Did you know TechSpot even has its own soccer team? Really.

First the newest one: “Hitler reacts to Nvidia Fermi Benchmarks:”

And here’s the same video with an older caption from the days of the Radeon HD 5000 series launch…

Looking back, I can’t believe I went to those extremes for a console that is now basically collecting dust after the Wii Sports novelty wore off and after I got my fair share of Super Mario Bros. and Punch Out nostalgia sessions. Long story short, the Wii is now my wife’s console but this could be getting me back for more…

The trailer above was just released and shows new gameplay elements for the upcoming New Super Mario Bros. Wii slated for release this November.

For the last 2+ years there have been two developments in the LCD market that I know I’m not alone in disliking:
(1) Glossy panels, you either love them or hate them – I’m in the latter group.
(2) So-called LCD “post processing”, used on many high-end displays.

Furthermore, the response time race also known as the “ms race” has had a very negative effect on LCD quality. This somewhat relates to the megapixel race seen in point and shoot digital cameras, where marketing went crazy for higher megapixel counts at the cost of reduced performance in low-light conditions.

It is a commonly known fact that 60hz is what most people will find a LCD pleasing to look at, and this is also close to what our eyes are capable of processing. 60hz is also what 99% of LCDs sold today operate at, with very few exceptions.

One second = 1000ms, thus a refresh rate of 1000ms / 60hz = 16.7ms.

What this means is that at 60hz the screen is redrawn once every 16ms. So why do we see LCD displays continuing to push below 16ms when there is no way for it to render that fast at 60hz? The answer is simple: marketing.

You may recall that when LCD panels first came to market there were serious problems with ghosting. This wasn’t as big of an issue with more static output like the Windows desktop or application windows, but became more noticeable when watching movies or gaming. The ghosting issue got fixed progressively as years passed, but nevertheless was something that everyone using those early displays witnessed and disliked. And thus it became easy to market lower response times because it really made a difference.

In today’s mainstream to high-end market this long ago stopped being a problem, and yet the marketing around it still lingers on. So in order to get “grey to grey” response time values (the time it takes to change one pixel from one shade of grey to another shade of grey) down to marketable specs like 2ms, other things have had to take a back seat.

I became aware of this with my last LCD purchase about a year ago, a 27” Dell 2709W monitor that cost about $800. It had great color output and was very pleasing to look at after reducing the brightness from 100 to 0. I really liked the monitor, but eventually it became evident there was some type of lag when compared to my previous LCD display, a Eizo S2000 20”. And when I say lag, I’m not referring to ghosting, but the kind of lag where the screen takes some time to reflect the change of an action performed by the user, measured in milliseconds.

After reading some reviews on my newly bought LCD (yes I know, great timing, but I hope you don’t end up in the same boat as me) it became evident that the display had a so-called “input lag” of approximately 50-60ms. If you think about the low millisecond numbers you might be a bit shocked, and well, so was I.

Reinforcing my previous point on the kind of lag I was experiencing, if you watched a movie this wouldn’t be a problem, you would just see the movie 60ms later than when your computer renders it. When playing a game you won’t notice visible lag either. The problem occurs when you, for example, fire a railgun perfectly aimed at an enemy moving in a straight line on your screen. Even though you are aiming right at his head, your shot will be 60ms behind him, since what you see is 60ms old information. This becomes a problem if you play fast paced games like Quake 3 or Counter Strike.

So in a nutshell, you won’t be able to hit your target when you aim at them while they are moving, sounds fun right? As it turns out this is exactly how I found out about “input lag”.

So what causes input lag?

In order to lower grey to grey response times to (marketing friendly) values like 2ms, the display has to store the image in a buffer so it can do advanced post processing on it to determine which pixels on the LCD it needs to boost to get to those low 2ms response times.

But that means that if you are storing 2 frames in the display, you are effectively 32ms behind the action before you have even told the transistors what to draw (from before, at 60hz, 1 frame = 16ms so 2 frames = 32ms).

