Behind the Numbers: LCD vs. CRT

OrenWolf writes "CNet has an article discussing the difference between CRT's and LCD's - where they've been, where they're going, and what to look for when buying one. They inclde information on how to judge the most important (and most overlooked) features in LCD's, the rise/fall of pixels, something that keeps most gamers away from them." Good summary type piece, although nothing exceptional for the more hardcore techie.

Comments

Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparison

[Canabinol]

This article over at Toms does an excellent job of describing the technical differences between CRT and LCD.

He also has a recent roundup of the current LCD players and what to look for.

C.

Re:Everytime

[sahala]

[OLED] flatter than an lcd?

how is that possible? Check out http://www.uniax.com/. They use Flash for nav so I can't give a direct link, but click on "how it works" and then check out either the FAQ or the OLED section. It's pretty cool...

Also check out this site for more info on OLEDs.

Karma whore I am...

Re:Price of CRT vs. LCD

[felipeal]

but a 15" LCD has the same viewable area of a 17" CRT

Maybe they have the same viewable area, but most of the times not the maximum resolution. Typically, you can get 1280x1024 in a 17" CRT, but not more than 1024x768 on a 15" LCD (on a laptop, for instance, the monitor must be SVGA+ our USVGA to achieve more than 1024x768).

Re:"Graphics designer would not touch a LCD" -- BS

[John Whitley]

Not only are the Apple Cinema (and Studio) LCD displays coveted by graphic designers and other professionals who do color work, you can actually use external color calibration equipment with them just as is done with CRTs and get reliable results for production printing. This article's information, while accurate for run-of-the-mill LCDs, perpetuates a lot of "old news" about LCD tech that is soon to go by the wayside.

BTW, the stated viewing angle on these is 170 deg, and they darn well mean it. Comparing (e.g.) a laptop LCD to these is wholly inaccurate -- not all LCD panels are created equal these days.

Anyone know of other displays that have managed to ship with panels of this quality?

Re:Longevity of LCDs

[Jeffrey Baker]

The pixels themselves last a really really long time. Much longer than the display technology will probably be useful. The backlights need to be replaced after a few years of use. An old backlight will either fail altogether or just turn purple. Luckily the backlights are inexpensive and easy to replace.

Re:LCD Colors?

[G-funk]

I hadn't heard about this before. Seems like another strike against LCDs for games because most gamers nowadays run their games with 32-bit color.

Nope, games (and your windows probably) run at 24-bit colour, 32 bits per pixel, and they simply waste one byte per pixel because it's much faster to access the pixels when aligned on a 4 byte boundary. It's simply a speed thing. Not only this, but from a reflective surface (paper) you can distinguish about 50 million colours (except some women who are reverse colour-blind in having 4 whatsijigs in their eyes instead of 3). On an emittive source (crt,tv, backlit lcd monitor) you can only see about 14 million colours. Note this doesn't apply to reflective lcd monitors such as the game boy colour, but that only does a few thousand colours in the graphics chip anyway :)