aylafan :
Are you able to see the Dell monitors in person? I usually just use my Note 4 camera app to see if a monitor flickers or not.
It really does work because I brought a cheap $120 Dell monitor at Fry's and forgot to do the flicker test. After 20 minutes on the Dell monitor I had a major headache. I returned the monitor for a different monitor (using the flicker test) and no longer have headaches.
A quick heads up on my purchase. And thanks aylafan again for your useful tip, which I refined with some googling on how to do a rough check for pwm/ flicker check with phone camera.
Technique, for whatever it's worth: Sit some distance from the monitor (2-4 feet), tilt your phone camera downward towards your lap. Now quickly rotate the camera towards the monitor which you intend to inspect- this is to make sure the camera is still changing its aperture. Once the camera has fixed the aperture after evaluating exposure, no banding mayl be visible even on a monitor with flicker. If your camera momentarily showed vertical moving lines, you may have a monitor employing pwm dimming/ flicker.
Now regarding my purchase, I inspected a Dell S2240L since Dell S2216H (which I was considering) was not on display. It showed vertical bands from a longer distance, but did not show the bands at a closer (~2 feet) range. That said, the glossy monitor looked quite good, and I'm unsure how big a deal this flicker thing is. Since S2216H has a low haze coat on a glossy display, it should be still better.
Moving on, I visually checked an HP 22xw, and found its text rendering to be poor (it may have been due to poor presets), and the white background seemed to crawl a little (poor 6-bit frc maybe?). I did not check this monitor any further, mentally crossing it from my list.
The third monitor, an LG 22MP58VQ, I could only check at 1366x768 resolution when hooked to a laptop. The monitor had a matt coating. As expected, the display did not look impressive at that resolution and had a yellowish tinge, but text in the monitor's OSD looked sharp.
At this point I was quite confused between the LG & the Dell. I was apprehensive of the glossiness of the Dell under my home lighting, having never owned or used a glossy monitor. The LG was a faster panel, a new model, and a little cheaper. The Dell had a better stand, thinner bezels, integrated speakers, good colours. Eventually I took a gamble on the LG panel, thinking the Dell is probably also using an LG manufactured panel anyway.
Upon hooking up my LG 22MP58VQ, the default brightness and contrast showed good colours. Then I drastically reduced the brightness and contrast for my room lighting, and was crestfallen to see a washed out colours, and the blacks only about as black as the 11+ year old Samsug TN-panel I was replacing. After reading the manual and monitor menu, I turned off a setting called 'black stabilizer' and that restored the blacks & text quality, and also partly fixed the faded color issue. Upon further investigating the monitor menu, it has extensive color settings. Six colors RGB and CMY can be adjusted for hue & saturation each. A quick fiddling with those settings shows the problem is not with colours, but of sub-optimal calibration of this bright monitor at low brightness/ contrast settings. Tweaking & calibrating color settings for low light levels should probably improve this.
I also checked this LG monitor for pwm/ flicker at home with my phone camera. Like its specs claim, no flicker detected. The matt coating is too matt for my taste, almost as strong as my decade old Samsung TN panel. I would have gladly settled for a lighter coating. Maybe the Dell S2616H (which I couldn't actually check) strikes the right balance. The matt coating on the LG also gives its whites a slight unwashed, dirty look. The coating on this set may not be of a high quality, but then we're looking at bargain basement IPS monitors here. The panel does have a noticeable IPS glow, but it hasn't bothered me so far. There is no backlight bleed. The panel seems to be fairly uniform except in the corners, where I can see some mild color tinting, and a loss of brightness particularly on the bottom right corner- again nothing that particularly worries me. The text, combined with windows cleartype, looks really good- possibly the best of the three models, at least definitely better than HP 22XW I looked at. The IPS panel is supposed to have wide visibility, but I do see some brightness and gamma shift when moving off centre, but I have little experience with other IPS panels to compare with.
Guess that makes it a mini first-impressions review of a new 21.5 inch model that has not been reviewed anywhere else, not by any purchasers on shopping websites either. Hope it is useful to some future buyers.
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