels for the
ViewSonic are merely average, with 0.353 nits with the backlight at
maximum, and 0.078 nits with the backlight at minimum.
The unfortunate side effect of those black levels is that while they
are the same as many other displays, those other displays can produce a
far brighter level of white. Perhaps the patterned retarder is causing a
drop in maximum light output compared to a standard LCD monitor, but
the end results is contrast ratios that are on the low side for a modern
display. Coming in below 800:1 at both maximum and minimum backlight
levels, these are the lowest contrast ratios that I have measured, and
the lowest we have measured in a while. Unfortunately it looks like the
test results of the ViewSonic are continuing to be a little bit
underwhelming.
One good test result for the ViewSonic was the brightness uniformity
test. It was still not totally uniform by any means, but the standard
deviation was only 9 nits, which is 50-60% better than most displays,
and an average brightness level of 185 nits. There were also no sections
of the monitor that dropped below 170 nits at all. It's not an ideal
result, but it is far better than most monitors manage.
The black level uniformity was just average for a display on the
ViewSonic. With a standard deviation of 0.028 nits, and an average level
of 0.21 nits, the ViewSonic doesn’t stand out in any way. The center of
the display was the brightest, probably because of the lighting system,
and it dropped off the most in the corners of the display.
Overall the ViewSonic V3D231 is a bit below average for brightness and
contrast, other than the white level uniformity test which was good.
Despite the good brightness uniformity, the color uniformity of the
ViewSonic is really not very good. The middle "row" of the display does
well, with an average dE of 1.84, but the top and bottom of the display
both have average dE values that are closer to 2.5. The overall average
dE for the display is 2.31, but that is really brought down by the
middle row. The upper left corner has a dE over 3, which is uncommon and
indicates that there will be a clearly visible color shift for anything
in that corner of the display. Looking at the breakdown by color, you
can see the grayscale in the upper left has a very large shift, with a
dE over 3 over the entire range. I was really quite surprised by the
poor uniformity in color after the very good uniformity in brightness,
as poor backlight uniformity is often the cause for color shifts around
the display.
The color gamut for the ViewSonic is just sRGB and measured 73.15% of
the Adobe RGB gamut. This falls in line with the color quality and the
backlighting system, as the errors occur in those shades of blue that
are at the edge of sRGB and it is not unexpected at all.
Of course anyone buying this ViewSonic monitor is going to be buying it
for 3D use as well. As I touched upon earlier, passive 3D has some
advantages over active 3D, including cheaper glasses. The main advantage
in my view is that I find it far easier to watch and enjoy than active
3D. For people like myself, the opening and closing of the lenses in
active 3D glasses leads to headaches and discomfort in a short period of
time, and we generally avoid it. Passive 3D has none of that since your
lenses are always open. This also allows more light to pass through
than with an active 3D display. Additionally the technology used in
passive 3D should virtually eliminate any ghosting or crosstalk in the
3D image.
Unfortunately, passive 3D does have one major downside: due to the
polarization used by the patterned retarder, you only get half the
effective vertical resolution from a display. Each eye is effectively
seeing a 1920x540 image instead of a 1920x1080 image as you would with
an active display. Determining if this tradeoff is worth it requires
trying out both types of display, both for gaming and for general use.
Examples of text from this review can be seen below, both with and
without the glasses between the camera and screen.
For gaming tests, I relied on three main games: Half Life 2, World of
Warcraft, and DiRT 3. ViewSonic provides the TriDef 3D software with the
monitor that supports hundreds of games, so anything you have from the
past few years has a very good chance of being supported. The first
thing I tried out was World of Warcraft, and this was certainly not a
game designed with passive 3D in mind. The loss of half the resolution
renders the text unreadable, which is a big no-no in an MMORPG or other
genre with lots of reading. During normal gameplay it was fine, but you
can’t read anything that is on the screen while in 3D mode and wearing
the glasses.
Half-Life 2 and DiRT 3 prove to be much better examples for the V3D231,
as there is a good sense of depth in the rendering and not much in the
way of artifacts. You still see some ghost objects, but I found the
glasses much easier to wear and use than any active 3D glasses. The
TriDef software allows for you to adjust the sense of depth and other 3D
parameters in game, which lets you determine what is easiest to view.
Objects that appear to come out of the screen, instead of going back
into the screen, can often cause more eye strain and fatigue, so if you
find yourself getting tired you can reduce the level of depth in the
image to compensate. While I think that 3D can add something to the
experience, passive 3D does add a lot of aliasing due to the loss of
vertical resolution, and I feel that a 120Hz refresh rate made for a
more natural, immersive experience than passive 3D does.
For watching movies, passive 3D is a tossup once again. The recent 3D
Blu-ray release of The Lion King looked just fantastic. Crosstalk and
ghosting were practically non-existent I found, and the loss of
resolution really didn’t bother me much with the animation. However, as
soon as I put on the 3D Blu-ray of Tron Legacy, I found myself wishing
for an active 3D display. The combination of black backgrounds and
bright, angled lines led to aliasing all over the image and was really
quite distracting. Tron is my worst case disc for passive 3D, as it
seems to show off the downsides more than anything else, and that is the
case here.
Running crosstalk benchmarks, the ViewSonic seems to do much worse than
the prior active 3D Samsung, but the results on the ViewSonic are
incredibly dependent on my head angle and location. If I shift just an
inch to the side I get totally different numbers, so I tried to maintain
my head in the dead center. Since it is a passive display, the numbers
seem much higher than they should be, but I made certain that every
measurement was as accurate as I could make it.
For non-3D gaming, I put the ViewSonic through the usual lag tests,
with both faster and regular response enabled. I found no differences
between the modes in testing, so there is only one set of numbers
presented here. The ViewSonic averages just about 1 frame of lag in
comparison to the ViewSonic CRT next to it. I had no issues using it for
general gaming, but people that need better response will want to look
at some other options.
Hooked up to the Kill-A-Watt, the ViewSonic maxes out at 35 watts with a
full backlight, and 15 watts with the backlight at minimum. This is
higher than other TN displays with LED backlights and closer to IPS or
VA panels. Given the higher power usage I wish the light output had been
higher than it is.
The ViewSonic V3D231 monitor is another way to get 3D if you want an
alternative to active 3D. With the choice between active and passive 3D I
would tend to use passive myself, but that would be with monitors that
were equal in other regards. The ViewSonic unfortunately underperformed
on the bench with poor color uniformity, very poor low light grayscale
performance, and a lack of peak light output. It also has a contrast
ratio that is very poor for the screen size and lighting technology
used.
For anyone that is looking for a 3D display, I would recommend taking a
look at a passive display if you aren’t going to be playing a lot of
text heavy games. However, I don’t think that the ViewSonic should be
one of those displays as it just has too many negatives to recommend it,
but I have not used any other passive 3D displays, so the performance
issues I ran into might be a result of the paterned retarter and
inherent to the technology as well. I would also make sure you can live
with the screen texture that is added by the patterned retarder, as it's
very possible some will be bothered by it in daily use.
For a display that will primarily be used for 2D content, the V3D231 is
definitely not a good compromise in quality and features. As noted
already, the patterned retarder is at best mildly distracting, and it
exists solely for 3D use. For a similar price, there are much better
displays available.
