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LCD Display Questions - Longevity and Monochrome?
Jack Frost IV asks: "Since higher resolution LCD panels have started to become a lot more common, many people have been complaining about dead pixels. I just received two SGI flat panels direct from the factory, and each shipped with a single dead pixel. In fact, the second display was a replacement for the first (for an issue unrelated to the dead pixel). While I understand the difficulties in manufacturing the displays, the single dead pixel doesn't concern me right now, as I don't notice it often. What bothers me is how many more pixels these displays will lose during a lifetime; say over the next three to five years. I want to replace a lot of my CRTs (Yes, *some* of us don't do color critical work, and LCDs are perfectly OK) with LCD panels, but if, say, a dozen pixels are going to die in 3 - 5 years, it's going to be quite annoying. SGI claims that once the pixel burns out, you'll never notice it was gone... but I don't buy it. Can anyone explain some of the longevity and degredation issues relating to flat panels?"
O'Bunny queries: "How come nobody apparently sells monochrome LCD monitors for PC-like devices? I'd love to have a largish (say, 1600x1200) flat monitor that: doesn't weigh five thousand pounds; isn't fifteen feet thick; and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
The rationales that I've heard behind the high costs of these monitors were:
- The manufacturing yield is low because of the large number of transistors that need to all work properly to display colours.
- The economy of scale currently is aimed at laptop users, for whom a 1600x1200 screen is impractically large (unless you happen to be Andre the Giant)
Ignoring the second part, why doesn't anyone make a decentmonochrome LCD monitor for those of us who want a large screen but don't necessarily need color?
In my case, I want to edit multi-channel audio. A Color display adds almost nothing to the information that I extract from the screen. I can select, cut, copy paste, apply effects, and otherwise mangle the sounds as well on a 1-bit per pixel display as I can on a 32-bpp monster.
I am also a technical writer. The documents I write are produced on a B&W laser printer, mostly. Certainly, on-line documents (and even most printed ones) can benefit from intelligent use of colour for various reasons, but most printed documents end up in black and white (mostly for cost reasons). Again, colour adds little to the experience.
So, I guess my question really comes down to the following:
- Where can I get a large monochrome flat-panel monitor for a PC?
- If I can't get one for $less than a colour flat panel, why not?"
Just the facts:
ls --help
Usage: ls [-aAbBcCdDfFgGhHiIklLmnNopqQrRsStTuUvwxX1]
Long options:
--all, --almost-all, --escape, --block-size=SIZE,
--ignore-backups, --color[=WHEN], --directory,
--dired, --classify, --format=WORD, --full-time,
--full-time, --no-group, --human-readable, --si,
--indicator-style=WORD, --inode, --ignore=PATTERN,
--kilobytes, --dereference, --numeric-uid-gid,
--literal, --file-type, --hide-control-chars,
--show-control-chars, --quote-name,
--quoting-style=WORD, --reverse, --recursive,
--size, --sort=WORD, --time=WORD, --tabsize=COLS,
--width=COLS, --help, --version.
This would be funny if it weren't so horribly
true. I mean, this is a nightmare come true.
This is worse than PL/I and OS/360 combined.
Although I can't help with some parts of the article, I can give you some experience I have. I have a very old laptop ~10 years old. It's monocrome, 16 grey scale (this laptop is a 386/25, BTW.) It still works fine, no dead pixels, but the backlighting isn't the best in the world either. But it still works. So they can last around 10 years, if not longer. Probably the backlighting bulbs are the major problem, but I've never replaced them either. My own advice for anyone buying an LCD is to buy a brand that probably will be in business several years, like IBM. Might be higher, but think I can get backlight bulbs for this laptop anymore? Not likely.
It may be happening more slowly than we would
like, but LCD prices are dropping. I found a
Princeton LCD17 for $699 "while supplies last" at
the local Fry's earlier this week. 15-inch LCD
panels are easy to find for less than $500 now.
When comparing CRT and LCD displays, I think that
a lot of people fall into the "equal size trap".
I.e. they think that they need a 17" LCD to
replace a 17" monitor, etc. This fails to account
for LCD's superior clarity, lack of flicker, and
visible area. Most people could happily replace a
17" CRT with a 15", etc.
I have such a display (Inspiron 5000e) and I must say that I don't know how people slog around in anything less.
Remember about, what was it, 4 years back? when monitor manufacturers began inflating monitor sizes. What was once advertised as a 16" monitor became a 17" monitor, despite only having a viewable size of 15.8". As you said, not far off a 15.1" LCD.
I've 12 of them for 4 years now without any dead pixels. They are Apple 15" LCD displays (first and second generation with VGA connectors) used mostly on Linux station (PCs) or Apple G3/G4. They have the size of a taiwanese cathodic 17", a longer longevity than most of our Sony trinitron, and a better comfort for users eyes.
They were not really more expensive than good quality cathodic display (about one third more) but what a gain of room on our desktop!
So bad Apple doesn't manufacture them anymore (the new ones don't have a VGA connector) but at least they have proven that it was possible to sell good quality LCDs at a reasonable price.
-- "Life is easier since I have excluded JonKatz stories from my homepage"
Well, NTSC is 30 frames a second drop-frame. Every 10 seconds a frame in dropped (It's late, might not be 10). So it turns out to be 29.97.
Analogue resolution is measured in horizontal scan lines, you can't say it's "640x480", it doesn't work that way in the analogue world. A BetacamSP deck can record upwards of 500 lines of resolution, a DV deck (Consumer mini-dv, dvcam, dvcpro) can record 480 lines (Cause it's D1 and uses a different shaped pixel than computer monitors, the resolution is actually 720x486 which would turn out to be 3:2 on a computer monitor, but is 4:3 on a TV.), etc.
Every frame is divided into fields, upper and lower. If you numbered them starting at 1 for the first line, the odd numbers would be displayed first, followed by the even ones. So you have approximitely 30 frames times 2 fields, so you actually have 60 frames per second at an effective "resolution" of app. 240 scan lines a frame. This increases temporal resolution by decreasing spatial resolution. This is called interlacing. It's also why when you pause video and there's movement it will jump back and forth, from odd to even fields.
Pal is 25 fps, with two field per frame, so it has a slightly small temporal resolution (with only 50 effective frames per second) but the spatial resolution is larger, there's more scan lines per frame.
Most 35mm film is projected at 24fps, however the shutter opens and closes several times that every second, if it only opened and closed 24 times every second the flicker would be very noticeable. It still is if you sit very close to a large screen.
