There is an almost overwhelming amount of options in the display market: OLED, MicroLED and TN panel types are just a few of them. But if you’re looking for a gaming monitor or just don’t want to blow your bank account on a screen, IPS and VA are generally the best choices. In-plane switching (or IPS) is an LCD-based technology used in almost all types of displays, while Vertical Alignment (or VA) is a more niche LCD technology used in gaming monitors, TVs for games and wide screens.
Although IPS is much more popular than VA and is often considered a more premium option, both panel types have strengths and weaknesses that you should consider before purchasing.
Color accuracy and coverage
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IPS panels are traditionally used to create displays that have high color accuracy and large coverage of wide color ranges such as DCI-P3 or Adobe sRGB. Not only do IPS screens usually look good, but they also look good from wider angles, so you don’t have to look right at an IPS monitor to get accurate colors.
Color accuracy and coverage can be good on VA screens (even at wide angles), but colors on VA screens are not always uniform. Depending on the viewing angle and the distance between the viewer and the screen, the center of a VA monitor often has more gamma than the edges of the screen, making colors less accurate.
Although IPS is generally better than VA when it comes to color accuracy and coverage, VA panels have perfectly good color accuracy and coverage for the vast majority of users. Only professional photo and video editors can be disappointed with a VA monitor that only covers 90% of the DCI-P3 color space, which is actually a very good amount of coverage for gamers and content users.
Contrast ratio
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Contrast ratio is a metric that measures how dark a black color is displayed on a screen, measured as an x:1 ratio. The bigger the x, the better. While IPS is generally very good with color accuracy, it has a really hard time making color black, and even the best IPS monitors and TVs can only display very dark grays instead of true black. Most IPS monitors have a contrast ratio of 1000:1, which isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. However, some monitors can achieve around 2000:1.
Despite VA’s general problems with color accuracy, it’s actually amazing at rendering blacks as true blacks. Even the worst VA displays can easily achieve a contrast ratio of 2000:1, and some can even achieve greater than 5000:1. In fact, VA is right behind OLED when it comes to contrast ratio, and OLED actually delivers perfect contrast ratios of ∞:1. Because of this, a VA display can look better than its IPS counterpart in darker scenes.
Some displays can increase the contrast ratio by using local dimming and HDR. By using a more complex backlight with multiple LEDs that can be turned on or off, local dimming helps IPS and VA displays look even darker when it matters. On the other side of the spectrum, HDR boosts brightness for colors that need it. By combining these two factors, some screens can significantly increase the contrast ratio. However, these features won’t make an IPS display’s contrast ratio as good as the average VA display, and poorly implemented local dimming can have the negative effect of creating more visual problems than it solves.
Response time
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Response time is the time it takes to completely refresh the screen and display a new image. This is an area where both IPS and VA struggle, but today very good IPS displays have overcome traditional response time issues and VA displays have not shown the same improvement. There is no standard that display manufacturers adhere to when it comes to measuring response times, but according to BenQ, which makes IPS and VA monitors and TVs, IPS has a response time of 1-2ms, while VA can only achieve 4-5ms . The specific values are not important here because this is the best case scenario. What really matters is that VA is much slower.
Very high response times can result in highly animated scenes that look blurry and smeared. This problem is called ghosting, and it is especially annoying for demanding players who play fast games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Both IPS and VA displays have solutions and workarounds to avoid double images, the most important being overdrive. Overdrive that is too aggressive can cause reverse ghosting, which is when the screen tries to change the pixel color so quickly that it accidentally overshoots and ends up with the wrong color by a few frames. Both double ghosting and reverse ghosting cause smearing, so if the overdrive is too weak or too strong, the end result is the same: it looks bad.
Although the best IPS panels are better than the best VA panels when it comes to response time, there are many IPS displays that have very poor response times. It is also worth noting that the response time must be equal to the refresh rate of the monitor in order to avoid smearing. On a 60Hz display, for example, it takes 16.66ms to display a new image, so a 1ms response time doesn’t really do much. Response time is much more important at higher refresh rates, and even at 144Hz a response time of around 7ms is enough to avoid ghosting.
Refresh rate
IPS has significantly higher refresh rates than VA. IPS can reach 500 Hz, while VA drops to 240 Hz. However, the vast majority of VA displays can only operate at 144 Hz or 165 Hz; there are only a few VA monitors that can do 240Hz. For those who want extremely high refresh rates, IPS is the clear winner.
Even if the VA was capable of 360Hz, it probably wouldn’t be any good because of its weakness in response time. A 360Hz display refreshes every 2.7ms, which is well below what VA is generally capable of.
Which one is better?
While IPS displays are usually a safe recommendation for most people, there are sometimes very good reasons to buy VA monitors and TVs. VA has found its home in mid-range gaming monitors, gaming TVs and ultra-wide screens, and many of the best gaming monitors use VA. However, if you’re shopping outside of these categories, you probably won’t have to worry about choosing between IPS and VA because VA isn’t used very often elsewhere.
If you have a choice between VA and IPS, you’ll need to evaluate what you prefer in a display, and you should definitely read some monitor reviews to make sure that VA or IPS will deliver what you want for your next display purchase. After all, even an IPS screen can have poor color accuracy or poor response time, so don’t assume that IPS means quality and that VA means budget.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn