ViewSonic V3D231 3D Display - The Passive Approach

When I reviewed my last 3D monitor, it was an active 3D display that needed far more light output due to the nature of the 3D technology. With the V3D231, while each eye is only getting half of the light output from the screen, that is still far more than the ~25% you might get from an active 3D display. With a pure white screen and all controls set to their maximum values, the ViewSonic managed to put out 272 nits of light. Cut in half this would only be 136 nits, which some people might find a bit too dull for their normal gaming, especially if there is much ambient light. It has plenty of light for 2D work, but ViewSonic would have done well to use a more powerful backlight for 3D.

With the backlight set to the minimum, the V3D231 put out 61 nits of light. This would be considered plenty of range to use for both normal use and print work, but as we saw on the 100 nits calibrated results, the ViewSonic is not a display that should be considered for print work.

The ViewSonic uses an LED lighting system, but it doesn’t seem to have any sort of zone controls built in. Zone controls would enable you to have far better black levels in areas of the screen that are pure black, but they are also more expensive to produce. The black levels for the ViewSonic are merely average, with 0.353 nits with the backlight at maximum, and 0.078 nits with the backlight at minimum.

The unfortunate side effect of those black levels is that while they are the same as many other displays, those other displays can produce a far brighter level of white. Perhaps the patterned retarder is causing a drop in maximum light output compared to a standard LCD monitor, but the end results is contrast ratios that are on the low side for a modern display. Coming in below 800:1 at both maximum and minimum backlight levels, these are the lowest contrast ratios that I have measured, and the lowest we have measured in a while. Unfortunately it looks like the test results of the ViewSonic are continuing to be a little bit underwhelming.

One good test result for the ViewSonic was the brightness uniformity test. It was still not totally uniform by any means, but the standard deviation was only 9 nits, which is 50-60% better than most displays, and an average brightness level of 185 nits. There were also no sections of the monitor that dropped below 170 nits at all. It's not an ideal result, but it is far better than most monitors manage.

The black level uniformity was just average for a display on the ViewSonic. With a standard deviation of 0.028 nits, and an average level of 0.21 nits, the ViewSonic doesn’t stand out in any way. The center of the display was the brightest, probably because of the lighting system, and it dropped off the most in the corners of the display.

Overall the ViewSonic V3D231 is a bit below average for brightness and contrast, other than the white level uniformity test which was good.