Hi guys welcome back to the Tech Chap. Now buying a new monitor can be a bit tricky
there's loads of things to consider, whether the size of resolution, the type
panel used, refresh rates, response times
adaptive sync technologies, ports, what if you wanna use the monitor of the games
console or maybe you've been eyeing up one of these fancy ultra-wide monitors or
perhaps you're wondering if you should invest in a 4K monitor can all be a bit
overwhelming.
you can of course to type into Amazon something like 24 inch gaming monitor
filter by customer rating and buy one that looks nice and it's within your
budget that's one way of doing it, but even a basic model will set you back a
100 pounds; 150 dollars
so before you go and buy one and spend your hard earned money just give me a
few minutes and when you through everything you need to know about buying
the right monitor for you and I put links to my favorite recommended monitor in
the description below this video.
"Jeez. You believe that guy? I hate these snobs" so let's kick off with the most
important stuff : size and resolution, you can get monitors in all sorts of sizes
from 17 to 40 inches the most common size is 24 inches and it's big enough to
make a useful second screen if your main computer is a laptop and it's popular enough
though there are loads to choose from only usually pretty cheap
now the vast majority of 24 inch monitors have a resolution of 1920 x 1080
also known as 'Full HD' which the same resolution as most tv's. The next
size up is 27 inches which is becoming much more common and popular with gamers
and power users who want the extra screen real estate.
Now if you get 27 inch monitor with the same 1080p resolution
everything starts to get a little bit blurry or that sharp because the pixels
are bigger so the pixel per inch density is lower. In my experience if you want -
27 inch monitor i would definitely recommend getting one with a 2560 x 1440
resolution also known as quad HD
unless you're a casual user who just want something cheap and basic I'd say a
27-inch 1440p my opinion is the perfect monitor and resolution combination right
now but it does add to the price, but what about 4K and also why monitor like
this one? while you can get 4K or 3840 x 2160p monitors as small as 24 inches but
it was popular size is 27 inches
still though, I don't think 27 inches is big enough to really take advantage of
all those extra pixels
and things like text and icons will start look smaller
you can of course make them bigger using scaling in Windows and Mac, but it doesn't
work well for everything.
I would say if you really want a 4K monitor, get at least a 30 inch or bigger one.
I think that'd be the best suited to that sort of high resolution and you can
be then take advantage of all that extra detail all those extra pixels.
I've talked about 4K monitors quite a bit in other videos but what exactly is
the benefit of getting a 4K monitor, I mean it was talking about 4K TV's and
4K Blu-ray and you know the next generation of consoles supporting possibly
4K gaming and i'll explain
having a UHD players so what's the point in getting a 4K monitor? well,
basically they have eight million pixels
that's four times as many competitors normal full HD monitor and what that
means is everything sharper, clearer, and generally appears more detailed, but the
problem is pushing four times as many pixels means that you need a much faster
computer to power it, especially if you're gaming
if you up the resolution to 4K it will have a massive impact on your frame rate
in games and in all honesty I wouldn't recommend 4K monitors to the vast
majority of people out there, not yet at least
unless you have a beast of a PC with the likes of an NVIDIA 1080 graphics card
you won't get a consistent 60fps in modern games at high settings, so for
gamers, stick to 24 or 27 inch monitor with 1080p or 1440p resolution respectively
however if your creative professional maybe a developer someone who really
wants a big monitor who wants to keep it looking sharp a 4K is a good
choice and there are good 4K monitor is getting more affordable but you just
make sure your PC is powerful enough to run it and crucially has the right port
but we'll talk about more about that later on.
Now finally in terms of sizes, let's talk about ultra-wide monitors where most
monitors and TV's have a 16:9 aspect ratio
Ultra-Wide like this one have a 21:9 aspect ratio, so they're not any taller
they just a lot wider.
this is great for watching movies having multiple programs open at once and
playing games it really adds to the immersion the most common sizes of all
towards are 29 and 34 inches with resolution of 2560 x 1080p and
3440 x 1440p respectively
there is definitely a price premium to be had with Ultra-Wides but they do look
great I think you look great in a weird futuristic something out of Minority
Report perhaps,
and they were good alternative to having multiple monitor setup you know
rather than having two monitors here with a bezel in the middle you have to try
hide, this looks much nicer, but you don't have to break the bank to get one there
are some good value ones out there but if you want a bigger one like this
34 inch one, one with a high 3440 x 1440p resolution and extras like juicing which
we'll talk about later on you're going to pay quite a bit more for and also
getting in one curved is going to add to the price now in terms of design and
style while it's all very subjective isn't it?