Sounds retarded? Absolutely, but so is cramming 15MP onto a compact point and shoot camera with a sensor as big as a small grain. Here’s a good example, the renowned photography site dpreview.com wrote this on 11/2005:

“As if noise and detail levels weren’t bad enough from the latest batch of digital cameras based around the 8 megapixel Sharp CCD they’ve today announced one that crams even more pixels into tiny package the RJ21W3BA0ET is a ten megapixel 1/1.7″ CCD with 3766 horizontal and 2801 vertical pixels (total) and a pixel pitch of just 2.05 µm. We always kind of hope that the next compact sensor announcement will have some real innovation like higher sensitivity and lower noise but it appears as though market forces just want ‘more megapixels’.”

Know what was introduced late last year? The Canon Digital IXUS 980 IS, it has the exact same sensor size but offers 14.7MP. Want to make a bet on how improved these cameras are at taking pictures in difficult conditions?

Input lag is never mentioned on the technical specifications for LCDs, do you think anyone would buy a new $800 monitor that has a 60ms lag in big bold letters on the box? So with all that whining out of the way, what is the point of this article you may ask? Jarred Walton over at Anandtech had a very similar issue and complaint with the current LCD market, i.e. that it sucks.

There are a few types of display technologies used on monitor LCDs today. The most common are TN (twisted nematic) based display. These usually suffer from mediocre viewing angels, bad color uniformity and are generally built to be really cheap, but they tend to have great response times.

Next up the food chain are MVA and PVA panels. A few years ago these had rather poor grey to grey pixel response times, so to combat this a buffer that does post-processing was introduced, and otherwise slow displays could be marketed as being fast. The $800 Dell 2709W I bought was a PVA panel type, while my two year older Eizo S2000 is MVA but lacks post processing, so it has a very good response time and the grey to grey time is “only” 16ms.

And on the top of the food chain is the IPS panel which as you can guess comes with a hefty price premium. It is not uncommon for IPS displays to cost $1000 and upwards (that much money getting you a base model, like the Eizo ColorEdge CG222W).

IPS panels carry the advantages of TN panels with very low grey to grey response time (lower than it really needs to be) and usually no input lag. It has great viewing angles and color uniformity is generally excellent.

So after reading Jarred Walton’s article I felt I should write a small article to cheer him up as there happens to be a great IPS display based on a new derivate of the IPS technology (there are several) known as E-IPS.

E-IPS is now the “entry level” in the IPS range, the acronym stands for Enhanced In-Plane Switching. The actual monitor I’m talking about is the Dell 2209WA, and it does not cost $1000+. Dell went a bit crazy and put this display out in the market with an MSRP of $400. But it doesn’t end there. Since it was released this display has been on rebate for $290, and most recently as low as $209. A friend of mine bought one last week so granted I had to check it out.

And wow, what can I say?
I used a Canon 40D system camera with a EF 50mm f1.4 lens to take some pictures with the display running in clone mode alongside his old Eizo CRT display (A CRT monitor has none of the issues I have talked about so far in the article).

All test images where shot at the LCD display’s native resolution of 1680×1050 at 60hz or 75hz, the CRT was rendering the same resolution and refresh rate but since it is a 4:3 display and not 16:10 widescreen it had its view stretched. This doesn’t affect the CRT display as it can render any supported resolution and refresh rate without issues. However note that if you run an LCD at anything except its optimal resolution you can incur in even more lag, due to a built-in scaler changing the aspect ratio of the rendered image. I didn’t test the Dell 2209WA at anything bar its native resolution.

With a shutter time of 1ms I took several hundred pictures of the two displays rendering a timer clocking down with a 1ms accuracy. Many images have to be discarded due to the fact that the CRT renders the display up to down, thus only a small part of the CRT screen is actually bright on any given millisecond (while your eyes see a normal picture on screen).

Next I calculated the difference in time shown on these displays, in most cases the old venerable CRT was about 20ms ahead but to my surprise the LCD was actually tied in some pictures, and in 3 of them it was amazingly enough ahead. You can download the pictures I used here.

I added the times together and then calculate the average input lag of the Dell monitor compared to the CRT To my amazement it was only 14.27ms. This for a monitor that challenges several TN panels in price!