In video this is called "progressive". Progressive is where the entire frame is displayed at once, and not in fields like interlaced video. There are a couple different compatible HD formats, one is 24p (p=progressive, i=interlaced) fps, the other 30p fps, and the other is 30i (effectively 60fps). the 24p would be for movies and stuff that originated on film or a 24p HD camera. The 30p stuff would be video content mostly, and the 30i stuff would be for sports where a faster shutter speed would keep movement sharper.
It's interesting to note that most DVDs with content that's from film actually store it as 24 frames per second/progressive. And your DVD player does what's called a 3:2 pull down in hardware to turn it into 30fps, that's also why you can freeze a DVD without interlacing artifacts of the picture jumping back and forth. I'm not sure how PAL DVD players do this, as the preferred method for transferring and distributing PAL VHS tapes was to just run the film at 25 fps, which sped it up. I think the PAL version of Titanic was actually something like 10 minutes shorter than the NTSC version.
But film can be shot and played at virtually any speed mechanically possible.
Earn cash in your spare time! Blackmail your friends!
We see prices from distributors now below $500 for 15.1" 1024x768 displays here in norway now, so prices are going down. 17" are below $1000 as well.
Hmm.... wonder why TV uses 25 fps and film 24 fps then. They don't look to bad to me, but when you move to lower frame-rates the inter-frame flicker becomes noticeable. There is a very real limit here, set by the intergration time in our rods and cones
The reason it looks okay is because each frame is motion-blured. It is not a perfect snapshot like a computer rendering is -- it represents the complete range of motion that occurs for the 1/24th of a second of a frame. Look at a still during a scene with a lot of motion to get the idea.
The inter-frame time is a very small fraction of the frame time, which is why it isn't noticeable at 24 fps.
If movies weren't motion blurred, they wouldn't look very good.
The enemies of Democracy are
Not so. IBM do a ThinkPad with a 1600x1200 15" display.
Never
The
Same
Color?
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Well it is 25 frames per second if you are watching PAL. NTSC is 29.97 frames per second..
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
Two problems with that one that if the electrons were not being absorbed by the coating on the inside of the screen. There would be no light.
Second is that acording to modern electrical thoery the electrons actually traval from the negitivly charged screen to the positivly charged electron "gun".
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
I was about to say the same thing I have a CRT that has a dead pixel amost in the center of the screen, and it has been there sence the moniter was new. I have also seen parts of lcd screen backlights go out.
It is like all electronics it is ether going to work forever or start going bad early.
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
A pen did that much damage? Wow. I dropped an IRON, which was also full of water onto the top of my closed Gateway solo 9300 laptop a few months after I purchased it, it's been over a year now and still no dead/stuck pixels. I guess maybe I'm just lucky? The iron did no damage other than cracking the plastic on the back of the lcd screen, luckily the water didn't go anywhere (but it did make the iron heavier).
mcox.com - Useful Information re: IT, Running, Fitness, Finance, or Ann Arbor!
Well, actually, it just comes with a 21" crt monitor on the Sun UltraSparc that drives it... No LCD Screen... Don't know what kind of printer you're talking about, but the dt6180 doesn't come with a LCD....
> Not that the human eye needs 30 but still....
That's an urban myth.
Well, OK, you might not need more than 30 depending on what you are doing, but you can certainly see far higher than 30.
Hmm.... wonder why TV uses 25 fps and film 24 fps then. They don't look to bad to me, but when you move to lower frame-rates the inter-frame flicker becomes noticeable. There is a very real limit here, set by the intergration time in our rods and cones.
You're probably being confused by motion blur.
Motion blur is certainly the key issue here. In graphics rendering you don't have motion blur, each frame is perfectly sharp. For perceptually pleasing results, moving objects should be smeared an amount that depends on the amount of inter-frame movement. This happens as a side effect in cameras, so film captured this way looks OK at 24 fps. In graphics rendering on the other hand you will have what is known as temporal aliasing due to moving objects being too sharp. By increasing the frame-rate, an acceptable blurring will instead occur in the retina.
Only a loser (noun: unsuccessful person, not a winner) would misspell 'loser' as 'looser' (adjective: more loose, less tight).
It's actually quite common among non native English speakers.
I've been looking for 8- to 12-inch color LCDs, and I simply can't find them for sale. There are products (net appliances) that incorporate them, but I don't want to shell out that much money.
I'd like to spend no more than ~$170 on a 10-inch, 800x600 LCD screen.
Why?
Most people stick their brandy-new LCD screens right up where the CRT used to be. Up high on the desk, where people get cricks in their necks 'cause you're not designed to sit and look straight ahead like that... I'd like to position the LCD on a tray about 16 inches in front of my face at about a 45 degree angle down, and have the keyboard under the tray at level-forearm height (I'm a touch-typist).
Like a book. When do you see people holding a book at arms' length, level with their eyes, while sitting ramrod-straight in a chair? You don't, because people hold the book in a more *comfortable* position; hands low, book low (but not too low).
But I can't find any 10-inch color LCDs with a connector that I can just plug in to my computer! Any info? Somewhere? Someone?
Thanks,
-lf
of course you do notice that Xerox ships those 180ppm behemoths with an integrated color touch screen CRT.
guess this goes to show that companies like xerox care more about functionality than looks.
The other question was about longevity.
I have heard that LCD's will last a rather long time.
Does anyone know different?
Point and Grunt
Point and Grunt
Acutally, power consumption is much lower with monochrome LCD displays. Note that I did not say that the LCD panel itself consumes more power, but the display as a whole does. The reason is simple: a color display has a color filter which lets through only the desired light color to each sub-pixel - Reg, Green, or Blue. Fully two thirds of the backlight's display is absorbed by this filer, necessitating a much brighter backlight just to get as bright of a display as a comparable mono display.
duh.
Oh, and learn to spell/punctuate properly. A few errors usually aren't a big deal, but you post was almost incomprehensible.
In the RF lab I work, where we test GSM phones, LCDs are used instead of CRTs because of the 60 Hz signal that comes from the CRTs which degrades the signals we test. So as you see LCDs have another use besides the obvious "cool" look!
Cheers,
Angel
I work in a hospital and we use large monochrome LCD displays. They are expensive, but a cost effective solution for us.
Many hospital xray departments are going to PACS systems -ie digital xrays. No film used. The images are displayed on very highresolution monitores. A radilogist looks at the image on CRT screens. (mono, very large, hires upto 3000x3000, high contrast).
