Whilst 3D cinema is growing in popularity day by day (offering a more immersive entertainment experience), its more of the gaming side that we believe will see the technology pushed to the next level….
A bit of tech....
In the past 3D content was normally viewed with a pair of colour glasses (most people should remember these), with one lens coated in red and the other in blue (though you can get green and red to).The 3D side of things worked by placing the same image on top, in red and blue, over the original image. If you then look at the image - without the glasses - it looks like the images are overlapping slightly to, this essentially creates the depth that you get when you put the glasses on (tricks your brain into seeing one image). This tech is known as passive viewing, which is similar to speakers in some ways, in that the glasses do not have a power source, they generate the 3D effect from the display.
Other 3D systems use polarized glasses….
Instead of using the colour filters of the above, another technique uses polarization filters. Each eye then has its own image, so in other words, the left eye sees a different image from the right, this then creates a 3D image of sorts when the glasses are applied. Well that’s our uptake on the tech anyways, though we are no experts in this field.
Two types of polarization are available, linear polarization is the first which allows more than one person to view the screen at once, but the downside is that if you move your head the 3D image can go to pot (images can appear to bleed into each other). Zalman uses circular polarization thankfully which is the other filter, this does not have the same probs as the above as such, but the viewing angle is still not as good as Shutter technology….
Whilst we won’t go any further in terms of the techie speak, for those that are interested NVIDIA uses said Shutter Glass technology for its system (£130), which has no limitation in viewing angle, however you do need a 120 Hz Monitor display or projector to create the 3D effect, as each eye receives 60hz (thus splitting the 120Hz into two) and another downside with the above is that you are tied down to NVIDIA, so if you upgrade to ATI you’re scuppered, so to speak.
Box Content
With the above techie bits sorted we can now move on to the product in Question and to start with let’s take a look at what you get inside the box…..
In terms of cabling Zalman provide 1 x VGA cable, 1 x DVI, a Power cable, line-out cable (for connecting the monitors internal speakers to a PC sound card), a driver CD, a DVD with various demos of 3D films and a sheet showcasing all the useful 3D resources on the web.
As for the glasses you get a pair of polarized glasses, both of which come with a case and cleaning cloth. One pair is a clip-on affair which can be used by people who wear glasses. The other is standard pair, which can be used by anyone with decent sight.
Monitor Design
In terms of the Monitor design Zalman have gone for a minimalistic look with the Zalman ZM-M215W (a 21.5” display), with a glossy black finish surrounding the edges and a selection of logos at the front, sporting the Zalman name and its 3D origins.
To the right you have the main controls of the monitor, these allow access to the menu settings and power button. You will find all the standard options – with the latter - for adjusting the colours, temperature, Input mode (DVI or VGA), volume control and DCR (Dynamic contrast ratio) to boost the overall brightness of darkened images.
The stand used for the display is on the light side, yet it feels rock steady when placed on the desk, the only downside is the lack of screen tilt adjustment, as we couldn’t angle the screen back as far as we would have liked. On the upside there is a set of holes at the back for wall mounting the display.
The standard set of glasses that you get, are more of a fashion statement compared to the second pair of clip-on variants. You may get the odd stare if you where the clip-on glasses, in say a LAN party, but more importantly they don’t cost a great deal if you break them (around £10.00, compare this to other manufactures which can charge hundreds of pounds). http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/audio-and-laptop-products/3d-glasses.
Connectivity
As you may have guessed from the above description the screen does lack a HDMI port, which at first seems like a disaster compared to most of the modern Monitors that you can buy on the market today. Yet the one saving grace is it does support HDCP, so you can at least use a DVI to HDMI adapter and plug this into a compatible device….Though you can buy a cable to do the same job (costs a couple of pounds from Amazon)
Luckily we had such an adaptor to hand though, which was supplied with our ATI HD 4870 (used for testing). We then plugged in the Monitor to our Xbox 360 and Virgin Media V+ box (HD).
Unfortunately the one disadvantage of DVI to HDMI adaptors or the above Amazon cable, is that DVI – in most cases - only carries pictures and the Monitor’s stereo speakers are inaccessible.
However with the Virgin V+ box this did have a digital optical-out port so we could route the sound to our external amplifier.
As for the Virgin V+ HD display resolution, despite the FULL HD capabilities of the screen it could only handle 720P (Wide), yet the picture still looked pretty good in our eyes.
As for the Xbox 360, well we could view this at full 1080P and Gears of War 2 looked great, with no motion blur, nice blacks and respectable colour depth to match (without any setting adjustments). Not bad for a 5ms, 60hz capable screen!
Sadly without the sound it was not really much fun. The only solution would be to buy a VGA HD cable http://www.play.com/Games/Xbox360/4-/719745/Official-Xbox-360-VGA-HD-AV-Cable/Product.html as this allows you to plug in the Xbox to the VGA port of the Monitor and then route sound via a standard pair of audio leads to your amplifier. Though, we have heard reports that this can only handle 1080i. However as we have not got one to test, we can’t vouch for this.
At least now you know what the monitor can and can’t accomplish on the connectivity front.
Sound
Even if you could get sound from the above into the Monitor’s speakers they are not much use at high volume as the treble seems to shrill. But for standard Windows and lower volume gaming, music or playing back films, they provide an adequate audible experience – just don’t expect anything fancy and you won’t be disappointed.
Display 2D – Pros & Cons
Ok so we have covered that the display does at least look good with the above connectivity options, but its primary function (apart from 3D) will be as a 2D display for use in say Windows.
We had the above display running at its native resolution i.e. FULL HD (1920 x 1080) for the past two weeks. And its 5ms response time again provided a solid enough performance, to not warrant any further concerns (2ms would have been better, but its not really a problem).
Its main drawback though lies with its glossy coating, which simply means that in brighter conditions or with darker backgrounds on-screen, if your focus shifts from the action you can see your reflection staring back at you. In fairness we found with our desk setup – which blocks light from the left and right of the display (plus with our blinds angled) we did not notice it during the day and in some ways our eyes strained less than when viewing our default LG monitor (which has an anti-glare coating).
Also when we were playing games we never noticed the reflection unless we concentrated on it. In darker conditions it’s not really noticeable at all. With most gaming sessions handled in this environment, this should not be a massive problem in our opinion. Still its worth noting none the less.
As was the one dead pixel we discovered in the top right hand corner of the screen, however it did take us 2 weeks to find this, so it did not impact in our enjoyment of the following games…
Similar to the Xbox experience the screen did not have any problems during our game sessions of Call Of Duty 4 (COD4), Left 4 Dead, Dead Space and Street Fighter IV. It coped pretty well with darker images and the 5ms response time kept the action flowing with no noticeable ghosting.
We also found the blacks were good when watching dark films such as Aliens, so we could happily make out the action.
Display 3D – Pros & Cons
Of course the main excitement comes from the 3D technology and its what we will discuss next in more detail.
Out the box the DVD comes with a selection of 3D demos that you can watch to see how the 3D side of things work.
Donning the clip-on glasses was our next step and whilst we then looked like an 80’s pop star, they clipped on firmly to our existing specs and the lenses flip up so we could view the screen as normal at any point.
A couple of the demos (Dracula4D) for example really showed just how good 3D can work on a smaller screen. The Stereoscopic player works by loading two separate files (left and right) and the software joins them together to create the 3D experience. We were quite impressed and excited by it, but the downside is the viewing angle, you really have to be close to the screen and look down on it in order to get the best experience, this is where it would have been easier to get more adjustment out of the tilt stand.
iZ3D or TriDef
Whilst the monitor is indeed capable of displaying 3D content, you still require help from drivers in order to get games and indeed convert standard films into 3D.
There are two options open to you, both of which will require additional funds to purchase, however the iZ3D driver can be downloaded as a 30 day trial so you can expreince the effect of 3D, but the full driver will cost around £25 (http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/gaming/zm-iz3d-driver). The alternative to the iZ3D is TriDef, which is around the £32 mark, but it does offer a lot more functionality.
You could argue that at £300 the Zalman should have included one of these drivers as standard, but if you think that NVIDIA’s solution requires a 120hz display to run (so around £320 when bought with the 3D glasses), the Zalman works out at the same price, however the Zalman triumphs in our opinion as the glasses only cost £10.00 and you are not tied down to a manufacturer.
iZ3D
We downloaded the latest driver from the Internet and found that in order to get it to work with the Zalman you need to install it first with the Full Installation option. This then allows you to select the Zalman monitor from the list. Note the screen shot shows the correct configurations (make sure you enable the stereo setting as this allows you to play the games in 3D). In our eyes the iZ3D driver is not quite as intuitive as the TriDef solution, its interface is a little clunky and there is a bit more setup required in order to get the games running as you want them.