I also tested both displays while rendering 3DMark06 in clone mode. Suffice to say that the differences I could find where so small it was kind of ridiculous, here is just one example to prove the point, and this was the image with the biggest difference I could find out of a hundred pictures.

If you click on the image to get the full version notice that the FRAME count is off by one, and there is a tiny difference in the lantern light shown right next to the box showing the FPS, TIME and FRAME. To say the least, this input lag is impossible to notice in a real life scenario, so if you where aiming for a headshot you would still hit dead centre.

But it does not end there. This display has great color accuracy. I calibrated it with a Colorvision Spyder 2 Pro and the RGB curves only needed adjustment down to 98/100/99 respectively to get the white point to 6500k.

After calibration the difference was noticeable, but it was the smallest difference I have seen on the many monitors I have calibrated, even my Eizo S2000. Here is a shot of the three RGB lines, if they form a perfect 45° angle no calibration is done, and as you can see they are not too far off.

For a much more in-depth look at the monitor read this review of it at prad.de.

Now they do come to another conclusion than me on the issue of input lag, but do take that with a grain of salt since many people confirm on their own that the display has a input lag of no more than 20ms on this very lengthy thread at HardOCP.

This thread on Digital Photography Review also praises its color accuracy for usage in photography work (for the price, of course).

One last thing that is very cool about this display, with some tweaking it’s able to do 75hz over DVI. Many current LCD displays offer this possibility, but it is only a cheat, the panel does not actually render at 75hz anyway, it simply discards the extra frame sent by the graphics card.

Not so with the Dell 2209WA, below are two pictures, the first one taken using a refresh rate of 60hz and my camera’s shutter speed at 1/15. As you can see there are 5 mouse pointers in a trail and one of them is a bit weak (this one is fading and we ignore it for that reason).

The shutter time of 1/15 equals 66ms, this while we moved the mouse at the same time the picture was taken, thus the monitor is redrawing the picture at an interval of 16.7ms, we see 4 mouse pointers (16,7ms x 4 = 66,8ms) and shutter speed: 1000ms/15 = 66,7ms.

Next I install the monitor drivers and follow the advice by ToastyX to set the timings manually like this.

After this we get the result in the picture below, notice that now there is an extra sharp pointer? This is because 1000ms / 75hz = 13.3ms. So in the time window (exposure time) of our picture of 66,7ms we can now cram 5 pictures (13.3ms x 5 = 66.7ms).

This results in absolutely no difference in a 2D Windows desktop, but when gaming you can raise the frames per second with VSync on (preferable triple buffering) and for very fast paced games like Quake3 this results in a more fluid motion. This requires your computer to be able to render more than 60fps, so forget about this helping in Crysis.

You may be thinking that I am contradicting myself because I said at the beginning of this article that the human eye is able to see only 60hz. Well, I did not say exactly that, I said:
“and this is also close to what our eyes are capable of processing”. You have to read the fine print.

The issue with refresh rates are not the same as on CRTs, where a low refresh rate of 60hz would give you headache. This is due to flicker of the display, because it is being rendered from top to bottom by the electron cannon and only a small portion of the screen is lit at a given point in time (which can be seen in the pictures I took with my camera). This very fact proves that our eyes are able to process more than 60hz. I personally didn’t find a CRT display pleasing to look at unless it was at a minimum of 75hz. Above this there were diminishing returns, though I remember running my Eizo CRT at 100hz a few years back.

I should also add that I tested how much input lag the Dell monitor had at 75hz hoping that it could be even lower, but I came to the same conclusion; 14.91ms which is well within margin (at 60hz I measured 14.27ms).

So what’s not to like?
Well, in my opinion nothing really. I would buy the Dell 2209WA straight away if it wasn’t for the fact that I am very happy with my Eizo S2000 LCD, though the Dell 2209WA does beat it.

What would set the deal for me would be this very same display but upgraded to 24” and a 1920×1080 resolution at a similar low price, then I would buy it in a heartbeat. But if you’re looking for a 22” screen that does 1680×1050 I cannot recommend the Dell 2209WA enough, and I don’t even get paid to tell you that.