In operating theartes, emergency rooms, intensive care units etc, space and portability is a necisity. In these places we use mono LCDs. These are resonable resolution + brightness, but can be hung on an arm over the operating table so the surgeon can see while operating.
Given how much money is spent on health technology this could be a big market as more hospitals move to filmless systems.
Elivs
Actually, I consider the color shift to be extremely noticeable, and because of this, I tend to turn any subpixel rendering options off. And yes, I've used the correct subpixel alignment value..
Marko Karppinen
Why such a low standard?
I mean, it used to be 9 dead pixels/line for the first mac laptop, but dead pixels are BAD. Why would you invest several hundred or thousand for a really good LCD and get 2 dead pixels and shrug it off? I mean, people are complaining about the G4 cube's cracks.
Oh, and TIP: If you moisten a tissue and slowly rub around the dead LCD pixel, it hopefully will change back or get unstuck in color.
It save you only a few dollars for the increasing complexity. In the price range to which you refer, we are talking inkjet technology. It is the consumables market which makes money, and are the expensive bit to manufacture.
I wouldn't say every lcd does. Where I work we have 50 or so (mostly viewsonic) displays - they are from a few months to a couple years old.
I would say 1 out of every 3 has a dead (most seem to be stuck on green) pixel, and only 5 or so have more than 1 (though 1 lcd has 4 or 5 dead pixels).
Out of the 5 mac powerbooks that friends, family members, or I have owned, not one has had a dead pixel. This includes a a PB520 I bought in '95 that I recently sold.
> Its not that they are from Sony, that is an
> effect of aperature grille monitors which need
> the wires to keep the vertical wires straight.
For whatever the duration of the patent, "aperture grille monitor" == "Sony Trinitron" display. That was at least 17 years, perhaps 20 and only expired maybe 8 years or so ago. I'm sure sony had licensed producers but the bulk of non-shadow mask displays carried the Sony brand.
DF
I Seem To Recall (tm) that Microsoft requires manufacturers to use color-capable hardware if they want to install Windows on their products. Probably for that wonderful user experience. And beyond Windows, the market gets small real fast.
Um, not wanting to sound like a complete idiot here, and having actually had some EE theory, I must still ask the question: if your second assertion is true, then what is it that excites the phosporous (sp?) coating? Holes? Can energy be transferred to the coating by electrons leaving it? Wow.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Yes, the backlighting is actually getting lower. I have a 3 year old dell and a couple of weeks ago the logic in the Display got bust and I lost 1/3 of my screen.
:)
Dell came in and replaced the display (still warranty) and the one thing I realized right away was that the new display was brighter than the old one.
Otherwise: no dead pixles here
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
And a throng of ppl would flock to purchasing a large Mono LCD monitor, just as they would flock to buy a large mono CRT monitor.
Mono LCD monitor demand, despite a cheaper price, will always be a niche market product. And, being niche market will mean that eventually the monitor will be MORE expensive than their colour LCD counterparts once the laws of supply and demand kick in.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I would trust the original poster to know their own needs. Some of us are old enough to remember working with b/w displays and remember what they're good for. The story submitter described uses that 1-bit displays are perfectly suited for.
I'm a little concerned about whether OS's and applications are still designed to work with 1-bit displays, though. I haven't seen one in use for the past four years or so, which suggests that application developers might have stopped checking to make sure that their programs work well in b/w mode. (As an example, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the red underlines vs green underlines that MSWord uses to mark words with bad spelling vs words with bad grammar.)
"There wouldn't be any point in a B/W LCD because it probably wouldn't be any less expensive to produce."
Bingo
You got it right on the nose. An unsellable LCD screen of any colour or size is called Toxic Waste .
More margin is needed just to dispose of the manufacturing cull, which is still quite high (something approximating 20%).
I've only rarely heard of new dead pixels appearing. LCDs tend to lose brightness gradually over the years, rather than suddenly lose individual pixels.
I've heard 10,000 hours operational life quoted until the LCD dims to half its original brightness.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Ever hear of a Deltra grill or Trinitron Mask? If you look very closely, you can see vertical lines down your screen. The maximum resulotion depends on the mask / grill. You're in the same boat as TFT/LCD screens.
Revolution = Evolution
Its not that they are from Sony, that is an effect of aperature grille monitors which need the wires to keep the vertical wires straight. They aren't completely invisible and can be seen on white backrounds. Everyone who makes aperature grille monitors uses this technique.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I would trust the original poster to know their own needs. Some of us are old enough to remember working with b/w displays and remember what they're good for. The story submitter described uses that 1-bit displays are perfectly suited for.
You need at least 4 bits of grayscale to get a decent-looking spectral display of audio, that is, the energy at each (time, frequency) pair.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Acctualy, it's 12fps. You can still whatch something at 12fps and have your eyes tricked into thinking it's something moving. As opposed to just a whole lot of pictures changing.
Another thing I might as well add. While you maynot notice the difference between 30fps and 150fps. If one was to rotate the camera fast, or film a car driving past. There would be more motion blur at the lower speed.
Even with all the fancy techology today. there are still shots that you can't shoot on film (24fps) because of motion blur and the like.
Sort of... don'f foget the little bits of phospher of what ever it's called. Spray a few water droplets on your monitor, and you will see lots of little 'pixels', each one with a r,g,b part.
Point taken.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
I am writing this from what used to be a 100% pixel perfect desktop TFT screen, until they day I dropped my pen and the back of it grazed the screen. On a black background, I now have some red and green speckles. Glass tubes are more resilient.
I was in line in a computer shop the other day, and heard the sales clerk ask if the prospective buyer had kids. He had, and left with a glass screen.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Yet another advantage, and the biggest one in my eyes, is the lack of flickering. Although LCDs are maligned for their blurry game performance (due to pixels staying illuminated, iirc), they boast a 0 Hz refresh rate -- no flickering, and easier on the eyes because of that.
i have seen a few with xerox docutech stations with touch screen LCD's
never... Go look at some old HP deskjets. Some of them ran for ages on one toner cart. Newer ones do not run as long. Why? It wasn't cost effective when you can make a printer that wastes more toner and you sell more toner. Same way with current inkjet. if they really wanted to make something more cost effetive they could but they dont want to when people will buy more carts. HP, epson, etc make most of there money this way. Not from the printers.
Modern LCD displays are typically rated with a MTBF of 100,000 hours. However, the backlight units are not...and as always your mileage may vary.
lisa bonet ate no basil
...
