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PCM2No you’re not the only one who notices this or finds it bothersome. Though most people won’t be using the local dimming solution for productivity and when gaming or watching movie content it’s generally less of an issue (though that’s also scene-dependent).
furamaI am curious, because the blooming hasnt really annoyed me so far. How do i replicate your scenario?
PCM2My advice is – don’t go looking for ‘blooming’. If you don’t notice it, be happy. It’s there and it’s obvious in some cases but there’s no point in going out of your way to highlight the issue. You can see examples of such things in our video reviews and described in the written reviews.
sblantipodiPCM2That’s the dark biasing for you. And yes, I found the ‘IPS glow’ more subdued (though a bit more colourful) on the X32 FP as well.
sblantipodiok thanks 🙂
DegraderI don’t agree that the glow is less visible on the X32 FP compared to the panels of the PG32UQX and the XG321UG. I would say it is similar, but blacks on the Acer are more blueish when viewed from an angle and on the ViewSonic more purple.
But I do agree that the amount of blooming on the 1152 zones panels is in real life not visible better than the Acer due to bright biased tuning. On the other hand, high dynamic range is about displaying very bright highlights and deep dark shades simultaneously. In that regard I find that the 1152 zones panels deliver a more true HDR experience (even though there is more blooming visible).
PCM2I should add that I used the monitors 2 years apart so this was no side by side or consecutive comparison for me. When viewing the X32 FP from ~70 – 80cm, centrally (or eyes slightly above centre) and using a brightness of ~160 nits I found the glow less bright but also more colourful than most IPS models and from memory also compared to the PG32UQX. I could certainly see how it could be considered either more or less obvious, subjectively. It’s not something that I find can be accurately captured from a normal viewing position, but the viewing angles videos from the respective reviews are good at showing the bloom colours off-angle.
sblantipodiPCM2sblantipodi
SirRockALotI wanted share some of my thoughts after having used the X32 for a week and ask if there are fixes / workarounds for issues I’ve encountered. Note I don’t game on my computer but have consoles, so my needs / usage might seem strange to some of the users here. I have the current firmware installed.
I can confirm the PS5 HDR issue reported by another user here. I would also guesstimate that the monitor is basically 100nits peak in HDR mode with that console. I don’t think this is a dimming algorithm choice but just a huge bug. I tried every conceivable setting on monitor and console and looked at various test patterns, purposefully miscalibrated the HDR settings and never got the monitor to reach more than a fraction of its SDR brightness. Only the HDR calibration screen is blindingly bright. Rtings writes about the X32 on the Mac “HDR is very washed out and dark, to the point where it’s unusable”. So it seems this issue exists for multiple non-PC sources. Has anybody found a workaround for this? Contacted Acer support? Think it makes sense to ask for a firmware update? This to me is really the biggest issue with this display. It’s a very capable HDR monitor that can’t do HDR with any of my sources.
My expectations from a current year high-price gaming monitor was good motion clarity. I placed a 10+ years old 1080p office monitor next to it and it looks exactly the same to me at 30/60FPS. When scrolling through a website at 60Hz holding down the arrow key I can’t read any of the text anymore. When panning around the map with the analog stick in a 30FPS console game I can’t read any of the labels. It looks exactly the same as the ancient IPS monitor used for comparison. 120Hz gaming seems noticeably better. I find the ‘Off’ and ‘Normal’ overdrive settings to be visually identical, looking like any old monitor without overdrive implemented. ‘Extreme’ is unusable. Does this monitor only exhibit good motion performance at 160Hz+VRR PC gaming and is there basically no improvement to be expected in 30/60FPS console gaming? None of the overdrive/dimming/VRR/latency settings seem to make any difference.
I had a different impression of the Local Dimming settings than the review. I couldn’t see much of a difference between Low and Average in dark biasing. Fast is noticeable brighter, though. When I move a bright mouse cursor over a dark background Low/Average will dim the cursor and show no halo while Fast will show a halo and keep the cursor brighter. Same for white text on black background. I can only use the Low setting because of flickering, though. Both Average/Fast will show very noticeable flicker in most real-world gaming scenarios while I could only provoke flickering on Low in synthetic tests. Low is of course the slowest and dark objects on bright background will have a noticeable zone smear.
I continue to be perplexed that high-end monitors with six inputs do not offer per-input settings. This seems to be taken for granted on 20 year old budget TVs but for some reason monitor manufacturers rarely include this.
PCM2Hopefully somebody else can chime in on the PS5 side as I don’t use or have experience with this. It does sound like a firmware issue – the monitor responded differently under HDR when using AMD FreeSync Premium Pro (per the review) as well, so it seems sensitive to different systems or ‘pipelines’ being used. A few additional things:
– The vast majority of perceived blur at 60Hz is caused by eye movement (recommended reading), you may not be sensitive enough to distinguish the pixel response advantage that the X32 FP has over your old monitor (at 60Hz). Per the review the 60Hz responsiveness is decent, but again you aren’t overcoming the main element of perceived blur which is restricted by the refresh rate. And ‘Off’ and ‘Normal’ are quite similar at 60Hz overall, the differences with ‘Extreme’ are far easier to notice (the ridiculous amount of overshoot). If you observe Test UFO on the Acer using ‘Off’ or ‘Normal’ and compare to your old IPS monitor the differences may be clearer. But even some older IPS models are fairly competent at 60Hz, anyway.
