Monitors: CRT vs LCD

[Thoran]

Well I've got two that I never use... but a buddy of mine just bought one and he uses it a lot (too lazy to walk over to the tv to watch I guess).

I think that a PC is a bit of overkill as a TV.

[uaciaut]

Good crt with TCO03 - that's the best option in my opinion. If you have lots of money you could get a very good LCD, though it's twice that much and not worth it (basicaly it doen't offer very much comparing to the CRT)

[Sir Krustin]

If you're looking for a 17" panel, there are a lot of good ones out there, ones with the Hydis 20ms panel being the best.

At 19", the only gaming panel I would buy is the Samsung Syncmaster 193P, it's only shortcoming is that it uses the newer VA technology, which doesn't have the response of TN - yet - but does have a nice wide viewing angle of over 170 degrees, the older TN panels have a much more restrictive field of view. I would avoid Sony's new Black LCD technology for now.

The Samsung is around us$899 right now, the good 17" are a lot less.

[Luvian]

My 17 visible inch Flatscreen LCD is playing all recent games perfectly. The first thing I did when I got it was test Need for Speed Underground on it. That game gots blur and light trails, and even at max resolution and graphic quality I had no problems.

[GokuZool]

Is there a difference between a CRT Monitor and a Flat Screen CRT Monitor?

[Sir Krustin]

Flatscreen CRTs are still big and bulky like normal CRT displays, they just have a flat viewing surface that is much nicer to view, and has less distortion.

[Memnoch]

OK...I had a look at a couple of 17" LCDs today and geez they looked a bit fuzzy. I checked out the Samsung 173V and the 173N and at their native resolutions 1280 x 1024 any font smaller than 8 was blurry - and any font that was in boldface looked unclear as well, is this normal?

I also checked out an 17" IBM Thinkvision 170P (??) at work and it was horrible - even my avatar here was flickering on a static screen!!! Ziroc's candles on the homepage were flickering too, you could see bits of the white box which make up the background of the GIFs flickering. Surely LCD's can't be this bad??

Obviously the video card used would influence this, right? I can't imagine our work PCs having a decent video card. Could this have something to do with it?

[ 05-10-2004, 10:08 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

[Paladin2000]

For smaller font sizes, it depends on the size of each pixel (dot) in the LCD screen. The smaller the dot, the better the clarity and also resolution. Obviously LCD monitor that has bigger dots are not very suitable to view smaller fonts.

Ghosting is another big problem with some LCD monitors. As such, some animated picture/sprite tends to show up quite ugly (in comparison to CRT).

[Felix The Assassin]

You have yet to answer the real question Memnoch. What are you going to use the monitor for?
Space being a premium, is a no brainer. But we need to know what you want to do.
Normal stuff at home, text, e-mail etc a cheap LCD will suffice. If you want fast paced games, then you need to start stashing the kids college fund into new LCD monitor fund.

If graphics arts is your game, then only a CRT will suffice. This is the last frontier in which high end LCDs have yet to match a CRT. Color representation, shading, shadowing, and pixel count are all the superiortraits of CRTs.

[Memnoch]

Well, I'm planning to use it as follows:

- internet surfing
- watching online movie previews, mpg files, possible DVDs
- games like NWN, Civilization, RTS, RPG
- usual office applications

It would be unlikely for me to be using it for:

- graphics design
- playing fast first-person-shooters on a regular basis - if anything I will only play these games on occasion and rarely

Space is quite important as I've mentioned before. Will an LCD suffice for this? Any brands anyone can recommend? And does the video card have anything to do with the quality?