iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Either way, as a display tech nerd, it's exciting to see what looks like a real improvement (without other massive downsides) after nearly a decade of little change in actual performance in any of these technologies.

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At the time there were a few off hand comments about these wide viewing angle VA panels having improved response times too. But that's something TV reviewers don't seem to care about at all, so no one seemed to follow up on it. But I wonder if this is actually one of those wide viewing angle VA.

A few months ago there was some news around a new "wide viewing angle VA" that some of the TV panel makers were showing off at some of the trade shows. I don't think any third partiesy got to do any testing on them, but they did note they were much more IPS like in their viewing angles.

Though there is one other option. It could be this isn't IPS. It should be noted, it _for sure_ isn't _actually_ IPS because LG owns the patent and trademark for that, and only LG can actually make IPS panels. Everyone else just makes "IPS-type" panels. But that's not what I mean.

A 3000:1 contrast ratio for IPS (or even the ~2000:1 the review gets after calibration) with seemingly no downsides is a massive change that could basically be the portent of the death of VA coming in the near future.

I also looked at some reviews of KTC's recent VA panels. What's interesting to note is they have almost identical contrast ratios to this IPS. But have all the other common hallmarks of VA: slow response times and/or overshoot and poor viewing angles. Something this IPS does not have.

So, I expected to see the same kind of issues with this panel. But no. It has response times very similar to your average decent gaming IPS. 4~5ms. That sounds slow compared to the 1ms and 0.5ms other IPS monitors claim, but those are lies, and they're all around that same 4~5ms.

They kind of suffer from the opposite of what most VA monitors do. Instead of a black smear, they have a bright smear where bright pixels take a long time to switch to a darker value. So IPS Black panels really aren't a good option for gaming.

First, they don't hit the claimed 2500:1 contrast, they're more like 1500~1800:1 contrast. And they have abysmal response times. Like mid 2000's LCD era response times. The latest model has claims 120hz, but it has a 12ms average response time, with some transitions closer to 30ms.

This isn't the first time we've seen IPS with exceptionally high contrast ratios, but never that high. LG and Dell made a big deal with the announcement of their IPS Black panels that some of the higher end Dell Ultrasharp monitors use. But these all come with a major downside.

KTC H32P22P Review 2026: 4K 165Hz IPS Gaming Monitor

But... no. It's IPS, and it has a 3000:1 contrast ratio, which was validated by an independent reviewer. Measured at 2800:1, which is better than what's measured on many "4000:1" VA panels! www.displayninja.com/ktc-h32p22p-...

displayninja.com

The KTC H32P22P is a 32" 4K 165Hz IPS gaming monitor with a high 3,000:1 contrast ratio, wide color gamut, sRGB mode, VRR, MBR and more!

It's not uncommon for cheap monitors to fuck up on their specs, either on the Amazon page, or even on their official site. So this is probably just some VA monitor that's been mis-labelled, or someone fat fingered a 3 that should have been a 1. Or they're quoting some terrible local dimming contrast

Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I need to post about a random budget 32" 4k 165hz monitor. The $440 KTC H32P22P. This is one of the cheapest 4k high refresh IPS monitors you can get in the US right now. But that's not what caught my eye. It's an IPS with a claimed contrast ratio of 3000:1. So, obviously that's a typo, right?

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That cute fact has been abused by GPUs for mip map level calculations for decades now. (The OpenGL reference implementation even makes special note of it, which is how I learned about it to begin with.)

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But yeah, it's just leaving a stain across the retro community like it is across the rest of the internet that'll make it harder to separate the history and understanding from the half baked and unfinishable throw away attemps.

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That split exists everywhere AI touches right now, and a lot of those people who don't really care about the preservation & history are also being given the "tools" to get to that end result of playing the game they want to play. And they're excited by this, and wanting to share that excitement.

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Then there's the group that really just wants to be able to play old console games for free with as little personal friction as possible. There are far more of the later, and they predominantly do not care if a game is made to work using hard work and understanding or chucked thru an AI grinder.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There are essentially two different groups in the retro gaming community. There's the group that is interested in understanding how the old consoles worked, who want to understand the feats of software engineering accomplished by the devs who made the games, and who want to preserve that history.

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I do most of my reading on my phone / iPad, so it does make it a lot harder. You could setup a GitHub pages link for it though.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

And by “put money into it”, I mean put money into politicians and local groups who don’t blindly believe in it all.

Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

That and eventual economic collapse due to all of the US and most of Europe seeming putting all of their money into the single bet that somehow AI will make money for anyone other than who’s already getting paid from it.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I genuinely think AI is going to kill us all if we don’t put more money into it. Not in the Skynet way of gaining super human intelligence sentience and building robots to eradicate us. In the making stupid people believe their own stupidity and giving them confidence to follow through way.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We need to remove the dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide from our children’s juice boxes and replace it with much safer and easier to understand Water! Why haven’t we done this yet!?

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If they do bring back the Peoplemover somehow, it would require completely replacing the track again, making yet another new propulsion method, and making brand new vehicles since all the old ones have been destroyed or sold to private collectors. I would love if they did, but I doubt they will.

But that meant to put in the Rocket Rods they had to remove _all_ of the Peoplemover track, and the mid-track ground wheels that actually propelled the vehicles. The Rocket Rod track was a single center rail with the vehicle's drive wheels sitting directly on asphalt. Along with a lot more power.

davelandweb.com photo showing the track and mid-track ground wheels and motors used to propel the Peoplemover vehicles.

The _Disneyworld_ Peoplemover vehicles are also not self propelled, but have a different track and propulsion setup, and are quite a bit larger than those that were at Disneyland. And the Rocket Rods that for a short period replaced the Disneyland Peoplemover were fully self propelled.

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But there's one part of the conversation I think a lot of people miss. The original Peoplemover track is _gone_. What's there today is the Rocket Rods track, and that difference is important. Because the original Disneyland Peoplemover was not self propelled.

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Recently Disney announced that they are planning to do work on Disneyland's Tomorrowland. They didn't say _what_ they're going to do, or even give a real timeline, but it got a lot of people who are fans of the land excited. And lots of talk about the Peoplemover maybe returning.

Yeah, GW1 vs GW2 was more or less a genre change. GW1 was a coop game with a VRML chat room for the hub town.

The French had removed the s by that point, so it was only because 17th century English scholars had a hard-on for Latin and thought it looked cool, so they added it to everything that was vaguely similar.

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Going back further, why does isle have a silent s if by the time they changed the spelling of island and aisle to include one? Because Old French had long stopped verbalizing the n and u of insula by the time they started writing it. And stopped saying the s by the time English appropriated it.

isle came from Latin insula island came from Old English iegland aisle came from Old French aile, which came from Latin ala.

Why does aisle have an s? Because island and isle had one, so aisle should too!

Also, why don't we pronounce the s in isle? Because someone added the s to island, so people thought they were from the same root and started mispronouncing isle with the s silent.

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My favorite cursed etymology knowledge is: "Why does island have an s?" The answer is because because someone thought it looked more latin-y, and thus "cooler", to have an s, so they added one.

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Also, why do we vocalize the p in pter when we say helicopter, but are told not to when we say pterodactyl!? Pterodactyl is even all Greek roots, so it really should be P-Tera-Dac-tyl

Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

With OLEDs becoming more and more popular, we really need to bring back screensavers.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

They keep trying to make a shooter within the StarCraft world, and keep failing to actually make it. What’s that quote from FarCry 3 about the definition ofof insanity again?

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

All of this is because car manufacturers realized how much money there is in selling your personal data to advertisers. They don’t want Android Auto or Car Play because it cuts them out of some of that money hose.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Doubtful. That'd require self reflection which I don't think anyone involved in any step of that has an ounce of.

Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I’m not really sure how you get “inspiration” from something that never is shown on screen. (They only ever have that costume in the movie with the full length jackets on.) And then somehow get something that looks like exactly like a different movie’s costume.

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Ben Golus @bgolus.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The US auto industry is trying to get Chinese made vehicles banned from the US indefinitely. Their current argument is Chinese made vehicles track data about passengers and that it poses a privacy and safety concern. I agree. But we should also ban US and EU auto industry for the same issues.

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Disneyland itself didn’t have any alcohol until around 7 years ago. But the rest of the parks have.

Disney’s big innovation was in building rides designed explicitly for both kids and adults. And trash cans with lids. (No really.)

Before Disneyland, there really was a much stronger split between adult and kid amusement. Rides for kids really only for kids, and adults just kind of sat on the sidelines. And rides for adults really were just for adults and you had places like Coney Island that were almost entirely adult focused.

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