– With the local dimming (‘Adaptive Dimming’) setting I certainly say that it’s subjective and people need to make there own mind up about which to use. I don’t put too much weight on desktop observations, where I dislike any local dimming setting and especially comparing extreme contrasting static content mixtures which aren’t really representative of the mixed dynamic content you observe when gaming. I demonstrate and discuss the local dimming settings on the desktop and when PC gaming in detail in the video review and that seems to be largely in line with what you’re describing, bearing in mind individual sensitivity to flickering and suchlike varies. There’s quite a broad consensus here and elsewhere I’ve gathered feedback that ‘Normal’ is the preferred setting for local dimming on balance, but again it’s subjective. Also be aware that the dark biasing you observe on the desktop with the different settings (for example comparing ‘Low’ and ‘Average’) when looking at for example a mouse cursor against a contrasting background will depend on the size of the mouse cursor (scaling even affects this) and also the exact shade of the background. The algorithm behaves quite differently for pure black vs. a somewhat brighter dark shade, too.
SirRockALotThank you for explaining the motion results I observed. One of my biggest complaint with my old displays is simply how I can’t see anything in motion. I can’t read text when it’s scrolling fast, in my 30/60FPS console games I always feel like I need to stop moving / turning before I can read signs and so on. Seems like I had overblown expectations that a faster response 2023 panel would fix this. For reference, I own a number of CRT TVs and monitors and there in say a side-scroller things look exactly as sharp in motion as they at rest. If I understand correctly, to get this kind of performance I would either need to game at very high refresh rates and/or have a display that can do strobing / black-frame inserting?
Local dimming is problematic on the desktop for obvious reasons, but I currently keep it always enabled due to the lack of per-input settings on this screen. It would so inconvenient to reconfigure all these settings anytime I want to switch from my computer to a console to play.
Everybody seems to agree that Average is the preferred setting for LD. I tested it in various real game scenes and haven’t observed much of a difference between Average/Low in the content I looked at. But I immediately noticed the jump in flickering when using anything but Low. I often see some zone flicker on the very first camera turn I do. This was all in SDR, btw. None of the HDR sources I own seem to play well with this screen :/
PCM2That’s correct, an LCD would need to have its backlight strobing create that ‘CRT-like’ look (i.e. become ‘impulse-type’ rather than ‘sample and hold’) or be running at a much higher refresh rate to compensate. The differences in the dark biasing levels between ‘Low’ and ‘Average’ on the Acer are certainly situational and in some scenes in games I’d also say the overall representation (excluding transition speed) is very similar. My own preference for a given setting could actually shift from scene to scene and I felt they all have their merits depending on the scene. It just depends on the shade mixtures involved and under SDR it will depend on the brightness you’ve set as well, which could also influence how noticeable you find any ‘halos’ or ‘flickering’ using ‘Average’ or ‘Fast’. If for whatever reason I was noticing a lot of flickering using ‘Average’ or above, I’d probably stick to ‘Low’ even with some of the compromises elsewhere – because bothersome flickering would really outweigh the benefits of using a higher setting in my view.
SirRockALotThat was very educational, I will pay more attention to backlight strobing on my next monitor / TV purchase!
LD settings are certainly very content dependent. I was just trying it out again and played a round of Gran Turismo 7 on ‘Average’. During the entire race I noticed nothing wrong at all, but after the race there was scene with a gift car where colorful confetti drops over a dark background and there it looked like zones everywhere where very visibly changing intensity quickly. It was very apparent and distracting. The flickering effect in general only happens with different shades of dark objects. White on black is fine, bright is fine, all black is fine, but just rapid movement involving dark-but-not-too dark content really exhibit this flickering behavior to a degree where I notice it.
In your review you mention image retention only in passing as something you’ve seen from the UFO test. I noticed it seems to happen rather severely with flickering content. In Gran Turismo 7 there’s a race clock on screen at all times with high-contrast white letters with black outlines. many digits change very quickly to and their echo stays on screen for several minutes before fading.
What I found strange is that this echo of the image is itself flickering noticeably. I changed inputs before taking this picture, it’s not a bug in the game.
PCM2That image retention is indeed odd. I definitely observed other timers and flickering elements in games and didn’t notice image retention, but the exact shades and frequency of the flashing could effect it and it could also be something that varies between units. I’ve seen reports of similar things on other models using AUO AHVA panels – which is the panel type I typically observe image retention with using Test UFO, but not the only one. There were some reports of image retention in certain gaming or desktop scenarios on the XB323U GP (another AHVA model) and those with multiple monitors sometimes noticed it on one but not another. It seems to have been cleared up with newer revisions of that model, or perhaps it’s just relatively rare and rarely reported on – the monitor isn’t so popular any more given the price and competitors available. With your X32 FP, does this image retention with that timer disappear when using the monitor normally (or displaying content that isn’t flashing) for a bit?
SirRockALotI’ve seen image retention on VA screens. All my TVs are VAs and they all have it to a degree. I only really noticed it in Gran Turismo 7 so far. It takes a few minutes to clear up completely. What I find really strange is just that the retained echo seems to flicker on the quickly changing millisecond digits. Also it’s visible even on bright screens, generally I only notice retention in darker shades. Never seen it like that before.
PCM2What refresh rate is the monitor running on GT 7?
SirRockALotJust 60Hz. I can basically see a few faint flickering digits on screen for a couple of minutes after a race.
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