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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.
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
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.)
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
...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.