Tom Reviews 13 LCD Displays

n3r0.m4dski11z noted that Tom's Hardware has a review of 13 LCD Displays for anyone who has been thinking about making the leap from the CRT to that fancy shmantsy LCD stuff thats all the rage with the kids these days. As usual, they do a pretty good job explaining the issues. In this case comparing CRT and LCD technology, as well as covering a ton of screens.

Comments

Re:Quality?--it's the stores that suck!

[coats]

LCDs display much better at their design resolutions than at other resolutions (think about it--you might say that they have "hard-coded" pixels, instead of "wherever the electron beam hits.") Stores, unfortunately, don't bother to set them up like this, and instead run their display samples at some stupid resolution like 800x600 that is way off the actual resolution of the screen. Result: they look horrible.

A properly set-up LCD running at its design resolution looks sharp!

LCDs by nature are sharper than CRTs

[yerricde]

In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article, color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here, Slashdot covered it here, and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here.

Ars Technica LCD buyers guide

[Digital_Quartz]

On a related note, Ars Technica recently pushed out a Flat Panel buyer's guide.

My LCD is better for my eyes

[peterdaly]

As someone who sits in front of computers all day who has a preference for ungodly high resolutions, my laptop has really helped my eyes. I recently got a Dell Laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 LCD display. For years my eyes have not been great. Not bad enough to really need glasses, but enough to bug me every now and then. Since I started using the LCD, I have had ever decreasing eye problems.

The screen is so much sharper than any CRT at high resolutions. I am starting to consider replacing my 21" sony trinitron (sp?) on my home desktop machine with an LCD. I want more screen real-estate than these 13" screens, but the prices keep coming down.

If you have eye problems as a result of using a CRT all day long, I highly recomend a high-res LCD.

-Pete

Samsung....

[John Miles]

Samsung's flat-panel product line is fairly easy to summarize, even without a formal review. I looked closely at several different models when upgrading my monitor late last year.

The Samsung 170T is godlike, especially with a DVI connection. It has a 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.26mm dot pitch, and it's bright enough to be painful to look at in dim light. The 160-degree viewing angle will remind you of a CRT. Oddly enough, it's not much more expensive than their (far inferior) 170MP and other 17" models.... which explains why most mail-order houses are usually sold out of the 170T.

I've replaced every CRT monitor in my house (three) with 170Ts, and couldn't be happier. There is only one dead pixel among the three.

Sadly, however, the other Samsung monitors are all junk, no better or worse than everything else in the slush pile at CompUSA. I imagine the 170T is blown away by the 210T, but those are even larger, more expensive, and (probably) harder to find.

Re:What about dot pitch?

[frankie]

I didn't notice where they mentioned the dot pitch of the various LCD monitors.

Non sequitur. There's no such thing as dot pitch on an LCD, just like there's no zoom, trapezoid, degauss, etc. Those are relevant only to analog CRTs.

Each pixel of an LCD (at maximum resolution) is exactly the size of the associated RGB screen elements. It doesn't move. It doesn't wiggle across phosphor dots, because there are no phosphors.