Not sure why this took me so long, but I finally realized that my setup with the ultrawide screen is awesome for games and movies, but for actually doing any work it pretty much sucks. I much prefer to run multiple windows in full- or half-screen, and also we do a ton of work in remote pair- or mob-programming with active screen sharing, and using a 21:9 is a problem for that for multiple reasons.
So I decided to return to my tried-and-tested setup of 3x identical 16:9. However, this time around 1080p wouldn't do, so I decided I wanted three 27" 1440p screens instead. Why not 4K - price, gaming (no way my old 1060 will run anything at decent FPS at 4K, but 1440p is just about doable, as proven by the ultrawide), and my reluctance to use DPI scaling in Windows are the reasons.
The choice came down to a few models, but ultimately I went for the ViewSonic VX2718-2KPC-MHD. VA, 27" 1440p, curved, 165Hz, 1ms (claimed) response time - what's not to like? At least that's what I thought when I got one and tested it as a secondary screen for a couple days, before getting two more. However, running them for all displays for a day quickly surfaced some issues. Basically, here's a list of what I like and what I don't like:
- (++) 3x 1440p was the right call, especially for work in remote meetings it's an absolutely awesome setup that I fully intend to keep.
- (++) VA panel contrast is great, the black is almost AMOLED-"true". Colors and overall image quality are pretty decent too on these.
- (+) 165Hz mode works, and the smoother mouse movement and scrolling is noticeable, although not quite as much as I expected / as much as I like the 120Hz on my phone, mainly because...
- (-) "1ms" on these screens is a bad joke. Actual response time, especially black-to-white and changing colors, is horrendously slow, and doesn't really improve with any of the available settings. There is a "1ms" mode even, but that is straight up unusable since it dims the brightness all the way down and disables the slider. Scrolling white text on bright background, there are really bad color artifacts, the text becomes orange/red for a moment - it's pretty noticeable and annoying, and I am certain none of my earlier screens had that, even old 1080p AOCs with nothing it terms of especially fast response times or anything. Even in games, simple shit like Stardew Valley, things that slowly scroll around the screen leave this colored "sheen" similar to the text scrolling issue... it's bad enough that I wonder if I'm missing some obvious setting somewhere, how tf is this supposed to be a "gaming" monitor and what is 165Hz good for if the response time is this bad.
- (-) There is noticeable backlight bleed on the right edge of all three screens. It's not visible when the screen is black, but with any color it's definitely noticeable, and annoying.
- (-) Viewing angles are not ideal, when viewed from above standing up in front of the desk the picture already begins to degrade slightly. Not an issue sitting down though, horizontal angles are decent, so not a show-stopper.
- (+) They properly auto-switch inputs! I know it's probably a normal expected feature of a modern screen
but the LG Ultrawide needed manual switching, or at least a confirmation of an auto-switch every time. Relevant for me, since I switch between the private desktop and work laptop several times daily, and while it was tolerable to manually switch one display (the ultrawide), manually switching three would be unacceptable.
So now I'm a bit uncertain on how to proceed. I have a month of return window for these from the store I got them from, and at the moment I'm likely to make use of it - unless I get the response time issue handled somehow. If I were to do that, I'd of course need another 3 27" 1440p screens to replace these... there are some options out there, I'd probably forget the VA experiment and get back to tried-and-true IPS. One of the best options is the LG 27GN800 - although if it has the same input switching issue as the ultrawide did (and I think all LGs are like that), it's something of a no-go for a triple setup.