[n00bface]

Monitors are a depressing set of products. Every consumer has a slightly different set of priorities, and for me, the continuous cycle of compromises to arrive at a monitor that checks just over 50% of my requirements feels punitive. The lack of satisfaction is compounded further by the tour de force of reasonably priced and high-end display technologies packed into a sexy af piece of art hanging in my living room. Stepping from the living room into the office feels like a trek into the past.

I'm hopeful that QD-OLED will make that a less jarring transition. Mini-LEDs may help modernize the market, but I don't see them making a significant dent in my disappointment.

[user_7832]

If you have the time and technical expertise of basic electronics (mainly soldering) and maybe 3d printing/basic CAD design, you can make your own monitor and that too at a decent price.

Step 1: Go to panelook.com (or directly https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?op=resolution if you have a resolution in mind)

Step 2: Find the model number of your desired monitor and put it into your desired search engine (Google works)

Step 3: Buy the monitor WITH THE DRIVER* from AliExpress/Alibaba/TaoBao/eBay/wherever you get Google search results from

Step 4: Wait (???)

Step 5: Design a 3d model and print it, or use acrylic and cut it by hand, or whatever you want. Profit!

* - the display connects to the display driver. The driver is the one with an HDMI/DP/USB-C port.

[NavinF]

This. 3 years ago I built a 1mm thick 4K monitor by just mounting a bare panel to a thin laptop stand and hiding the eDP to DP board underneath. It was better than anything on the market and cost literally 3/4 as much as a normal fat and ugly monitor.

I’ll just add “Message several sellers and ask for a datasheet and 1pc price+shipping from each one” to Step 3.

[o_____________o]

Let's see some pics

[NavinF]

It doesn’t look as interesting as you’d expect. In fact it looks just like any other panel lol. These days I only use it to set up new machines in the data center: https://i.imgur.com/H7kww6U_d.webp?maxwidth=1520&fidelity=gr...

My current daily driver is the XB273K (27” 4K 120hz)

[ornornor]

Cool, do you have a way and controls to set contrast, color, brightness, temperature, etc like in factory monitors via an OSD menu?

[NavinF]

Yep! Just about any driver board that can convert between different input formats will also have an OSD.

I’m kinda surprised people have so many questions about this. I dug up the emails. I paid $176 incl shipping/tax to zjtechhk for a B156ZAN03.4 panel, eDP cable, and a MST9U11Q1 driver board (which has DP, HDMI, and USBC inputs, eDP output, and a ribbon cable to a PCB with 4 buttons to control the OSD)

It was an awesome deal at the time, but I’m pretty sure all these components are obsolete by now.

[foota]

Lol uh, what's the don't touch label for?

[NavinF]

It’s for factory workers that assemble laptops. Despite the label, it’s perfectly ok to touch it. There’s a flex PCB behind the label that drives the backlight and converts the eDP signal to pixels. It’s normally protected by the laptop bezel so it’s somewhat fragile. If you bend it, you’ll break traces on the PCB or pop components off.

[zamadatix]

The problem is precisely the selection of appropriately sized "TV quality and price" panels to make a monitor with not the lack of physical construction of such panels into monitors.

[user_7832]

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that the problem is selecting the right model out of all the available choices, or are you saying that there aren't models available at TV quality/prices?

Regarding the former, the website does have quite a few filters (though the navigation isn't the best but it works).

For the latter, yes quality can be quite a hit-and-miss when purchasing but prices are very reasonable. There may be a ~10-15% markup compared to a large-scale razor-thin margin monitor being sold at nearly a loss on Amazon, but most products are quite reasonably priced.

Re: the quality, if you're talking about advanced features you may be able to contact the distributors/manufacturers on the website selling them and ask them to make a custom order with more features (eg an extra port) for a slight price, though this varies.

[zamadatix]

The latter. As you say, finding panels that exist is easy even for a layman so it follows out of over 100 million monitors shipped per year at least one manufacturer would be using said all around vastly superior panel and you wouldn't have to DIY it.

I've used this method for repurposing laptop screens but I've never found it a significant cost saver (even ignoring time/labor) vs standard prebuilt monitors nor is anyone making such a panel exclusively for DYI-ers.

[user_7832]

It's certainly true that for high-end displays I'd just go to Dell/LG/Samsung etc instead of AliExpress. Heck, anything that's premium enough to cover beyond sRGB is likely to be rare on Ali. But (imo) the biggest benefits of low price and easy accessibility to the low-mid end of products is the benefit.