I just wanted to add, that when I switched to a laptop for the majority of my work a while back, the occurance of eye problems seemed to drop dramatically (although posture problems have increased ;-). I also noticed a decrease in skin problems on my face, less dryness etc.
I found this link which has a little info on what comes out of a CRT (or VDT) and the possible effects: http://www.eaie.nl/activities/es/ENIS/HEALTH/
Another to look out for, if you can find it, is a book called "Terminal Illness" (unfortunately there are several with this name at Amazon, none of which are the book I'm referring to) which has a very in-depth study on the health effects of sitting in front of a CRT over long periods..
I wouldn't be suprised if there's future litigation over this issue, much, much further down the track.
The reason the inkjet printers are so cheap is that they make the $$ on the ink. Better to compare color laser and black and white laser. Now there's a difference.
Sounds like they have to go back to school and learn about the conservation of energy law.
The statement "LCD monitor only drew 1/10 the power and generated 1/4 the heat of a 17" CRT monitor" is highly unlikely to be true. Except for the trivial amount of light output, maybe a couple of watts (total). All energy used, even the light output, ultimately gets converted to heat. So 1/10 the power should result in 1/10 the heat, etc. Or 1/4 of the heat roughly equals 1/4 of the power. One or the other, not 1/10 equals 1/4.
As if that would be so easy. After reading your postactually went to the site to look at the LCDisplay. I don't think it plugs directly into a 15-pin VGA connector, you'll have to come up with some sort of controller... but I like the idea.. if not for Winamp, there's got to be some application for it..
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
LCD is nice...I know, I own a Sony LCD screen, but unfortunately the tranformator got busted and I have to wait for a new one for over a month. After 6 months the first dead pixel showed up...So I guess, next time I'll be more wise and shell out the cash for a big CRT :-(
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
These kinds of color printers are sold below cost. Once you've bought it, you're stuck buying supplies from the vendor at incredibly inflated prices. My bubblejet cost $75 and I couldn't get a b/w only for that price. A packet of black ink costs $30. Go figure. I'll bet people who print color might as well re-buy the printer every time they fill up.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Ahh, I allways wondered what those lines were, at first I thought it was bad pixels but then I realised you don't get them on a tube. Also, as I understand it there is a certain probability of a bad pixel occuring in the manufacturing process, hence the much larger cost of bigger screens. Bigger screen=more pixels=more displays with too many bad pixels that have to be thrown away. Although there is advances in manufacture every few months it seems
why don't LCD manufacturers make lower-cost Monochrome LCD screens available for those who don't need to work in full-color glory
A company's goal is to make money. Mass producing something they may sell 5 of is not a good way to achieve that goal.
end communication
Douglas Trumbull did a lot of research into this area, and created a process called Showscan that uses 70mm film projected at 60fps, which is supposed to look incredible!
Have you ever been to an IMAX movie? From what I remember they show the film at like 30 or 32 FPS (I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure it's faster than normal film)
Either way, when I see IMAX films it looks much better than standard film, so there's definitely a difference when going to higher FPS.
-C
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Not to mention the fact that a dollar today is worth more than it is tommorow (inflation, intrest). Buy a crt, put those extra $ in the bank and in 3-5 years it will pay for a new monitor.....
Obviously, you have never been to Japan.
There's a whole other world of computers out there beyond the home, cubicle, or studio: back behind the offices, out in the factories. Black and white monitors are used all the time in heavy industry, specifically in the industrial process control arena. Many industrial computing systems use touch screens that use 800x600 monochrome LCDs, but these displays can output various shades of blue and brown by varying the intensity of single pixels. (And they run Linux, too! See www.controleng.com , they have a wealth of links to the industrial computing sector.)
I read this article a while ago, the basic summary is that around 60-70 fps and your visual organs (eyes brain nerves and whatnot) become saturated with information and additional information does nothing. Its best explained with monitors, at 60 Hz many people can see it refreshing, I know I can. However when you turn it up to 72 or 75 or 80 Hz you can no longer see the monitor flickering. Go read and see, it's pretty cool. http://www.penstarsys.com/editor/30v60/30v60p3.htm
I use 1600x1200 on my Dell Inspiron 8000 uxga screen every day, and I love it. I have a hard time going home to my KDS radius 17" panel that only does 1280x1024 (woe is me). As far as longevity goes, I have some 486 laptops from over 6 years ago and the screens are still in top shape. -ted
Is the monochrome market there?
Where can I get a monochrome CRT these days?
If color is in the $75-150 range ... what are all the other costs which go into the price? Shipping, handling, shelf space, inventory, the store's price is half that range.
The parts cost of the manufacturer is no more than 1/4 to 1/3 of that 1/2 price. When down to $10 - $20 in manufacturer's parts cost, why leave out color?
It would probably cost more in inventory and other costs all the way up the line to the buyer than the parts left out.
Hey all - I got sucked into the Flat LCD screen thing and just picked up a 15.1 Samsung. I was like a kid at Christmas.. Couldn't waite to get it home and start it up. Firsat thing I noticed was the dead pixle almost center screen. Thought I would return the thing but with all these companys having a 15% extortion fee... ahhh. I mean restocking fee - I will keep it. Got the screen (color) for 400 and change ( and it comes with a $50 rebate) and I am happpy with it. You will NOT see and monochrome screens yet ( if ever) because it does not pay to manufacture a screen that only a select feww will want to have. Overall - the flat lcd will be standard in about 2 years; and you will see many larger version ( 21, 22, 35, 66"...) coming out. It is all about the money with Demand dictating the supply. 99% of the world wants color (and with color you can still do the B&W/monochrome work all of you have been asking for). I wanted a larger scree (18 - 19") in flat LCD but It is way too expensive today. You could support a small country on the price of the LCD I am using at work! The only good that comes from the owning of an LCD is the WARRENTY.... Make sure you have at least 3 years on the LCD monitor alone. This comes in very handy because you can always use this warrenty to get your dead pixles monitor replaced every 3 years - and most likely the overall cost will have gone to rock bottm pricing - just like the VCR did.
At my rate of use, my LCD display should die in 3.65 years. During that time it will have saved 210 watts per hour of use for a total of 4200 kwh. It does allow me to run it (Samsung SyncMaster 770TFT 17" ) @ 1024 X 768 while I could not run my IBM G200 ( 20" ) at greater than 800 X 600 and see it clearly. That in itself makes it worth the extra cost. TFT = $899 after rebate IBM = $1495 six years ago.
