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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.
When a new story is posted at Tom's, it gets front page status here. Shouldn't there be a "daily updates at well known hardware sites" category for those of us who go to those sites anyways? I just don't see what the point behind Slashdot getting cluttered with a "posting notification" for Tom's, Sharky, Anandtech, etc.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
A properly set-up LCD running at its design resolution looks sharp!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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.
Check out one of these, yes it's an Apple Cinema Display, but take a look at one, they are simply amazing, they are a piece of art, yes it requires a $50CND dongle to go from Mac-DVI for PC users, and I am a pc user, but they are so worth the money, they are great monitors.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
On a related note, Ars Technica recently pushed out a Flat Panel buyer's guide.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
So you wouldn't buy from one of the LCD market/value leaders because they didn't cater to Tom's crew? As far as your feelings on Tom's, I don't know if you'd find industry wide agreement: I personally have seen some bizarro conclusions, and some personal biases and agendas (i.e. like issues like this where he or his crew didn't get a sample in a timely manner and it turns into a personal agenda against whichever company he doesn't like that week). I have little respect for any reviews that rely upon the goodwill of companies either: If Tom's is all that successful that they deserve such props then they should head down to the latest computer store and pick up the monitors (so they're testing actual retail samples rather than picks of the litter), selling them at auction or whatever afterwards to recoup most of the cost. Otherwise they end up in this "love/hate" relationship with OEMs and it seriously affects every review: there is always a colour of bias.
I own a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a GORGEOUS 15.1" UltraXGA screen. It's wonderful to look at and sometimes it's even easier on my eyes then my dual 19" CRT system on my workstation.
However, from what I understand about LCD screens is that they need to be mated with particular video cards (digital, of course) in order to even come close to high-quality laptop LCDs. Laptop manufacturers mate the best LCDs with the best, tuned, video cards in order to achieve the best display out there. With a much wider array of desktop LCDs and video cards you'd be hard pressed to be able to perfectly match a digital video card to a LCD display without massive amounts of time, money, and trial-and-error.
Thanks,
--
Matt
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.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Tom's used to be
the same for me.
But when it took
longer to render
each of the 20 pages
of HTML
at one paragraph
per pageview and
4-5 banner ads,
I stopped reading
Tom's Hardware
.
Which is a shame -- I cut my PC-hardware teeth in the early Pentium-I era learning about the distinctions between chipsets, the various busses and their overclockability, etc. at Tom's. Now I go to Anand, or any other similar site that features a "Print this!" button on their pages, and/or at least more than one sentence per pageview.
That said, Samsung was pretty braindead to dismiss hardware websites as inferior to print magazines as sources for reviews. Particularly for leading-edge products (like LCD panels), you've gotta get the early-adopter mindshare, and I don't know any early adopters who get their tech information from dead trees anymore. (By the time the dead-tree magazine is printed, half the information in it, and all the pricing, is obsolete.)
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!"
Oh wait... COM+D monitors rock!
Wait... this is the last time, I promise: .NetD monitors kick ass!
T :-)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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?
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd say two very relevant qualities of an LCD display, hell any display, are size and resolution.
As far as I can tell, few to none of the "Test Tests" pages provide this information.
The "Conclusion" is actually just a summary of monitor properties with no rankings or opinions gathered presumably from a "review" process. Even then, the summary doesn't include size or resolution.
On the first page, there's no description why these values are not relevant nor significant for the review. Instead, there's three paragraphs regarding why Samsung-France is big and mean for not sending a unit to "review". Not only does that seem like last-page material, it seems unprofessional to even print.
Going back the introductory pages, I did find some references to "only of limited interest for a 15" monitor", and a few other references to "768 pixels". So, after correlating and cross-referencing text from a number of pages in the review, I can make the guess that all the monitors have 15" diagonal with max resolution 1024x768.
Considering the quality of both the review process and the journalism, Samsung was right to not send them a monitor. And, I'm right to resume my practice of never visiting Toms Hardware.
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.
In this case, it is a short-term, long-term thing. By relying on vendor test models, Tom's is entering a dance that it cannot win with its outsider posturing.
So Sansung decides it does not want to be part of a review. So Tom's posts a very unprofessional rant about it. Do you think Samsung is ever going to send Tom review units again?
Now, on the short-term, it makes Samsung look bad. A popular and generally respected Web guide runs a review of products and you are not in it. Tom gets a some baby sucker-punches in. Maybe Samsung loses a couple of sales. Maybe enough to even be a fractional blip on their radar (but not likely). Tom wins short-term.
However, the other participants see this. Eventually, some other big player decides it doesn't want to deal with someone that unprofessional, and refuses to send units. Now Tom has a big hole in its coverage, and its readership will fall off because of it.
If you are going to play the independent news card, you can't be beholden to companies for review units.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
I bought a Planar PV174 at the end of December and so far, haven't looked back. Total price was under $700 including shipping.