It seems as though nearly everyone has at least two email addresses these days, and it’s not uncommon to have upwards of four that are used on a regular basis for separate purposes.

You may or may not have heard of Gmail’s multiple inboxes feature and how useful it is, so if you’d like to take advantage of this awesome way to manage your email, read on.

The multiple inbox feature can be enabled to access third party email accounts (hotmail, your ISP email, etc.) alongside your Gmail account and can even be used to display certain sections or labels within your Gmail account simultaneously, e.g. by creating a search filter for a labeled or starred email.

Though at first glance this may seem daunting, it’s not that bad to configure and will give you the advantage of never ever having to check 2+ separate email accounts again.

Step 1:
Login to your Gmail account and enable the “Multiple Inboxes” feature under the settings > labs tab.

Once you do that, an additional box next to your inbox pane will show containing search results for “is:starred” and “is:drafts”. If you have starred or draft emails, you’ll see them there. If you don’t want to have a pane dedicated to drafts or starred emails you can remove those panes by going to the multiple inboxes settings.

We will be adding our third-party email accounts next, so we can add those inboxes to separate panes in Gmail.

Step 2:
Head back into settings and take a look under the accounts tab for an option labeled “Get mail from other accounts: Add a mail account you own”.

Enter the email address, password and any other relevant information, then add the account. During this setup process you’ll be able to apply a label to the new incoming mail and if preferred, archive it as well (both recommended). You can also take advantage of the “custom from” feature which allows you to send emails from those addresses through Gmail.

Step 3:
After you’ve successfully added your external email accounts, jump over to the “multiple inboxes” tab in the settings.

If you haven’t touched these settings yet, by default you’ll see that pane 0 is occupied by “is:starred” and Pane 1 by “is:drafts” (I opted to remove those on my account). Simply enter the new email address or any other search criteria you might want displayed beside your Gmail inbox. Also note the additional settings, which provide the ability to increase or decrease the number of messages that will be displayed in the extra inbox panes as well as their position.

For adding additional email accounts simply repeat steps 2 and 3 to add more inboxes or labels as well as anything searchable that you want displayed in its own pane. And this is just one of the many advanced features found in the Gmail Labs tab which can take your webmail experience to the next level. Enjoy.

While it might be a bit overwhelming at first sight, the 5-15 minute learning curve is well worth the time and energy you’ll undoubtedly save.

The Bulk Rename Utility allows you to perform a plethora of bulk file name modifications, all of which leave the files’ extension untouched unless you deploy an edit using the “Extension” section. You can easily add, remove and substitute letters, numbers, date and timestamps and it can all be done in more than a single way in some situations, ultimately leaving the process very open to the user.

You are provided with a preview of all potential and pending changes so you can tinker with and tweak your settings accordingly, though if you make an error it’s easily reversible by tapping CTRL+Z.

As you can see in the image below I’ve managed to alter the text to be appropriately capitalized (4), I requested all underscores to be removed (5), shifted the band’s name from the rear to the front (6) and inserted dashes ” – ” at the designated position (7) to separate the band and song name. The configuration of this took literally 45 seconds or less, if you’re curious.

Once you experiment by using a few features or skim some relevant sections in the help file, the rest should be easy with a bit of common sense.

I’ve personally used this utility to reorganize roughly 2,500 music files in 200+ folders, something I’d been putting off for over a year due to the tedious nature of the whole process, but with BRU it only took me less than a couple of hours (including the learning curve).

Download the Bulk Rename Utility here.

This is nothing new and actually has been a “feature” of Windows ever since XP’s SP2 got released and the Security Center came to exist. It’s nothing new either to have a majority of antivirus suites to become incompatible with brand new operating systems – and Windows 7 is no exception, especially more so in its current beta form.

Upon a bit of investigation you probably made your way to the Windows 7 security provider page at Microsoft’s site and perhaps were let down by the fact that the three “officially” supported AVs are all paid software or that your preferred suite isn’t listed (AVG is listed but not the free version). So, we’ve decided to install and test a variety of the more popular options out there so you don’t have to.

