We are going to purchase new PCs and monitors for our lab and I am hoping for some input from the knowledgeable people here regarding the latter. We are no vision lab, just regular cognitive psychologists (e.g., working memory), and are thinking about purchasing the ASUS VG248QE . It has received quite good reviews on the web (e.g., here), seems to be pretty fast (144hz), and decently priced (around 300€). In addition, I have also found a few papers actually suing this screen.
Does anybody have any experience with it, especially in the context of using psychopy? Colors will play a role in some of our experiments so it should display colors somewhat truthfully.
We are also considering which graphics card to buy with it. Are there recommendations of NVidida versus AMD for this screen?
I haven’t tested that one. It reports having a low “input lag” which is a good thing. For vision science I’d be a bit nervous about the “Smart Contrast Ratio” and “Splendid™ Video Intelligence Technology” because those sound like processing on the image. But you probably don’t care and as long as the input lag stays low.
Sometimes you have to bite the bullet with these things and see.
Do let us know if it works out well (especially if you’re able to test the timing with a photodiode).
I’ve mostly bought nVidia cards lately but that hasn’t been very deliberate; I haven’t had any bad AMD experience.
In the summary they write that there are some problems with color grading and the display seems to glitter (similar to IPS technology). They do not recommend it for professional photo editing. Otherwise it seems good.
We have been exclusively using these monitors for our psychophysiology testing computers for the past couple of years. To obtain 144 Hz you have to use a display port cable as the other inputs do not seem to work. But using the display port, psychopy has no trouble with the monitor. The color gamut is displayed very well, but we do use a color-calibrator to profile the monitors just as a double check.
They have been fantastic monitors but do have one issue to note. Occasionally the monitor will power on and not be able to find any input, after hours of trouble shooting and dealing with Asus it turns out that you just need to unplug the monitor for 30 seconds and then plug it back in and everything works just fine. Once you know the trick, it comes back to life just fine with no other issues.
After reading more on the monitor, we decided to go with an alternative 144 HZ model. We bought the BenQ ZOWIE XL2430. Following some online reviews it seemed to have better colour quality than the ASUS. We hope to get some colour calibration equipment in the next weeks to test this more thoroughly and I will post updates here if something comes out of it.
As computers we bought HP ProDesk 400 G3 MT (Intel Core i5-6500, 8GB, SSD) and additionally bought AMD Radeon HD8490 DP (from HP as well) graphics cards. When using display port this setup allows 144hz usage of the screen. The only small downside with this setup is that the graphics card is not-passive, but uses active cooling. However, one can barely hear the fan so far.
Unfortunately, we do not have access to a someone doing testing with a photodiode. So if anyone feels capable of doing it and wants to visit our lab in Zurich to run some tests, this person is very much invited.
Hi @singmann,
were you successful in doing some measurements regarding the actual refresh rate of the screen? What is your impression of using it? I am just asking because we are thinking of buying the same or a similar one.