I tend to prefer monitors with really thin bezels, it's really up to you what
they look like, the one thing that is probably worth mentioning about the
design is how flexible they are how much you can move them around. Some monitors
can be tilted, raised, lowered, swivel, and rotated 90 degrees so you can use and
vertically and even VESA mounted if you want to take the stand off and
mounted to your desk or the wall, other ones
don't move at all, so if you're someone who wants to move it
around a lot if you've got a weird shape desk or you want to rotate it 90 degrees
look at the part description to see just how flexible it is. Now let's talk about
panels that sounds really boring, I know but it is pretty important that makes a
big difference to how good your monitor looks
there are three types: IPS, TN, and VA with the first to be the most common
if you want to know all there is to know about TN VS IPS you can check out my
in-depth comparison video by clicking on the card at the top right, but generally
TN panels are cheaper, and they offer better response times, so you don't get as
much ghosting effect when playing games or watching fast-moving content, but they
do generally have pretty rubbish viewing angles. IPS on the other hand is more
expensive, has slight slow response times, and depending on the quality might
suffer from IPS glow
but despite all that they have well there's a lot more color accurate they
have fantastic viewing angles and generally and also in my opinion the
other preferred panel to go for
similarly VA panel they are very similar to IPS they tend to offer better
contrast ratio, so you get deeper blacks, richer white, slight more vibrant colors
but they tend not to have the best as quite good viewing angles either IPS, so
unless you're a professional gamer who wants the absolute fastest response time
the lowest input lag, which is something different and I do discuss in that IPS
VS TN video
perhaps you can forgo the good viewing angles and go for a TN panel
if your general user if your photo as if you value color accuracy definitely try
and pay the extra to get IPS or VA panel IPS is the most popular most common
after TN, VA is usually just restricted to samsung monitors there's nothing
wrong with them
but again you might not want something want to something more to it might not
have the features you want so this is what I have here is IPS and I really do
swear by IPS and if you get a good one
their import lags and response times can be pretty much as low as a TN now
anyway the technology is getting a lot better.
Next up are refresh rate this is the number of times your panel refreshes per
second the more if it does the smoother everything looks the vast majority of
monitors including this one have a 60Hz refresh rate, but more these days
monitors are offering higher refresh rate is anything from 75 to 200 Hertz, a
high refresh rate is really nice feature to have, but anything above a
120Hz your struggle to notice the difference however jumping from 60 to
a 100 or a 120 well offer a big difference; games will feel
slicker and smoother moving the mouse around a desktop will certainly become a
nice to experience some people especially gamers swear by a high
refresh rate monitor in my opinion though having used a variety of them
I actually decided to stick with an Ultra-wide monitor which has a
basic 60 Hertz refresh rate rather than typical 16:9 with a higher refresh
rate
mainly because I don't play games as much these days and that's one of the
main reasons you would want more, it is worth mentioning that in games you'll
only see the benefit of high refresh rates if your PC is fast enough to push
the games above 60 frames per second, if you have an average PC, then you get 30
to 40 FPS in games you know they're taking advantage of a 120Hz
monitor for gaming, at least
So weren't going to be any use to you. High refresh rate monitors it do definitely
cost more, but it's a really nice feature to have i do recommend it if you can
afford it.
You don't have to have it as a self so I have chosen not to in favor of an
Ultra-wide but hopefully something in the future I can afford an ultra-wide
with a high refresh rate is definitely something i would like
it's not essential but it is a pretty cool feature, now a quick mention about
ports, I know it's boring but there are just two kinds of ports on monitors that
you need to worry about HDMI and DisplayPort, older monitors have
VGA, VGA and DVI ports but considering this is a toy 16 video and I guess you
guys are watching this because you are interested in buying a new monitor not
going to worry about all those old port, so HDMI and DisplayPort currently the
vast majority of monitors have a HDMI 1.4 port and or a DisplayPort 1.2, that's
great, nothing really to worry about there
but if you want a 4K monitor, you need to make sure both the monitor and the
graphics card in your computer support the newer HDMI 2.0 connection, otherwise
you'll be limited to just 30Hz at 4K which will make your computer feel
really slow.
DisplayPort 1.2 on the other hand is capable of 4K at 60Hz so that's the
best way of doing 4K right now
a 1440p you can only get 60Hz over HDMI 1.4 so again
DisplayPort 1.2 is your best bet, unless of course you're monitor and you're
graphics card support HDMI 2.0. But that is a bit rare right now
so the moral of the story is where possible use a DisplayPort 1.2
connection but HDMI is fine for 1080p or 1440p resolutions as long as
you're not doing running a high refresh monitor.