It's not so much the pixels that fail; for us it's been backlights, backlights, backlights. We rolled out about 30 17" deals from 3 OEMs, and over the past year we've had about 6 backlight failures (four were in the first two months, however). We have a few with some dead pixels (and one with a green pixel stuck "on"), but they were shipped that way.
The biggest problem with AM displays is... color. If you'll be doing any graphics, viewing angle will dictate what shades you see, and you'll find yourself needing a classic CRT to actually get a consistent perception of the images you're making.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I've seen two laptops with active matrix displays that had to be replaced within 2 years simply because the backlight faded to be very dim. Strange that they were enclosed in such a way that the whole LCD had to be replaced.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
would htey add another product line that isn't going to make very much money but which would increase their production costs on smoething that is already expensive to make
most people don't use monochrome so they aren't available
as far as being envious.. i'd rather have a 60" HDTV
i want a boot loading penguin bigger than my head
I plopped down $1500 for Toshiba laptop almost 2 years ago, and got the 12.1 TFT screen. I had a dead pixel on the screen, and Toshiba told me their policy on dead pixels. You could have up to 12 or 14, depending on where they were. You'd have to meet some conditions, like 3 or more being adjacent, or a big list of crap. My Dell with a 14.1 TFT didn't come with any, I actually expected a few. The VAIO is in the mail, so I'm betting on it having at least one. This dead pixel policy SUCKS. What if your CRT glass had a big BLACK, WHITE, RED, GREEN, or BLUE spot on it?!
I was watching TV (Cnet or ZDnet? can't remember), but on the show the interviewed flat panel makers & they said that up to 2 dead pixels/monitor was acceptable.
:)
But the question remains, if it is acceptable for desktop flat panels, why is it not acceptable for laptop ones?
(I am writing this from a 100% pixel-perfect laptop right now)
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Okay.. To produce a screen which is backlit and has active matrix, the cost is only marginally different to produce a color screen instead of a black & white. I used to work at the laptop division of AST/Samsung and this was the case about 3 years ago. So here is the thing.. If you want to reduce cost, go with a non-backlit reflective LCD like you'd expect to see on a Palm or cell-phone and you could get away with a pretty cheap display. Truth is, there isn't much of a market for it. I would maybe use them on my servers to save space and heat but on my desktops I would want a crisper image. Color isn't so important to me as active matrix.
On the issue of dead pixels.. You have to look at it from the manufacture's point of view. If it costs you $1000 to produce a screen and 30% of your screens have 1 pixel that is out.. What do you do? If you trash those screens then you have to bump up the price of all the ones that do work in order to make up the difference. Your typical laptop LCD has over 2.4 million individual pixels (if you count red, green, & blue.. and usually the whole pixel doesn't go out, just one of the partitions) having a failure rate of 1 out of 2.4 million isn't that bad. As far as having more go out.. It isn't likely. Most of the time the ones that go out do so in the first few hours of operation. Anything that lives beyond that will probably last for years unless the screen is damaged.
Of course this whole conversation may be moot shortly with the introduction of OLED screens. These screens will cost less to produce than conventional LCD and definatly have sharper images and faster response times. Not to mention it is more durable. LCD is likely on its way out. Once all manufacturers realize it costs less to get more, they will drop LCD technology in favor of OLED.
I'm really glad I went for an LCD. You can look at it for hours without feeling eye strain. At $450 it cost about $200 more than an equivalent CRT. If you spent a lot of time in front of your monitor it is easily worth it.
The eye only sees one small detail at once and shifts to another one approximately 70 times a second. I guess that's why the ergonomic frequency barrier in monitor refresh rates is usually 72Hz.
Can LCD-s change resolutions ?
And if not, why ?
thx
How about old Laps with good Crystal? Ive gotten me a couple way old Compaq laptops with B/W LCDs that Id LOVE to hook to my servers, anyone there knows of a source to get PIN info on them? My girfriends pet cat made a jump on my desktop the other day and busted my Vaios display... Ive turned it into a server for the time beeing and wouldnt mind to use a LCd from a different maker just to get the portability back..... I mean, I can get a hold on a dell with a burnt down M/B and hack it? EOF
Thats sweet, $25? Imagine plugging that into a spare video card, and having a nifty little winamp control/vis monitor sitting on top of your regular monitor.
Regardless, at 210 watts saved, for 105 hours per week and 2.65 years (to get to 4200 kWH), and a $.06/kWH rate, you save $252. This calculation ignores the cost of cooling your work space in summer, as it ignores the savings of heating the workspace in winter.
While factoring that savings into the cost of a new LCD or CRT display is accurate, comparing it to your old, expensive, and low performance CRT serves only to make you feel better about replacing the old monster with an LCD.
Finally, this savings only means something monetarily if you can actualy save money on your electric bill. In a business environment, your employer may not be able to negotiate a reduction in lease payment due to energy savings. I know mine can't.
That said, I want one, too.
Well, I don't know about LCD's, because I assume they don't flicker on and off like CRT's do. Or if they do, they're on for a greater percentage of the time than CRT's. Technically, CRT's are only "on" for like 0.001% of the time, then they start discharging, a nice approx. exponential decay in light intensity.
This rate of discharge can have an effect on the perceived refresh rate. The article you referenced does have some interesting points about visible refresh rates. However, their argument about the flickering of a monitor being visible up to 72 Hz doesn't prove that 72 Hz is the solid limit. The quality of the CRT could affect this test.
It really depends on how long the monitor's phosphors stay lit up. On really crappy monitors, the phosphors stay lit longer to compensate for the monitor's low refresh rate. That way the monitor's light doesn't strobe. But more expensive monitors designed with 150 Hz refreshes in mind have much more quickly discharging phosphors. Otherwise, they would blur at the higher rates. Because the phosphors discharge more quickly, at lower rates than 150 Hz (say, 60-85 Hz), there's s substantially greater flicker than on a crappy monitor. I have a crappy monitor at home, on which 60 Hz is a little annoying (but do-able), but 70 is pretty good, and I can't see the flicker at 75 Hz. But on my friend's $1000 21 incher, 60 Hz can practically cause seizures it's so painful, 75 Hz still hurts, and even at 85 Hz you can kinda tell that there's a flicker (though it's not annoying, you have to be looking for it).
So in theory, a 60 Hz CRT wouldn't actually bother you if the phosphors didn't decay for the first 16.7 millseconds or so. And if I can still tell there's a slight flicker at 80-85 Hz (on a higher quality CRT), then I think there's something to be said for running a FPS at 90 Hz.