Not saying that you can't get those 8k panels LG uses - but - sending 4k USD to someone over AliExpress feels quite risky even to me. You could probably get good stuff if you put in the effort but if you're earnings decent money from your CS job (I suppose most here are, I'm still a student) then it'll probably be easier to buy OEM/brand name.

[gryn]

here's a video a youtuber showing how to do it, in case someone want a visual example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrqdHVeBkp4

[userbinator]

They're usually called scaler boards, not drivers. Ones with LVDS outputs are common, but a lot of the new panels use VbyOne which seems to be rarer and more expensive to find a scaler for.

[madsushi]

Thanks for sharing panelook; just spent 30 minutes browsing around. I love niche sites like this!

[user_7832]

Thanks, I'm happy when I can share bits of trivia like this ^^

[ayushnix]

I've been going crazy and frustrated with the lack of HiDPI monitors on the market which can do integer scaling (27 inch 5K, 32 inch 8K) and here's a website that lists panels for such monitors.

I have no idea how to go about making a custom monitor but if it's feasible to solve my problem, I'm willing to learn.

So let's say I want to buy the LM270QQ1-SDA2, should I order that panel from an e-commerce website? Or should I find a monitor with that specific panel? Why is 3d printing needed here? Any article or detailed guide you can point me to?

[NavinF]

I’d recommend buying the panel, eDP cable, and driver board from the same seller. I posted my experience doing the same above. Of course you could take a chance with random components and it’ll probably work as long as the connectors match, but why bother when Chinese vendors are willing to do the legwork for you?

You don’t need a 3D printer if you have another way to hold the panel (I glued it to a thin laptop stand)

[ayushnix]

Got it, so I should get the panel, the driver, and an eDP cable (to connect the driver and the panel?) from a single seller.

I assume that the use of 3D printer was mentioned to build an enclosure for the panel, like for using a VESA mount?

[user_7832]

Yes exactly. You need something to attach the panel to (unless you've got magic to float it in mid air lol). You can repurpose an old canvas/acrylic board, or go fancy with a custom 3d printed case.

Thing is, you could glue the panel to something as people have done. I find that detestable because you can't remove the panel non-distructably. A proper enclosure can hold the panel instead of sticking to it.

[epicureanideal]

Sounds like it could be a good business. Custom monitors, no Alexa or spyware. Choose the specs you care about.

[thelittleone]

Quite a sign of the times when "no spyware" is now a valuable and rare differentiator.

[skhr0680]

What are your priorities? A lot of pro photographers I know use iMacs because they are a cheap way to get an adequate computer attached to a monitor with high resolution and OK (for the price) color space

[zippergz]

This is currently challenging because the 5K iMac is still on Intel which I’d be hesitant to buy into at this point. Hopefully resolved soon but we don’t know exactly when or what form it will take (e.g. will the 5K iMac be an “iMac Pro” and have a higher price than the Intel version?).

[n00bface]

System agnostic (not an all-in-one), <35", HDR, OLED or OLED-backlight, >144hz, 1440p+ or higher, G-sync, 16:9, >=99% DCI-P3, doesn't look like a F-117 fucked a ferris wheel at an EDM festival, <$2k.

Prioritized in that order.

[AtlasBarfed]

I'd be curious as to the differing priorities you are thinking about.

For me, I want real estate. At this point I'm looking forward to 8k in a 50-55" TV, good DPI, and 60Hz. Not a twitch gamer, I'm a developer. I use TVs.

Gamers want response time/Hz, decent appearance. They are the prime target of "Monitors"

Then there's the professional editors and the like. They used to be high-end monitors, but I think high-end 8k TVs will serve them as well.

What else is there?

[account42]

What I am looking for is a large (at least 37.5") ultrawide OLED (or something with comparable contrast) with at least 3840x1600 pixels and a >= 120 Hz refresh rate. Basically something that is a straight upgrade from my current monitor [0] that improves the contrast without compromising on other factors (size and resolution are hard requirements, refresh rate, pixel response and color gamut are negotiable as long as they are good enough, brightness I don't care - have the current one set to 10%). Oh, it also needs to support FreeSync, but that seems to be less of a problem these days.

There are no panels that fulfil that at the moment. The nearest option woulb be getting a 4K OLED and then just not using part of the panel but that is hardly ideal.

[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-38gn950-b-gaming-monitor

[NavinF]

Sure you’re not a gamer, but have you tried using a 120hz/240hz monitor for a week? I think you’ll find that it’s almost as massive an upgrade as going from 1080p to 4K.

