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Using smoked plexiglas - Hey RandyT!
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OSCAR:
I knew you would reply anyway, so I figured I'd just get your attention first.  :)


I was getting ready to buy something to go over the monitor on the cabinet I'm working on when I read a post you wrote about using a dark smoked plexi.  I figured I'd give it a shot since you were pretty happy with the results.

I had no idea how good it would look!  I'm pretty happy I decided to go with a smoked plexi instead of just standard glass.  The games & colors looks so much better.  The funny thing is that I thought they looked great before, I didn't know what I was missing, but that tends to be the case unless you actually do a A-B type test....  Check out this link to see what I did, along with a couple more pics.  For reference, the monitor shown here is a W-G 9100 powered by an Asus GeForce 2.  The same exact camera settings were used in the comparison shots.

Macros:
Hmm, wouldn't turning down the screen or brightness pot have a similar affect? The picture without the smoked plexi looks a little bit too bright for my taste, which is washing out the colours. The whites are blooming as well which means the contrast is probably set too high. If that control is available I would turn that down. Or maybe I've spent too much time calibrating my projector with Avia.  :)

OSCAR:

--- Quote from: Macros on February 04, 2003, 08:48:45 pm ---Hmm, wouldn't turning down the screen or brightness pot have a similar affect? The picture without the smoked plexi looks a little bit too bright for my taste, which is washing out the colours. The whites are blooming as well which means the contrast is probably set too high. If that control is available I would turn that down. Or maybe I've spent too much time calibrating my projector with Avia.  :)
--- End quote ---

Well, that was kinda my point.  It *didn't* look too bright or washed out before I made comparison photos.  Before I took any pictures, the monitor without the smoked plexi looked fine.  I also took the photos in a completely dark room with the monitor producing the only light, and that likely makes it look like the monitor is too bright, but it doesn't seem that way when there is ambient light in the room.  Could you get the same effect by playing with the monitor controls?  Most likely, but then Windows and other apps look funny when I did so.

I should probably add that a photo comparison probably isn't the best way to show the difference between these.  Rather than a difference in brightness/color/contrast, it seems more like a filter effect has been applied that cleans up the image.  Actually, it's exactly like that, since that is essentially what it does.  Many arcade games used a smoked glass for this same reason.  If the same effect could be gained from adjusting the monitor, I'm sure they would have done that, but that's just my opinion.

eightbit:
Oscar it looks good.

The other advantage to using plexi is that it hides your monitor bezel and when you play vertical games you can't tell your not using the whole screen.
ashardin:
This looks like a good solution to me.  I've been wrestling with making my custom bezel look right, and it never has.  Where can you get the smoked plexi???
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