Anyway, for monitors (CRT or LCD), continuous light is they key. As long as you have continuous light, your eyes won't be strained to the point of insanity. I guess that's one potential advantage of LCD screens. I'm not sure how they work in regards to flickering, but I assume they're not as bad as CRTs.
That is a good point.. People with the money to save the space.. Not so common is spacious north america, but definitly a factor..
I remember kids in school who had had the laptops because they fit pretty in their dorm rooms.. Apple sells a lot of real powerful pretty notebooks to people who don't know a MIP from a Mouse.
I'm fairly sure that wasn't apple bashing, it was owner bashing.. People who buy over powered computers based on looks are in the same boat as a lot of people who buy SUVs and sports cars, and to a large extent, LCD displays. They 'want' one, they don't 'need' one..
That said, I'm pretty sure I don't need my groovy designer sunglasses, or my Nokia 8260, I'm no better, it's just worth noting that looks count in the LCD game.
You know, I was thinking about that as I was typing it and it didn't quite seem right. I just saw the figures briefly yesterday, so I'm just going from my ever falable memory. I know Fred's looking at getting their research released so they can post it on their webpage. In any case, the point was that LCDs represent a significant cost savings after only a couple years of average (5 days/wk, 8 hr/day) use.
-"Zow"
What is there market for it? If you see a market for these LCD's then you could either.
1) Get a petition going online to ask the companies to start making them
2) Submit a business plan to a few venture capatalist that will help fund a business that manufactor and distribute them
3) If you have the know how build one yourself (If might not be the case but hey I never know)
4) Or do nothing
Have fun
Check out PC Weasel. It is a card that emulates a MDA but pipes the output over serial. With this you can run your system headless, and still be able to get into the BIOS.
The prices on color displays are coming down. In another 2 years they will probably be less than 500 for a 17 inch and it will be of very good quality.
Personally I think this will be the next technology push. Flat panal display devices. SImilar to lap tops, but more along the lines of the sony pc that is super thin. basically like the mac cube adn its display. Only instead of it being 3k it will be 800 for the whole deal. Wait and in a year or two you will see these come down.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The eye only sees one small detail at once and shifts to another one approximately 70 times a second. I guess that's why the ergonomic frequency barrier in monitor refresh rates is usually 72Hz.
There is a 70 Hz tremor in the eye called nystagmus tremor which is probably what you are thinking about. This only affects refresh rates on CRT displays, and only when your eyes are close to the screen though. The problem occurs due to interferrence between the high frequency screen flicker and the eye tremor.
AFAIK the pixels stay lit on LCDs in-between frames, so there is no screen flicker that could interfere with the eye tremor. For this reason the refresh rate is better called an update rate on an LCD.
I agree completely but the **real** problem is we now live with an industry that resorts to snap, crackle and pop rather then intelligent functionality. The move to "pretty" is overwelming when motivated by the need to impress reviewers and salesmen devoted to plying their wares to the mass buying and usually unsuspecting public.
Issues like supporting cost-effective monochrome displays with its resulting lower prices also means lower commissions and less profits. Its ironic that I know so many people who would comparison shop for the cheapest soap and shampoo prices seem too often reliant on a salesmen for higher priced goods, who themselves are usually more interest in furthering their own ends rather then the needs of their clients. I agree that monochrome displays would likely fit the needs of most people most of the time -- but tell them that they might need it 1% of the time and they will not give up the option.
That's right, but what has that to do with the article in question?
There wouldn't be any point in a B/W LCD because it probably wouldn't be any less expensive to produce. You'd have to develop and build a separate process and manufacturing line, the materials cost wouldn't be much lower, and for all that you might as well be making color displays at practically the same cost but getting higher margins.
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
It would make a good deal of sense if you followed common UI design critera. A reasonable number of computer users have some sort of colorblindness and as such it is usually a good idea to design applications to not depend solely on color.
True -- if you aim for cost savings, you need to set up a new process and a manufacturing line for producing LCD panels with 1/3 of the sub-pixel density of a color screen. But what if you went for resolution instead of savings? You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display. 4800x1200 resolution in a greyscale laptop screen? I could exchange color for that..
Marko Karppinen
We don't have monochrome displays now because the resolution is too low. Just wait, when we get over 300dpi then greyscale will be more interesting (as halftone), and at higher resolutions you won't be worrying about the gradations of even rgb pixels, just how many you turn on next to each other. Think about the resolution of 150 line-per-inch magazine glossies.
The other reason they don't sell now is no demand, and not enough volume for the reduction in margins which the price point we want necessitates. Used mac b/w laptops are still sitting in the 2nd hand
stores..
Dell, and Compaq. They're not exactly cheap, but with a KVM you would only need one of them for a whole room full of servers.
I'm pretty sure that other manufacturers have similar products.
Although the notion of a monochrome display is noble (why do I need more than one colour to read text?), the problem remains that more people are likely to go for devices like the all-singing proprietary NVidia GeForce cards. It's all because people don't understand that there is an application of computers beyond that which has been popularised by the mainstream press and "EasyPC" initiatives that aim to reduce the computer to the level of other consumer devices like the TV or washing machine. As long as there are geeks around, the true importance of computers will not be forgotten, but as time progresses we will find it more difficult to find hardware that meets are needs without exceeding our needs, or our budget.
All in all, of course, mainstream computing has done more to bring down the cost of hardware for geeks who are actually interested in the technology, and for this we must be thankful. But the simple, one-purpose devices analogous to the *NIX tools designed to do one thing right, will be the casualties of this new trend. Our best hope is to get over it and enjoy cheap, powerful computers while they last before embedded devices take over the world and put the PC back where it was two decades ago.
I'm afraid I completely disagree, there are any number of _real_ advantages to LCD's and they more than outweigh the cost as far as I'm concerned. My top three (without even mentioning power saving) is as follows... Space; Deskspace is EXPENSIVE! A 17" or larger screen is purely impractical on my desk. I have a printer, scanner, keyboard, desk lamp and working space to fit onto an area about 2' by 4' Losing the massive bulk of the CRT has been a life-changing experience. Ergonomics; Kind of related to the space issue, but still important. Something that is about 6" deep can be positioned a lot more comfortably that a 25"+ deep monitor. My previous monitor had to be positioned at the side of my desk overhanging the edge to make room for all the rest of my junk - not at all comfortable to use for a long stretch of time. My lovely new LCD is slap bang central, right in front of my keyboard. Clarity; There is _no_ distortion on an LCD panel. This makes a huge difference when you're editing text, code or whatever. (And *yes* I know that some of these points have been made elsewhere...) There will always be a place for CRT's (well, for the next five years or so at least) but once you've used a quality LCD Panel for an hour you will never want to go back to a CRT display. As for the cost, I paid about the same (give or take £50) for my 15" LCD panel two months ago as I did for a 17" CRT about four years ago. Cheers Chris
You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display.
