I have memories, clouded by sorrow

Sunday evening saw me mostly trying to spend some quality time with my new monitor (LG 2486, 24", widescreen, LED-backlit) and trying to get it set up properly. So far this has been a bit of a disappointment. The picture quality and the colour clarity are good, and the larger screen size is great, I'll give it that much. But I bought it for the allegedly deep blacks and good contrast, supposedly made possible by the LED backlight, yet I've seen no evidence of this so far. The automatic contrast system actually seems to work in reverse - give it a bright screen, and it dims, give it an almost black screen, and it gets lighter. I can see how this is good in an office situation, but this means everything tends towards grey, which is entirely the opposite of what you want from high contrast, surely? I can disable that feature, but even then a screen of almost entirely black is still irritatingly lit up as grey when I would have expected it to dim the backlight to make it appear, well, black. In that regard it's no better than the no-name monitor I had before, so that is strange.

I have 2 more issues to contend with. Firstly, there's a dead green subpixel right in the middle, which is unnoticeable for games but can be distracting the rest of the time. Maybe I can have the screen replaced under warranty, and maybe I can't - I certainly can't easily find any information about this.

Secondly, I've still not got the hang of how I'm going to deal with games designed for smaller resolutions. The monitor comes with an option to pillarbox the display to work in 4:3 mode, and that works fine, even if it is a bit fiddly to try and find the right button and navigate to the desired option. But I really want to be able to scale things up using the video drivers instead, and to be able to have arbitrarily windowboxed modes for older resolutions, instead of stretching things and making them fuzzy, and I've not worked out how to do any of that yet. Unfortunately most of the widescreen gaming people online are only interested in how to make modern shooter games use the whole screen effectively, which is not where my interest lies at all. I'm more concerned about how to get a 320x200 game scaled up to 1600x1000 instead of a very blurry 1436x1080 or whatever it is. Even if I do play modern shooter games, I still want them at a smaller resolution so that they actually run at a decent frame rate. Hrmph.

If you haven't already, do my attraction survey! It is here. It'll only take 5 minutes, and will contribute immeasurably to the knowledge of future generations for, well, infinity. Perhaps.

A couple of questions have been asked about it, so I'll go back and edit that post to clarify a couple of bits of information.

In other news, it's FMR tonight - out of those of you who know what that is, who's going?

In other other news, I have a new and complicated phone, so if you text me and get no response, it's probably because I pressed the wrong button and ordered an orbital strike on Moscow instead of sending an SMS. It also had the audacity to warn me that loud ringtones may damage my hearing. What? Standing in the front row at an Entombed gig, that may damage my hearing, Mr Phone.