Going back to 60hz is painful. You’ll see the cursor moving in a rotating square pattern when you’re moving your mouse in a circle. The lag is palpable.

> What else is there?

Well HDR is nice to have.

[SECProto]

I've been using a 144Hz screen for two years, I am a gamer, and I'll be honest: I don't notice much difference between consistent 60Hz and 144Hz. And I'm fairly sensitive to frame rate - when I'm watching a movie at someone else's house, I can tell in seconds they have the garbage "smoothing" or whatever features enabled.

Things that do stand out to me are input lag (again, usually only from TV-as-monitor with bad settings), bad colour space, and occasionally bad grey-to-grey time. I would take a 60Hz monitor over a 144Hz one if it meant avoiding any one of these issues. In a heartbeat.

[gryn]

one of the jarring things about using a TV as a monitor is that some TV models don't have the option of disabling the image processing that blurs the text so you end up with blurry text that gives headaches. I remember encountering this problem in the past with a specific samsung TV model where the processing was only disabled for the VGA port but not the rest of the ports (it was hard coded and couldn't be disabled).

[layer8]

Not the GP, but my current dream monitor would be a 3:2 or 16:10 OLED in the 24"-27" range with roughly 200 PPI and 120 Hz, preferably slightly curved, with hardware calibration for at least sRGB gamut. There’s nothing close to that in the market.

[jiggawatts]

sRGB is a very modest goal.

I just got an RGB OLED laptop with a gamut significantly wider than Display P3. It's just glorious. UHD content like 4K movies just pop in a way that you have to see in person. It's especially noticeable on military uniforms, where the various shades of dark green are much more distinct than on a typical monitor.

[layer8]

My priority is color accuracy, via hardware calibration (LUT) (no loss of gradations by OS-level or GPU-level mappings). I’d rather have an accurate sRGB display than a not-quite-accurate P3 (or, worse, "natural" wide gamut) display. Also, to display sRGB images (still the large majority of what’s out there) accurately on a wide-gamut system, you need 10-bit color depth at the OS/GPU level to not lose/distort gradations.

[jiggawatts]

Most wide gamut displays are 10-bit per channel, which makes them accurate enough even with software calibration.

Most also have 14-bit LUTs in hardware.

[layer8]

It's not sufficient for the display to be 10-bit, the OS and/or GPU (where the software calibration mapping takes place) must also work with 10 bits, and when graphics from different color spaces are combined on screen (UI graphics, images displayed, etc.), the OS must correctly map the source color space to the 10-bit output color space. All of that working correctly is not common-place yet.

Therefore, for dev work and dev-related UI graphics, I prefer to work in a calibrated "least common denominator" 8-bit sRGB space, because that's much easier to get right. However, in order to not lose color gradations to calibration, hardware calibration is then preferable.

[jimmaswell]

What are your requirements? I had no issue finding one that met all of mine at a reasonable price a few years ago. 144Hz, low latency, decent size, 2k resolution.

[jnwatson]

The solution is simple: use the “sexy af” piece of art in your office.

I’ve used one for 4 years. The only compromise is I have to power it on/off by remote.

[n00bface]

I've considered it, but can't play FPS effectively on anything over 34" due to biology and $ per sqft of real-estate. The seating position to keep the game in focus would be half way across the room.

OLEDs under 40" aren't TVs and almost all OLED monitors target revenue generating use-cases and are priced to match.

[jnwatson]

LG sells several 48" OLED TVs. To get the equivalent of 30" distance to a 27" monitor (about 48 degrees FOV), you need to be about 4.5 feet away from a 48" screen.

I just mounted mine to the wall, and the back of the desk is about a foot off the wall.

[bpye]

LG is also introducing a 42” OLED this year - which I am very tempted by [0].

[0] - https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/lg-c2-oled-tv-line-up-for-2022...

[poink]

I have the Gigabyte FO48U, which uses the same panel as the 48" LG C1, and... it's a beautiful TV. That's what I wound up using it for, because I couldn't stand it as a monitor and went back to my old 27". Image retention is still a real factor for computer use, and maximizing a mostly-white window results in this incredibly jarring transition from a screen that's almost uncomfortably bright to one that's too dim.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Playing FPS is office use? Are you a game developer? :-)

[ianmcgowan]

What brand/model are you using?

[jnwatson]

I have a 49" curved Samsung 8500. It isn't the newest technology anymore.

When a curved 42"-50" 16:9 OLED comes out, I'll be the first in line.

[after_care]

I really enjoy the 49" ultra-wide curved form factor Samsung has pioneered and is on the second generation of.