Microsoft Cleartype uses subpixel text rendering to take advantage of the fact that each LCD pixel is actually three. Apple used a similar technique for text rendering on TV monitors. And you can enable subpixel text in recent XFree86.
Will I retire or break 10K?
- Something else to consider is that most applications are not optimized to work in a B/W environment.
I think his point was that his application didn't require a color environment. Seems odd to me that anyone would write an application that didn't make the most of the color display that was available.I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
There's not enough market for monochrome LCD displays. If you're going to shell out for an LCD display, you'll shell out for color, and most home users wouldn't DREAM of monochrome (even if it does look cool).
Eh...
For the longest time, I has a 1280x1024 black and white screen on my desk. It is just easier on the eyes, and it's perfect for coding and e-mail. I eventually replaced it with a color screen because of all the web sites I had to use that abuse color.
What is an interesting market once someone uncovers it, is cheap 640x480 B&W LCD's to use as a console in colo facilities. I hate wasting 6U os rack space for a monitor, and I'm not the only one
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
http://www.flat-panel.com/
Ive bought some color And B&W lcds from Earth Tech. (URL above)
You can get a 12" color lcd for just under $500usd
You can also get a 9.4" monocorome for $300usd
much more expensive for the same as a CRT, but overall not bad.
They recently changed their inventory it seems so I cant find any of the more fitting LCDs i once thought they had, but may be useful none the less.
--Jon
B&W LCD's exist for thigns like PDA's but nobody makes them big.... The Dead Pixel issue. 8 might be an acceptable amount of dead pixels on a 1600x1200 screen, but on a 160x160 screen ala a Visor Prism, one dead pixel can be quite annoying. As I take it, on Smaller screen,s there are a lot fewer dead pixels in total, than on the big screens.
every lcd monitor has dead pixels. LCD manufacturing of large sizes is *very very* difficult (which is why they cost so much). I'll take a couple dead pixels that i dont even notice over the blurriness of a crt any day...
-
Once, I bumped my color LCD monitor and it fell over. The color all leaked out and left a big, rainbow-oilslick looking puddle on the floor. Now it's monochrome. All the pixels work, though.
Having worked in a Computer store once I can tell you the reason you can't get a great monochrome lcd. Simply put, 99% of the demographic that wants to buy one of these is an older person that is wanting to "get on that internet thing." Unfourtunatly, while I'd have one of these bought for every LAN room I manage now (dozens), techs are rarely the target audience for technical devices anymore. Sure, we have a good amount of buying power, but when compared with the AOLers we're not much in the eyes of a marketing dept. I could only imagine an engineer at company X trying to sell the idea of a monochrome LCD to the higher ups. The conversation would sound something to the effect of {engineer} "There are many uses for these devices and they can be built cheaply." {Marketing guy} "Yea, but why would anyone want a screen that was only black and white. Windows would look terrible." So as you all can see, while it's a great idea it proabaly won't come about. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Keep Austin Weird!
you can set your games/opengl/directx/etc. to "sync every frame" so things won't seem that blurry.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Then there's all the static electricity around a CRT. This causes dust particles to attack you, and fill your pores. Combine that with hot weather and perspiration, and you understand why hax0rs have such bad skin. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I could have sworn there was an article on slashdot recently about how CTX monitors are better than LCD becasue LCD monitors cannot display as high FPS on games like Quake and will start to blur out after 40 of so. Not that the human eye needs 30 but still....
We've seen how you can use sub-pixel positioning to get an apparent increase in horizontal resolution for monochromatic text (Cleartype, etc.) on full-color LCDs. Why not produce, for example, a 15" 1024x768 LCD with each sub-pixel the same color? Sure, the display would be monochrome, but horizontal resolution would increase by 3x. As a bonus, you get hardware support from any truecolor video card, since 8-bit monochrome has the same layout as 24-bit RGB. It's so simple that someone must have already done it.
This is because the receptionist needs only one monitor, while even a small operations center needs, at a minimum, about 40.
Even with 17" LCDs going for four or five times the price of CRTs, it saves money in the long run due solely to the fact that the operations consoles can be shortened by about two feet each.
This might not hold true if you're building a facility in the middle of nowhere, or if all those LCDs wind up having a maximum life of about five years; but where real estate is even moderately expensive, the rental on the floor space CRTs would take up would make their total cost of ownership higher than that of LCDs in about five years.
I expect that the break-even point would come even sooner if one was inclined to figure in the cost differential of powering and cooling the things. CRTs use a lot more power and generate a lot more heat than LCDs. I used to use the back of a Sun 20" monitor to keep my breakfast bagel warm in the mornings until I was ready to eat it. The vents there were so well suited to this task that I think they must have been designed for this purpose.
Of course, the potential problem with this reasoning is that CRTs last almost forever, while all these LCDs might well sputter and die within that five-year period.
I've heard that the limit to an LCD display's life is usually its backlighting; supposedly the backlighting dims gradually over time, making the display harder to read. This is why LCD display manuals recommend you turn the display off or put it to sleep when it's not in use, even though it won't suffer burn-in problems like a CRT. I haven't ever seen an LCD display with backlight problems, however (though most LCD displays seem to take a few minutes after power-on until they reach their normal brightness).
As for dead pixels: Sometimes you can 'un-stick' them by massaging the screen over a dead pixel very gently.
The only problem I've had with my Apple Cinema Display is some mild 'burn-in,' believe it or not. Apparently with any LCD display, if you leave a static image on the screen for a while, the LCD hardware will 'remember' that image and you'll continue to see a faint ghost of it on the screen. I see this most often when I've been in Mac OS X for a few hours, and then I reboot into LinuxPPC -- I can still see the ghost of my Mac OS menu bar at the top of the screen! The ghost stays even if I power down the computer and display for a while. I've been told that the ghost will go away after as much time as it was on the screen to begin with (if the menu bar was there for eight hours, its ghost will fade after eight hours), and that's been borne out by my experience.
How cheap would a B/W printer be?
