Once we fire up the computer, the monitor scans through the analogue and digital interfaces to find a connection and then takes a few seconds to auto-adjust the image. This auto-adjustment, in our experience, never needs to be corrected. It hits it perfectly every time. The 931BF differs from the 940BF in specifications slightly, but what intrigued us was the menu system. The 931BF offers adjustments of just about every aspect of the display imaginable. This isn’t your daddy’s LCD with nothing more than a brightness knob. Some of the more interesting options were several “intelligent”, on-the-fly adjustment settings that could dynamically change their effectiveness based on how bright or dark the screen was supposed to be. After a bit of tinkering, we achieved a setting that mimicked our old CRT as much as possible. With all that fuss out of the way, it’s on to our analysis!


Obviously testing an LCD monitor is going to be purely subjective, but in the past we’ve done our best to spread the opinions evenly over several tasks. Today we’re splitting them up between everyday routines, movie playback, and games. We’re saving games for last because we’re amazing authors who know how to build suspense. Basic tasks involve simple things such as how the monitor looks for chatting on AIM, IRC, or typing up LCD review articles. For movies/video, we’re just going to watch some high-contrast, high-speed scenes in Battlestar Galactica since that’s our current show of choice. As far as games go, we’ll cover the usual gamut, including Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, FEAR, etc.

Testing
All the specifications in the world won’t make this “not an LCD”. This shows up most often in the everyday use of this monitor. It suffers from what’s known as the “screen door effect”, like all LCD’s do. What this means is that instead of the pixels flowing together to create a solid, fluid image like they do on a CRT, the individual pixels are noticeably “boxed” from each other, making it looks like you’re viewing a CRT image through a very fine screen door. This is not something that can be prevented to our knowledge, we’ve found it on every LCD we’ve ever seen, so we can’t really knock off for it. However, it is wise to simply be aware of this fact when considering CRT and LCD, and that it’s still present even on a high end one like the 931BF. All in all though, the screen was completely readable and easy to use for these tasks. Nothing else really to report here.

In high action, high contrast video LCDs really started to separate themselves from the pack. A budget-bin LCD will show noticeable ghosting and the difference between the bright and dark areas won’t be nearly as vibrant as they are with a high end LCD, or ideally, a CRT. We chose a few atmospheric combat scenes from the third season of Battlestar Galactica as our reference point, due to the fact that the white sky provided a good contrast with the black fighters, a lot of the combat was at high speed, and we’re really addicted to BSG right now. In this test, we couldn’t identify any sort of ghosting at all. Everything was smooth as silk. Due to the high level of action, the “screen door effect” was gone as well, since that only really applies to static images. As the fighters tore through the skies, they didn’t leave any unnatural contrails and they really stood out. Contrast ratio, as opposed to response time, is a bit harder to pick up on, but we saw no problems at all with how the black and white contrasted with each other. Overall it was a very good experience, the best we’ve had from an LCD monitor to date. It was noticeably better than the 940BF we tested earlier. To be perfectly honest, it was the closest we’ve ever seen to a CRT in picture quality. We definitely recommend it for those of you that enjoy quite a bit of video media on the side.