We will start things off by confirming that the supported AVs on Microsoft’s page indeed work:

AVG & AVG Free: Compatible **
(Download)

Kaspersky Antivirus 2009: Compatible
(Download)

Norton AntiVirus 2009: Compatible
(Download)

Eset NOD32: Compatible
(Download)

McAfee Total Protection Beta: Compatible
(Download)

Avast! Home Edition: Compatible
(Download)

Avira AntiVir Personal: Compatible
(Download)

BitDefender Internet Security 2009: Compatible
(Download)

Trend Micro Internet Security Pro: Incompatible

eScan Internet Security Suite: Incompatible

Ahnlab V3 Internet Security 2007: Incompatible

Needless to say, the similarities between Vista and 7 become apparent from looking at the list above. No doubt AV makers have adapted their applications to interact with the OS internal workings better, so they are easily prepared to work with 7.

Besides installing the suites we toyed with them a little and ran quick/full scans. Those apps listed as compatible should be working fine for you unless some bug in the beta OS (or why not, the AV suite compatibility) becomes self-evident.

If you’re curious about any other antivirus, let us know in the comments and we’ll update the article with our findings (if we can obtain the software) and be sure to let us know if your favorite antivirus is now compatible!

** Update 2/12/09:
Added BitDefender Internet Security 2009 to the list. I experienced no compatibility issues whatsoever throughout the installation, updating and scanning process.

Paul Hayes (Ascully.com) was kind enough of letting us know that AVG’s Mail Scanner portion doesn’t go along well with Outlook, causing it to stop receiving email. We will confirm this ourselves later. I tested this using Outlook 2007 and had no problems at all sending or receiving new/old mail via IMAP/SMTP from my Gmail account. Perhaps the issue is more isolated to a specific configuration and it may even be absolutely unrelated.

** Update 2/13/09:
Added Trend Micro Internet Security Pro to the list. Resulted in BSOD (stop 0×18) and screwed up UAC, couldn’t make any alterations from within Windows. I was forced to manually remove the software in Safe Mode (by deleting program data/registry entries).

Added eScan Internet Security Suite to the list. During installer/uninstaller caused the cursor to randomly move on it’s own and caused general instabilities.

** Update 2/16/09:
Added Ahnlab V3 Internet Security 2007 to the list. It required me to run the compatibility wizard for installation and even then the program was very unstable (stopped responding on multiple occasions, especially when applying settings). Also, the Action Center failed to detect any protection while it was installed. Though it installed/uninstalled and allowed me to update/scan successfully, I would not presently use this antivirus on Windows 7.

** Update 2/25/09:
Added McAfee Total Protection Beta (thank you for updating us in the comments). Experienced absolutely no issues, installation/uninstallation were clean and updating/scanning went smooth. If you were bummed about the previously incompatible offer from McAfee, wipe the tears away and get their beta software.

Now Microsoft is expected to unleash the first public preview of Windows 7 at their Professional Developers Conference this week. Some details have leaked already, but nothing to share just yet in terms of UI elements except for this PDC wallpaper that all computers at the conference are using (courtesy of istartedsomething). I have been using it for the past few hours and I had to recommend it. Nice colors, blends well and is a bit flashy (Vista style) without being too distracting.

For some of us, upgrading to Vista has been somewhat of a relief. The rest of Windows users still using XP have probably either gone back to the silver boxy Windows or relied on official or third party patching for getting the job done. Unfortunately last time I checked (a couple of years ago), even the most elaborate skins for popular applications like WindowBlinds lack the finish and subtlety I require.

But don’t despair. My advice, use some of the Microsoft-made themes that replace the original blue theme and make for a much better impression than the built-in silver or green themes.

Previously available themes include:
Royale
Royale Noir (by far my favorite)
Zune theme

Now also available (thanks to Sizzled Core), the Windows Embedded theme that uses a strong blue but still looks quite good IMO.

Notice neither of these require UxTheme.dll patching or other workarounds.