Now DisplayPort 1.3, 1.4, an HDMI 2.0, be are all sort of coming about
coming out now in the new graphics card like the NVIDIA GTX 1070,
1080 and the NVIDIA GTX 480, so if you're building a new way can you look into the
future proof your; perhaps not sure what monitor want but you might want the
potential of having a 4K, Ultra-Wide, High refresh monitor do try and get one of
these newer cards because you're thank yourself later that you've got these
brand new connections on them, now moving on from port should be glad to hear it
to another feature you might be interested in
particularly if you're a big gamer is G-SYNC or FREESYNC, these are what are
called adaptive sync technologies from NVIDIA and AMD respectively.
Basically they work by making sure your graphics card and your monitor refresh at
the same time, so it reduces screen tearing, get rid of some stuttering and
reduces input lag, which makes your games can feel smoother
I wouldn't say it's as big or as important feature as getting a monitor
with a high refresh rate in my opinion, but if you want the best gaming
experience and G-SYNC and FREESYNC monitor is a great idea
G-SYNC in particular does quite a bit to the cost of a monitor
and of course can only be used with NVIDIA graphics card.
FREESYNC tends to be quite a lot cheaper but again can only be used with
AMD cards now i hope i'm bored you guys too much just yet but i want to mention
a couple more features
I just quickly, one of them is Ultra Low Motion Blur (ULMB) and other is
overdrive
ULMB as it attempt reduces motion blur and it worked quite
well but the problem is it reduces the monitors brightness by often up to 50%
- 60% so i'm not really a fan of using it even though it makes things a
bit smoother
the other feature I also didn't really use is: overdrive, which artificially
lower response times which reduces ghosting
but the same time it does increase input lag which is the time between say
clicking a mouse and the gun firing in your game on the computer so UMLB and
Overdrive, often built into monitors
they're quite common but you might have a play around with you want to use them
or not but generally there's just too many issues with them that i'm
personally wouldn't use them again if you have G-SYNC freezing
that's better than UMLB, and overdrive well, just make sure you can
either put on medium to ever put on high or very high you get weird artifacting
but generally just keep it off it's not something I would really recommend is
not a game-changing feature, one of the questions I do get asked quite a lot is
what the best monitor for games consoles well
PS4 and XBox one currently have a maximum output of 1080p at 60Hz, so
4K monitor is pretty pointless at the moment
if you attempt to buy an ultra-wide a monitor for console gaming, again most
consoles go games just output at 16:9 aspect ratio, so you're going to have
letterboxing on the side of the monitors; the old game will stretch, but it
won't look good, so Ultra-Wide monitors aren't ideal for console gaming, they work, but
you'll have letterboxing most of the time.
As for the next generation of consoles on the PS4 NEO or whatever it's called,
Xbox One S and 'Project Scorpio' it might be worth investing in a 4K monitor to
take advantage of the Ultra HD Blu-ray players and potentially there
4K gaming out book, but I wouldn't really worry about that too much now
maybe look at buying a 4K monitor in a year or so, perhaps mid to late 2017
when the consoles are out, when that monitor much as a cheaper they have
more features, but for now i wouldn't really bother with 4K for gaming, generally a
good 24-inch 1080p
monitor will be best for gaming because I say soon as you go to 27 inches and
above you do lose the quality, however if you guessed it farther away like people
often do when you play console games you could get away with the 27-inch monitor.
Now what would be the perfect monitor? for some Ultra-Wide like this it doesn't
have all the bells and whistles that doesn't have juicing or high refresh
rate, but I really do appreciate the wide angle for many of you though a solid
27-inch 1440p IPS
high refresh rate, G-SYNC monitor would be the ideal of a perfect monitor, but you
are going to pay for those features you're looking about 600 pounds or a
800 dollars for a monitor like that all of these features don't come cheap
alternatively you may want a 4K monitor, perhaps of 32 inch one
you don't care about G-SYNC that saves on some money, but again
4K still does have a bit of a premium over the lower resolution so one it will
just come down to what you're going to use it for, and how much you're going to
pay, so I do appreciate that is quite a lot to take in, but i hope this video has
helped you decide also monitor you want to buy, perhaps clean up a few things
for you
I have put a link has a say below this video in the description to a few of my
favorite monitors, including this one I'm using right now, but if I have missed out
anything when you don't agree with something I've said, do let me know in
the comments below it would be great to hear your thoughts or tweet me at
@thetechchap, thank you very much for watching guys and I'll see you again
right here on the tech chap.