What to Look for When Buying Flat-Panel Displays

Adam Wiggins asks: "After seeing the gorgeous plasma flat-panel montitors in the local taco shop night after night, I've decided it's time to treat myself to a nice flatscreen monitor. However, I looked at a couple at Fry's, and was unimpressed. The refresh rate seems slow, and the pixels didn't seem as sharp as they should be. Currently I'm using a 21" which does 75 hz at 1280x1024, so if I do buy a flat screen I want it to be really nice. However, the few reviews and flat panel overview articles I've found online don't seem to address the issues of refresh speed, sharpness, or brightness at all. Can anyone recommend a buying guide, or better yet tell me about your own flat panel display that you are happy with? "

Comments

DVI

[Betcour]

You really want a screen with a DVI connector - that way you can have direct digital input to your screen and perfect image - the way flat screens were meant to be used !

(note that you also need a card with a DVI output to use this feature, but if you've got the cash for a flat screen then I guess paying a STB 3D Prophet DDR DVI is not an issue :)

Re:DVI

[dublin]

I'd second the fact that digital interfaces are important. Most of the problems I've encountered with flat screens and regular analog (*VGA) connections center around the difficulty inherent in redigitizing the analog signal that the RAMDAC on your video card just thoughtlessly created, and mapping that *cleanly* and solidly into the panel's native pixel grid.

I've seen some very expensive LCD screns that look awful because they aren't able to perfectly re-gen the digital signal. Most analog-input flat-panel monitors can be made to work well with a singel computer, but on the rare occasions I've tried to use a vid/kbd/mouse switch box, I've found that it's pretty much impossible to come up with a setting which will look good with the input from differing video cards. (It might be better if they were identical, or it might not...)

The problem is that there's not a lot of support for the digital interfaces yet even on the hardware side, and you may (although I haven't checked) have problems finding video drivers for XFree86 or any other non-MS display system.

This seems to be kind of a chickenand-egg problem - no one can buy digital interface flat screens until someone builds them, and no one will build them (and price them sanely) until there's a large proven market.

I've gone through this set of gyrations myself, to the point that I may just give up and buy a Gateway Profile just to avoid the hassle.

I wish there were more, better, and cheaper choices for flat screens. It galls me that it's nearly as cheap to buy an all-in-one like the Profile, or one of the new "suitcase-luggable" laptops like Dell's with the big screens than to add a good digital flatscreen and video card to my existing PC. Something's very wrong here...

Buy the cheapest and/or wait...

[hedgehog_uk]

You really want one with a digital (DVI) connector. However, these (& cards that use them) are not very common yet. Your best bets are to either stick with your 21" monitor or buy a really cheap analog flat panel and wait for the better DVI ones to become widely available. I went for the latter route. The display is OK but not amazing, but it has a silver surround and looks very cool.

Also try the monitor before you buy - many (most?) of them have some dead pixels. Bright dead pixels are much more noticable than dark ones.

HH


Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.

Dead pixels

[_damnit_]

I have a 18.1" LCD and couldn't be more pleased. Mine has two connectors (one for Sun monitors and one for VGA). This saves space for me. I suppose the most important visual aspect is dead pixels and how well it looks when not in it's native resolution. I have seen some LCDs that look horrible when not using the native resolution of the screen (vs CRTs which seem to look good at nearly any supported resolution.)


_damnit_

SGI

[gatzke]

SGI has one of the sweetest LCD panels available. It has 1600x1000 resolution and I think digital interconnects. Problem is, it is tied to a crappy number 9 video card. And it costs 2.6 K$.

Apple has a sweet Apple Cinema Display. A little bigger than the SGI, but I think they are at the same resolution. The beast costs 4K$ and comes "bundled" with a G4. I have never run Linux on a Mac. I wonder if it runs on the G3 G4 series... II bet it does.

ed

Accelerated X?

[Nonesuch]

I've been using Xi Graphics' Accelerated X product on a Solaris desktop for the past few months, they have much better support for my odd video card than Sun provides.

Has anybody tried XiG's DVI card drivers?

NEC LCD1525 X (Analog/Digital)

[Quack1701]

I just bought the NEC-LCD1525X. It looks great! It's main advantage is it will accept both analog and digital inputs and has connectors for all three of the standard Digital formats (DVI, DFP, and P&D).

This is ideal because digital video cards are harder to find and if you want to buy the monitor now, you won't be locked down as to what type of video card to get once you either get the money or can find the right card.

Quack

Look at the SGI before you buy anthing else

[ribond]

Ebay has them listed ~$1300.. they're gorgeous. I've got a viewsonic 21" CRT that's really nice, but the flatpanel just blows it away. http://www.sgi.com/peripherals/flatpanel/

Digital displays

[Anonymous Coward]

>The refresh rate seems slow, and the pixels
>didn't seem as sharp as they should be.

You want to get a flat panel display with a digital connector and you will also need a video card with digital out.

There are several types of connectors: DFP, MDR-20, P&D, and DVI. DFP is Digital Flat Panel, P&D is Plug and Display, DVI is Digital Video Interface, and I think MDR-20 is an older kind of interface (not quite sure though).

DVI is becoming the standard, and you can get converters between the different connector types.

>Currently I'm using a 21" which does 75 hz at
>1280x1024, so if I do buy a flat screen I want it
>to be really nice. However, the few reviews and
>flat panel overview articles I've found
>online don't seem to address the issues of
>refresh speed, sharpness, or brightness at all.

With a digital output, the image is as sharp as it gets. The display is also nice and bright usually. As for refresh rate, liquid crystal displays don't have the same problem as CRT monitors (fading phosphors) so LCD screens typically refresh at 60 Hz, but there is no flicker. (Your digital watch probably has a 1 Hz refresh rate, but no flicker there either.)

With a digital output, each pixel is precisely defined so there are no controls besides brightness and on/off.

>Can anyone recommend a buying
>guide, or better yet tell me about your own flat
>panel display that you are happy with?

The IBM T55D (digital) is a very nice 15" monitor. Unlike with CRTs, the 15" are all viewable (so it's only a little smaller than a 17" CRT).

A 15" will run you about $1000-$1400, 17" about $2500, 18" about $3000-$3500. It makes more sense economically to get two 15" monitors and use Xinerama.

Currently, under Linux your best bet seems to be an ATI Xpert LCD with a DFP to DVI converter. Other cards (Matrox, NVidia) only work right now with the framebuffer console driver, which means no acceleration (scrolling is slow).