I see your point, but it depends on what type of printing you do. I work with black and white "laser" printers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (I don't really know how much, you'd have to talk to Xerox about the price, the bean counters could tell you though). What, that much? Well yea, but they rip and print 180 pages a minute. They are variable data printing monsters, but if you've got several million b&w unique pages to print, that's what you need.... It's all about finding the right piece of equipment for the job.
1) Minimal demand
2) Lower per unit profit margins
The first problem is that ultimately most people want to buy color LCD panels. It's not worth it to most LCD manufacturers to bother with the small segment of people who would be happy with large black and white LCD panels.
The other issue is that with Black and White, because it is simpler technology, ultimately their profit margins are going to be lower per unit. That means that they have to sell that many more in order to make a profit. If they charge enough to recoup their investment it wouldn't be that much more for people to shell out for the color display.
To see how these economics work, look at the price of processors in the market. There's a certain optimum point where you get a significant amount of power for a low price. If you reduce the power of the chip, the price doesn't drop much because. So you end up in the bizarre situation that you could pick up a K6-300 for just slightly more (or maybe even less) than an old pentium 60. It's just all economics.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
During a trip to the Far East a couple of years back, I was very surprised to see the number of laptops that appeared on office desks. I commented on it to my guide who then pointed out the obvious; Laptops represented a **HUGE** proportion of office desktop market for one very good reason, the amount of desk space occupied is much smaller (primarily because of the screen) and (at that time) there was no other option then to get a "space saving computer" -- the proper name when referring to the laptops over there (which btw, rarely leave the office or even get unplugged).
Further, a friend in Japan tells me that the number of relatively new tube monitors appearing on the street during garbage day has risen dramatically over that last year as everyone is trying to recover a couple of extra square feet and are moving in troves over to LCDs.
Something else to consider is that most applications are not optimized to work in a B/W environment. I know very few developers who have considered, let alone tested the appearance of their applications in a B/W environment. For example, how many developers have a monochrome monitor on their desktop (or even in their dept.) to test against???
Colors, especially monochrome reds/greens/blues appear nearly identical in B/W, yet these are often used together as background/foreground colors in dialogs and are rendered largely incomprehensable in a monochrome environment --appearing as dark grey lettering on a darker greys/black background).
My first laptop 10 years ago was monochrome and the number of times I had problems even then (when monochrome displays were everywhere) was daunting. Yes, if an application is "monochrome" aware you wouldn't have a problem, but the number of apps that fall into that category now has seemingly all but disappeared.
Yes, things like Linux do have support for a serial console, but that won't help you if you need to get at the BIOS. There are a few BIOS's that support serial consoles too, but they're rare.
And then there's NT. Alas, people do run servers on NT, and NT has no concept of a serial console that I'm aware of.
I think this is very true. Go to any trade show and the companies are trying to look good. This means all of the slickest hardware they can find. Optical/wireless mice, small keyboards, lighting, and flat screens everywhere.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
In my experience the pixels last a long time. I have a laptop that is over five years old now. It has only one dead pixel which was there from the beginning, and the screen is left on basically all the time. As for my new laptop, it too has one dead pixel which appeared the second time I turned on the computer. I can live with one as long as no new ones appear.
It seems for some reason that one or two dead pixels seem common place, but once the bad ones die off when the monitor is new, the rest seem to last a long time from what I have seen.
Why would you need a console monitor on a server? Run a serial cable from your laptop or pda into the server's serial port / alternate console port and chug away. Here in my office all of my servers are headless and have their serial ports plugged into a portmaster.
We ordered 40 flat panel View Sonics, and 1/4th had to be sent back because of what we called, "Hay Screen" which looks like someone took a fist full of hay and smashed it up against the screen from the inside. With those stats, we expect the rest to fail within the next year or two, after they are out of warrenty. At that point all we can do is throw the $1000 plus monitors away.
I suspect it's because the whole 'LCD on the desktop' industry deal is still very much a special thing for people who want a slick front office. Yes, I know people (more then average around here) use them for solving real problems when a big CRT won't do it, but I'd say at least 80% of units sold goto vanity applications. Vanity means color.
Here's some information regarding ISO standards fro LCD's flat panels. (All this info is from technical documentation I got from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers.)
ISO standard 13406-2 is a completion of ISO 9241-3, -7 and -8, which already regarded LCD's. Classes I to IV are defined in ISO 13406-2.
Class I (theoretical) allows for no pixel faults.
Class II allows for 2 "light pixels", 2 "dark pixels" and 5 "other faults", per million pixels.
Class III allows for 5, 15 and 50 respectively.
Class IV allows for 50, 150 and 500.
"light pixel" is when a pixel is >75% lighter.
"dark pixel" is when a pixel is >75% darker (or "death", I presume).
"other fault" is, well, for other faults (e.g. a subpixel is defect, giving the pixel a distored hue - think color-stuck pixels).
Class II is considered acceptable for office use. Classes III and IV are not.
For a 1,024*768 panel, which is 786,432 pixels, that makes 1.57 light pixels (rounds up to 2), 1.57 dark pixels (rounds up to 2) and 3.93 other faults (rounds up to 4).
This give a maximal number of defective pixels of 8, which is 0.001 % of the screen surface.
This data is very useful when you're a techie on the field and you're being annoyed by some customer who keeps asking for a new monitor because his/her got one or two death pixels. You can tell the monitor still meets the industry standard and therefore will not be replaced.
As for the ViewSonic monitor, I suppose ViewSonic was pretty nice to you when they replaced your "defective" monitor.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Yet no body sells them because they would make less money on them.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Actually, what you want is grey scale, not 1 bit Mono.
You can see the effect by taking any BW photo, and convert it to 1 bit color.
You also see this in printing. Laser Print IS 1 bit color, more or less, but you get true photo-grade at about 1500 dpi. Contrast this with grey scale, say on a screen, where 70 - 100 dpi is adequate for a photo, if you are using grey scale. 100 dpi in 2 bit color is horrible.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The medical industry uses high-end LCD's in radiology departments. Resolution and brightness are the most important factors and you pay for it. Check out these puppies: http://www.dome.com/products/cx/cxdisplays.html
I'm not sure how todays displays differ from those of older laptops, but I have a PowerBook 170 from almost 10 years ago that is still looking great. At the time we were extatic to have found one with no bad pixels (they were few and far between at the time), and I can say for sure that the same is true of that screen today. It should be noted, however, that that was one of the earliest shipping Active Matrix screens, and monochrome, but it would be hard to find a 10 year old Apple Cinima Display (drool) to check.
Narrative
I can only speak from my own experience: