Asus VG236H 3D Vision Monitor Review

Introduction

The Z-axis. Its function is far more important in life than most people would ever give it credit for.

Anyone who knows how tall they are, and I assume that's all of us, will know all about the Y-axis. Got to take something off the top shelf for a person not quite as tall as you, that'll be the Y-axis.

The X-axis is equally a part of all of our lives. It's 3 miles to the supermarket? That's the X-axis. Your room is 15' long? X-Axis again. Anyone who has ever done basic mathmatics and plotted stuff on graphs understands the X and Y axis.

In display terms we're so familiar with it we don't even think of them as axes anymore. Full-HD is 1080p, and the 1080 is the value of the Y-axis resolution. When we look at monitors, or improving our frame-rates, we deal with figures like 1280x1024 or 1680x1050 as normally as we deal with our keyboards.

But the poor old Z-axis is much maligned. Z-axis is all about depth. Distance away from you in 3D space. It first appeared in our lives with games such as BattleZone. This allowed us to move into the screen, and rotate. However because we didn't have the ability to move up and down, it was still a 2-axis game. Moving on a few years and ID brought us the seminal Wolfenstein 3D and later on Doom. These were the first two games in which the concept of moving into the screen was brought into the mainstream and they are lauded as revolutionary. Once again though they didn't take advantage of up and down. We had to wait for Quake to give the masses a game that allowed you full movement in 3D space.

So what has this all got to do with a monitor?

Monitors are, like televisions and suchlike, still 2D devices. Sure you may have the effect of moving into the screen along the Z-axis with your FPS games or whatever, but you aren't really aware of it because your brain is still processing a 2D image. You can tell the other enemy is far away because it's smaller that the one hitting you with a chainsaw, but you can't really tell how far away, and never really feel like you're occupying the same world as it.

All that changed a while ago with the introduction of stereoscopic 3D technology. We'll explain more about that later on, but the important thing is that early monitors capable of handling the refresh rate necessary to handle it were limited to 1680x1050. Most people when given the choice between a high resolution or a emerging technology chose the resolution. The rest of us sat and waited for monitors to be sufficiently high calibre to supply us with both the 3D 120hz aspect and the high resolutions we demand.

Asus have brought out the VG236H which is a full-HD monitor supporting the 120hz we need for the stereoscopic effect to work, and that is the subject of today's review.

Technical Specifications

As you can see we've got a 23 inch, 1920x1080 monitor with a TN panel that supports all the usual Asus features and has a decent amount of connectivity.

So let's take a look up close shall we.