Zalman 2D/3D Convertible Trimon Monitors Ultra

The horrible high pitched whine makes it the noisiest component of my PC. Poor viewing angle means colours look different in the centre compared to the edges of the screen. There is a visible colour temperature difference across the viewing angle. The backlight is uneven, showing nasty brightness bars around the edge. The weak stand means the monitor wobbles at the slightest touch. The ultra-glossy glass makes it all but unusable in a lit environment.

Te 3D it pretty terrible. It feels like a depth buffer hack rather then stereoscopic imaging, although I can’t be sure. I hadn’t realised how bad interlaced 3D would look - I’d kind of assumed that there would be something clever to prevent it looking like a blurry half res interlaced image but there isn’t and its just ugly. The 3D Driver does nothing to compensate for the reduced brightness and filtered colour of the glasses, meaning you have to set the brightness and colour settings every time you want to wear/remove the glasses.

I am interested in 3D photography – this screen is perfect for editing and viewing 3D pictures at my desk. It’s also a great wide screen monitor for everyday use.

When using the display for 3D, you wear a pair of circularly polarised passive glasses; two pairs are supplied, one of which clips onto prescription glasses and can be flipped up out of the way. 3D is displayed by having alternate rows of pixels circularly polarised in the opposite sense so that when wearing the supplied glasses, the left eye sees, say, the even rows and the right eye the odd rows. With 1080 display lines, each eye sees 540 lines so you are a slightly aware of the lines for 3D viewing, like watching on old TV.

The display has analogue and digital interfaces; I use the latter to connect to an nVidia geforce gt 7600t graphics card and use Stereo Photo Maker freeware to view my pictures. No extra driver was required.

My only gripe is that the display readily attracts dust so has to be cleaned frequently.