Testing

There really is not a whole lot to do when testing a display, but we have setup a system that we test all new displays with. We test on movie and video playback, gaming, viewing angle, brightness / contrast, and color reproduction.

Movie and video playback on the Topaz S was really good. There was almost no backlighting that was visible during movie playback. Since this is a 24-inch screen movies and any other type of media will look great on the screen. I watched movies and live TV on the display and they both looked great.

Next up we have our gaming test. I played a lot of different games and even had the chance to take the Topaz S to a local LAN party. Some of the games I played were Counter-Strike: Source, Unreal Tournament 3, World of Warcraft, Day of Defeat Source, and Supreme Commander. The Topaz S has a 3ms response time so there was no ghosting or artifacting. It was also cool playing games at 1920 x 1200!

Brightness and contrast is something that you always want to look at when you are purchasing a monitor. The basic rule of thumb is you don't want the display to be to dull, to bright is ok because you can always turn that down. The brightness of the LCD was set at 100 and actually that is good with the contrast set at 50. You could probably mess around with it even more to tweak it, but that setting was good for me. The black solid fill test will show you the backlighting on the panel. As you can see from the below pictures the backlighting does not bleed through that much at all.

This is quite a large display so most likely you will be in front of it at all times, but the viewing angle is very good on this display on both the sides and from top to bottom.