IPS vs VA – Which Is the Better Panel Tech?

if you type an ips vs va into the google search button you get a bunch of different opinions on whether ibs or va or even tn is the best panel technology there's always someone defending their favorite panel type as if it was a matter of life and death but in reality there is no single best panel technology for each and every purpose so i'm gonna tell you and actually show you where each panel tag has their strengths and weaknesses and when you should either buy a va monitor or rather get an ips instead now if

you ever looked for a monitor with a va panel you've probably noticed that most of them are curved in fact there are very few va monitors that have a flat panel and on the other hand curved ips panels are also quite rare or to put that into actual numbers over 90 of ips monitors that are currently in the market have a flat panel whereas over 80 percent of the va monitors are curved now this comes with a bunch of implications when it comes to how games look how good a better monitor is for photo editing

and graphics design or how a monitor handles glare we'll take a look at all of these things in a bit and for now it's a good idea to keep in mind that va usually goes along with a curved panel and ips usually goes along with getting a flat monitor the two monitors we'll use for demonstration reflect that as well the one on the right has what's called a 1500r curve or in other words if we stick a bunch of these together side to side we'd get a circle with a radius of 1.5 meters so a

bigger radius or r value means a monitor is less curved and in that context 1500 r is relatively high so this monitor hasn't a very strong curve now why should you consider a curve monitor in the first place probably the biggest argument for curved monitors is immersion the idea that a monitor kind of wraps around you and covers your peripheral vision in a more natural way now this marketing speech sounds good in theory but as long as we're not talking about something like this the benefits are extremely small the larger the monitor and the closer

you sit the more beneficial the curve will be for gaming or watching movies sitting close to a large curved monitor can be nice and displaying video content is where the v8 technology really shines side by side it becomes pretty clear that the va panel on the right has the much better contrast ratio take a look at the black bars and the other dark parts of the image it's more of a dark grey with the ips panel and it looks much more like a true black on the va panel of course you can find ips monitors

with a higher contrast than the ips that we're looking at here and you can also find va monitors with a lower contrast than this one but generally expect ips monitors to have a contrast ratio of around 1 000 to 1 and expect most va monitors to be around the 2500 to 1 mark but some va's can even reach values as high as 5 000 to 1 or above now you may already have noticed that both monitors don't really look black anymore when i film them from an angle with ips monitors this usually is called ips

glow but the va panel shows a very similar kind of glow when we're not looking straight onto the monitor the ips glow on the left is a bit more pronounced but the va panel does also shift in color in addition to the glow giving us a bluish glow when viewed from an angle sometimes people claim that glow is exclusive to ips but this really isn't the case it might be a bit less noticeable but va panels have some kind of glow as well so how does that affect things like photo editing or graphics design where

you want to see your image as true to life as possible i really don't want things like glow or color shifts to mask what you're seeing well both technologies somewhat suffer from glow but the ips looks just more consistent at different viewing angles that does not only apply to glow but to colors in general both monitors look very similar from the front but from an angle the va loses a lot of its saturation whereas the ips still looks about the same the ips becomes a bit darker but the colors don't really change much even when

sitting straight in front of the monitor the v8 shows some inconsistencies depending on where you look at the display as you can see there's a black circle right in the middle of your viewing angle that follows you around wherever you look this phenomenon usually is referred to as gamma shift or black crush ips panels though don't suffer from problems like this as you can see here making them a much better choice for anything creative you really don't want to have inconsistencies in your image when you're color grading your photos or videos if you're not someone

who does a lot of editing there's a chance you don't really care much about things like this because it's really not that big of a deal if you're just consuming content instead of creating content though you might find this very distracting take a look at how much bigger the glare is on the right than on the left okay that's not something that's directly related to the va technology but this is a side effect of the curve and as i said in the beginning it's extremely likely that a monitor with ava panel is actually curved this

really isn't a problem when you don't have a window or a lamp directly behind you but something to keep in mind nevertheless alright so far va monitors could really only convince with their great conscious ratio which is a big benefit if you're planning to watch a lot of movies or your favorite netflix shows on your monitor a lot of people though want a monitor for gaming and that's all they really care about and the good news is that both ips and v8 monitors are available with high refresh rates and therefore at least qualify as gaming

monitors well va monitors currently max out at 240hz whereas ips monitors can be had with up to 390hz at the time of making this video but this is not the only reason you might prefer an ips monitor for gaming we're looking at two monitors with the exact same refresh rate of 165 hertz but still the ips monitor has some advantages now you probably heard the term response time before and know that fast response times is something we generally want from a gaming monitor curiously you find both ips and va monitors advertised with the infamous one

millisecond response time suggesting they're both equally as fast and yet i'm telling you that va monitors are typically slower than ips monitors now i'm not going to touch on how useless and even misleading these response time numbers are that manufacturers like to give us that's probably a topic for another video but let me demonstrate why va panels typically do worse than ips when it comes to response times and what that looks like now response times measure the time a pixel needs to change its color so when we're looking at a moving object like these ufos

the monitor has to change its pixels back to green after the ufo went by and as we can see the ufos on the right have some kind of smeary trail behind them which the ones on the left do not have this mirroring shows us that the pixels behind the ufo struggle to change the color back to green fast and instead they remain somewhat darkish grey for some time leaving us with that smeary try and this is what slower response times look like now not every single va monitor is slow this for example is what a

very fast va panel can achieve and this really doesn't look much worse than a good ips panel but this is pretty much the best we can expect from ava panel these days as the aoc pd27 together with the samsung g7 are basically the fastest va monitors that money can buy right now but you might have noticed that even though the lighting track and the middle track look great the darker parts of the image show significantly more smearing that's extremely typical for va panels and as we can see with slower va monitors the dark level smearing

can get pretty obstrusive and it can be very noticeable even outside of gaming like when scrolling through a website in dark mode white text seems to disappear the faster we scroll and pops up again a split second after we stop scrolling this looks very different on the ips panel on the left ironically this is the product website of the va monitor on the right by the way the gaia star map probably is the most extreme example of this effect when the pixels finally manage responding to the color change it almost looks like the image is

flashing so yeah these slower pixel response times especially for darker colors really is what keeps competitive gamers from buying va monitors if you're someone who plays a lot of fps games and really care about winning and your performance in general you should definitely think twice about getting a va monitor and you should really only consider fast va monitors if any however if you're more interested in watching videos on your monitor or even movies and netflix shows va is the way to go where it gets a bit more complicated is when you want a monitor that's

perfect for gaming and watching movies as long as we don't have any oled or microlight options an ips display with a mini led backlight is probably your best option but prepare to spend some cash and generally if you're unsure and are looking for the most versatile panel technology i'd recommend ips it's the safest option because it can do everything pretty well and prices these days are fairly similar for ips and va monitors so unless you're on a very tight budget you very likely have the option to choose an ips monitor in case you were wondering

whether it's worth it to buy a more expensive monitor i highly recommend watching this video where compare a cheap and inexpensive monitor that has the same specs side by side thanks for watching man sits in this video