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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.
telling Tom's to take a hike. Great bit of negative web publicity, that.
This is the only piece of hardware I have ever drooled over!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
And it is compatible with other things than Macs (as the cinema display is not). The best price I can find on it is $3940; the list is $5370.
Even better is the IBM C220, at about 3Kx2.5K, but it requires a special IBM graphics card and special drivers. Moreover, it runs $21,000.
HW/SW question for slashdotters: For my next system, I'm thinking of getting either a 1920x1440 or a 1600x1200 LCD (probably the VS VP201, instead of the 230--I can afford it better). I like large virtual displays under Linux/XFree86 (currently I'm running 2Kx1.5K that seems to be the most that nVidia will support under XFree86). What graphics card should I choose to be able to get VIRTUAL 3200 2000?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Price. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that LCDs cost about 5-7 times a comparable CRT
Yes, they're expensive. But getting cheaper, especially the 15" ones. OLEDs won't be any cheaper when they start getting produced, either, I'm sure...
All of my LCDs had a terrible viewing angle - no better than 15 degrees to either side.
I think that's improved dramatically -- most of the units in the review (which I only had time to skim) look like they do 120-160 degrees, not 30 degrees like you seem to have gotten...
OLED products promise to significantly reduce the weight of the display, because they will not require so much glass to produce.
Huh? I'm not sure that they'll really use any less glass, as I'd bet that the OLED screen will be behind some kind of protective screen, anyway. Regardless, as someone else pointed out, OLEDs are way off. And it's not like the LCD panels weigh 50 pounds like the old 21" monitors I used to lug around...
Durability. LCD displays are scads more sensitive to EMF, shock, and time than CRT displays are. Dropping my CRT resulted in a few scratches; dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred dollars down the tubes. And who knows if OLEDs won't be just as fragile -- they might be a really thin film that gets torn the second the glass breaks, leaving you with just as useless a monitor (though without the funky LCD ooze).
The same goes for laptops. Solution? Try not to drop it. Seriously. As long as they don't break in normal use (like, say, if your framed MCSE falls off the wall onto it when your office neighbor slamdances the wall), then this isn't that big a deal.
Compatibility. I had problems getting two out of the three LCD monitors to run with Linux. Since they rarely use a standard VGA connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not have open source driver support.
I really don't understand this one. Almost all displays have at least one standard VGA port. I've seen flat panels on all kinds of systems. There are some with digital video ports, and for those, yes, you need a special card and thus enter driver hell. But (again, I only skimmed) it looked like all the screens the review looked at should support Linux over standard VGA.
What kinds of screens were you trying? Were they all the same make/model, or did you try a sampling? Were they wacky mega-advanced things like the 16x9 SGI panel, or simple stuff you found at CompUSA?
...can we have 14" Laptop LCD's that can have up to 1600x1200 resolution (via the Dell Inspiron 4100), yet the best these 15" Desktop LCD's (where power is not an issue) can reach is 1024x768.
IMHO, that's f*cked.
I have seen LCD screens with good quality. My wife's laptop has the second LCD that didn't annoy the !$^$ out of me for certain applications. The Apple Cinema Display is the first LCD, although I've only seen it in stores. You probably saw an LCD that wasn't properly set up. Of course, every time I start using a CRT tube, I have to get /it/ set up properly, too, but that's another matter.
There are two things that annoy me about LCD screens. One is the contrast ratio, and the other is refresh rate.
At some point, the LCD manufacturers hit the contrast ratio that made the blacks look black. Before that, a little bit of the backlight would creep through the blacks. It made things look all muddy. It's fine for office applications, programming, and whatnot. But it made any sort of Photoshop usage nearly impossible, even for web design. This has now been almost fixed. The latest expensive displays are good enough to not be annoying. Granted, I still wouldn't spec out a system intended for prepress with one, but they are OK.
What kills them for me right now is resolution. For the same price as a 1280x1024 LCD, I can get either a 17 or a 19 inch CRT that will do at least 1600x1200. I like a big, high resolution screen.
The refresh rate is getting better, but it's still not quite good enough for games. Of course, for an office PC, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also great for an office PC because the pixels are very square and very sharp, which makes things easier on the eyes.
But the big thing is that a cheap LCD is going to suck more than a cheap CRT.
Gentoo Sucks