.4" is nice to have) and the price was comparable or a little cheaper.
Specs:
* 17.4" LCD. 1280x1024 resolution
* up to 75Hz analog, 60Hz DVI. (as it happens, when running analog I found it preferable to run at 70Hz to avoid some slight flickering)
* Built in speakers (I don't use them)
* Built in USB hub (don't use this either)
* Built in pivot (don't use this - the model is available in black or white with a pivot or clear/translucent red/trans blue without pivot)
* 220cd/m2 brightness
* 400:1 contrast
* 160degree viewing angle
* 25ms refresh (15ms rise, 10ms fall)
Frankly, from the research I did at the time the specs were far better than anything else in the 17" market (not to mention the extra
I have a friend who uses the Planar 15" LCD on his Mac and is also very pleased with the way it performs.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
...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.
"Since they rarely use a standard VGA connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not have open source driver support."
This is absolutely untrue. Most LCD monitors are either driven through analog VGA or through a standard digital interface (DVI.) Of course, the DVI-driven displays will provide higher-quality images.
And what makes you think that OLED cards will have open-source driver support, anyway? IMHO, if the drivers work well, does it really matter if you have the source code? It seems good to try for the utopia of all-open-source, but not purchasing a great monitor just because the drivers aren't open-source seems a bit overboard.
"...dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred dollars down the tubes."
Whoa. Stop there. If you spent $200 on an LCD monitor, no wonder you're complaining. The low-end monitors are crappy. I have an SGI 1600SW with Multilink Adapter that will soon be driven by a Geforce3. I spent over $1000 on it, which is more than I have spent on most of my computers. However, it is worth every penny. I would not trade it for any other LCD and I certainly wouldn't wait for a still-vapor technology.
Yes, LCDs are pricey! No, LCDs are not for everyone. But for those of us who want an absolutely gorgeous display -- one that every person who walks into your house will say "Wow!" about, and one that never makes your eyes hurt -- we are more than happy to pay for an LCD.
BTW, I thought this Tom's Hardware article was horrible. Instead of focusing on the wonderful high-end LCDs, this article is dueling the low-end LCDs. Most of these monitors are awful. I would recommend that anyone who is in the market check out the following:
Low-end: IBM T-Series 15" analog
Midrange: Samsung 17" 170MP with built-in TV tuner and PIP
High-end: The SGI 1600SW with Multilink, since discontinued; any Apple LCD
Whatever you do, I wouldn't recommend paying less than $600 for an LCD. Also, definitely read the shopper.com reviews before purchasing. Their thumbs up / thumbs down system is a good way to figure out what people actually thought of the product after bringing it home.
Good luck...
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I used to live in a place that was right next to a line of high-voltage power lines. And while that isn't a problem to my health, (a few fradulent scientific studies to the contrary), I was close enough that the magnetic induction would give every CRT in my house a 60 Hz signal on the display, so that the screen would move back and forth according to the beat-signal created with regard to the refresh rate.
While this isn't a problem with TVs (which refresh at 60Hz), it was a MAJOR problem with my 21" Viewsonic CRT display, which, in order to get the benefit of the 1800x1400 display, had to be refreshed at 75Hz (going at 60Hz caused too much flicker on that huge display). Needless to say, trying to read tiny text, when the whole screen is shimmying back and forth at 15Hz was headache-inducing at the very least.
This was when I shelled out the big $$$ and got a nice new SGI LCD (SGI 1600SW. It has a good viewing angle, good contrast ratio, runs at 1600x1024 (enough to display two web pages side-by-side), is light-weight and compact (especially compared to my 75 pound Viewsonic P815), and best of all, had no electron beam!
So if, like me, you have a problem with ambient magnetic fields, then I think that the only solution (until OLEDs come out, of course), is to get an LCD. And they're nice. Really nice. In fact, after seeing my display, all my friends went out and got LCDs as well. The only problem is that they're not nearly as cheap as CRT displays.
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
I just got a new LCD myself! ViewSonic just released last year their VG191, which is a 19" TFT. It's MVA, 1280x1024, 500:1, 250 nits, and it pivots. I love it very dearly.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg191.cfm
I got mine for $860, though prices seem to have gone up a little since last week (?). I think this makes it a great alternative to those ridiculously expensive ones like Apple's Cinema display. (Especially since I could not find a GeForce 3 with DVI-out at higher res than 1280x1024).
Anyway, the real point of my post is this: If you go for a high-end LCD, do yourself a favor and get one that *pivots* or at least a VESA wall adaptor. I thought this would just be a kind of fun gimmick, but there really is nothing like reading a webpage in portrait mode. I leave my monitor like that almost all the time, in fact (I like to have a widescreen movie playing across the bottom of the screen and emacs up at the top.
LCDs typically have crisper pixels, use far less power, have no headache-inducing flicker, allow better desktop usage (I gained about a foot when I replaced my 19" CRT with a 19" LCD!), often support pivoting, and are more likely to get you laid.