However you do have a respectable list of game titles to choose from (profiles that enable the 3D capabilities) and if the game is not in the list you can use the default profile instead.
Though getting games to run with the 3D technology was a little hit and miss at first, mainly because we discovered that the driver won’t work properly unless you are running at the monitor’s native resolution, which is 1920 x 1080! So you will need a good PC spec to get games to run properly.
Despite this when you first launch a game it runs through a setup wizard which allows you to configure the game to maximise the 3D effect. This was a little time consuming, but it’s worth it because without the correct configuration we found our eyes were getting a little strained.
Once finished the 3D effects were pretty good, especially in Left4Dead and COD4. With the latter as an example we found it immersed us in the game a lot better and we felt part of the action. The clip-on glasses were pretty comfortable for long periods of gaming, more so than we expected and we did not feel motion sickness, which a lot of people report when plying 3D games – configuring the display properly with the above wizard helps with this.
TriDef
However whilst we eventually got to grips with the iZ3d driver, in our minds the TriDef driver was possible the better option.
Configuration does require a little bit of know-how, as the Zalman is not listed as a monitor, but choosing Standard monitor with line interlaced does the job and then we were off….
We found its interface was a lot more intuitive to use than the iZ3D, colourful and inviting could be another word to describe it. More importantly we could run games at lower widescreen resolutions and still get the 3D effect (1440 x 900 for example).
When you first launch the gaming interface it display a list of popular games, you can then scan your computer for additional titles or manually browse and add these to the pile. The number of profiles was more than respectable with Modern Warfare 2 in the list and various other reasonable up-to-date titles.
More importantly we felt that the games we tested, COD4, Left 4 Dead and Street Fighter 4 seemed to work in 3D pretty effectively straight out the box, without any further configuration. In game though, you can also quickly bring up the control panel to adjust several options to improve the 3D experience even further and you can quickly save your new configurations as a custom profile.
You can also take 3D screen shots which can be viewed using a pair of bog standard red and blue 3D glasses for example. Overall the whole experience of the TriDef driver felt less intrusive and we really enjoyed using it.
Final note: Of course all of the games above were originally designed to work in 2D displays, with the driver simply converts them to 3D. The results were good, don’t get us wrong (though some games worked better in 3D than others), but when dedicated 3D titles come out you should find the experience gets even better! Another thing to mention is that with both drivers the viewing angle is not bad in 3D, but in certain games it can create motion sickness if you move your head from side to side to quickly.
In terms of online game play, we would recommend you practice offline first until you get used to the 3D, as it does require a certain level of adjustment. Our eyes had to adjust to the aiming cursor position for example.
The gallery below or via our Facebook page shows a few screen shots from some of the games we tested. You can use a pair of 3D glasses (the red/blue green/red ones for example) to get some idea of the 3D. Though the 3D is not as effective as the Zalman glasses.
Films & Other Content
The TriDef driver also has a neat feature which allows you to view photos or standard DVD’s in 3D. The effect is not true 3D as such, rather you can adjust the front or background to push the image/film content to create a sense of depth. We found that you need to adjust your position to get the perfect viewing angle, yet the effect is pretty good we have to say, though we did get a sense of motion sickness if we kept moving our head from side-to-side, as the screen appears to swim and this can be off putting! Adjusting the settings can help reduce this effect, but it was still pretty cool to view classic films such as Aliens or Predator in pseudo 3D.
Another feature of both drivers is that you can view Google Earth in 3D, this also has similar limitation to the images and films above. Note: There is a 14 day trial available so you can test this driver for yourself.
Performance
We have added a dedicated section on performance because playing games in 3D does require a bit more CPU and graphics power to run.
As mentioned earlier, with the iZ3D driver you need to run the monitor at its native resolution. Depending on the game this can be quite a struggle, as even on our Phenom II X4 processor running at 3Ghz, 2GB Ram and an ATI HD 4870 Graphics card with 512MB ram, things could be smoother. Running the Tri-Def driver would be the better bet for lower spec machines.
Specs
