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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.
Everytime I see an article about this sort of stuff I keep praying that OLED monitors will be out soon. Flat, less power required than in LCD, flatter than LCD, bright like CRT and once in full production likely up to 30% cheaper than LCD.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
about $200.
I recently had a new 18.1" LCD screen from NEC loaned to me for a trial period. Wow. I used it connected to my HP Omnibook and the larger screen was incredible. I forget the resolution I was running, but it was great for working on documents side-by-side. Going back to the 14" on my laptop was disappointing.
In a computer store, you'll often see monitors stacked on a rack and connected to a signal splitter that degrades image quality (with the cheapest monitors on top catching the most glare).
Kind of like the area that I share with my cube friends.. No splitters but monitors everywhere.
Far from the "ideal" conditions that I doubt anyone really has.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Will be an LCD. I'm planning on buying an Apple Cinema 23" to go with my Dual G4. Then I get to move my 19" Viewsonic CRT to the game box and finally get rid of that old, dim dingy Sony Trinitron. Unless of course someone knows how to make it brighter again. I want the Viewsonic on the game machine because I've yet to see an LCD that can keep up with a fast paced game. I do understand that the OLED's that might be coming out soon will be very close. Now if there was a way to hook up one of those 60" plasma screens (and afford one...).
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I hope they are comparing the actual viewable screen size when they are compaing the prices of CRTs to LCD. Most people don't realize this, but a 15" LCD has the same viewable area of a 17" CRT, and a 17.4" LCD has the same viewable area of most 19" CRTs. You can't compare a 15" LCD to 15" CRT, since they really aren't the same size.
Dimensions, Refresh rate, Colors, Response time, and Power consumption.
While I would agree these are all important, why are response time and refresh rate not linked together? I.E., a crappy refresh rate (50Hz) combined with a crappy response rate (60 ms) could possibly lead to trouble. Also missing are contrast and brightness, two more very important aspects.
I dunno what the big deal is about lcd vs. crt. As far as power, the average desktop user(including me) doesn't care. The desk space, perhaps. But I've already adapted to my 21" monitor taking up most of the space, so what's the big change gonna be. I guess just a few more square inches for me to fill up with trash!
You have a 21inch screen and you're gonna give it up for an iMac with a 15" screen?
Get yourself a G4 without a monitor. Your monitor is good enough.
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.
than CRTs to throw off the tops of buildings.
note: use extreme caution and some common sense when throwing anything from a rooftop.
A few years back, my CEO's wife said, "We should replace all our monitors with LCD flatscreens to make the whole company look high tech to investors" Eventually that kind of free spending drove the company into the ground.
LCD's are pretty to look at, that's about it. None of them can match the refresh rate of a CRT. (Yes I know LCD's don't really do vertical scan like CRT's do, but most LCD's sample the analog verticle refresh at 60hz then coverts it to digital unless it has a digital interface to begin with)
If you really want to reduce eye strain, or just simply get work done, a bigger monitor with a high refresh rate (120HZ+)
Size and refresh rate are the two most important things for me when I purchase a monitor. I don't care if I can hang it on a wall or off my ass. Unless you absolutely need it to be portable, you're better off using a CRT.
Apple Cinema Display is absolutely coveted by most of the graphics designers i've met in the last year or so.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
I've just found the 18.1" NEC 1850x which supposedly has a refresh rate of 15ms from black to white and white to black, but am uncertain if this is "real" anyone seen any reviews? From what I've read this would make a good gaming LCD monitor. Though I must say the $1300 pricetag is a kick in the wallet.
Anyone found any new technology that will make us wish for something other then LCDs? I've seen all the articles about the different process technology for LCDs, but nothing exciting.
Anyone seen DLP flatscreen monitors? DLP seems to do everything you want, they make kick ass tvs.
This is a little OT, but can we get a poll to see what kind of monitors everyone is using and in what sizes? I'd love to know how many of us are using LCDs or dual-monitor setups, and what size screen most /.ers gaze upon daily.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
If you want a damn good techie white paper on the basic physics and engineering of LCD technology, I recommend the mildly dated but still highly informative SGI 1600SW white paper.
Their display used to have the unique advantage of a very low pixel response rate, great for avoiding ghosting in video, but I can't seem to confirm that in their specs nowdays.
--LP
1. JPEG compression is terribly magnified on an LCD. look at a typical Yahoo News press photo on an LCD and then on a CRT, especially close ups of people.
2. Contrast is variable from top to bottom while looking dead center: On my recent model VAIO laptop, when looking at the screen from dead center, the top is too dark, the bottom is too bright. (in terms of black level)
3. Colors shift depending on left to right viewing angle, and typically subtle hues of red and blues and purples will not appear as pleasing and natural as they do on a CRT.
4. Overall gamma is poor, with the falloff happening in all the wrong places, which wrecks havok on portraits and figure photography. (which means yes, pr0n!)
So it's interesting to note that on a recent visit to Vertis studios in San Francisco, the people who often do the Macy's catalogs, that each digital photography station consisted of a high end scanning back camera and a macintosh with a 22" LCD monitor! I mentioned this to one of the supervisors and he said "Yea...we're aware of the problems with LCD...we carefully calibrate them and make sure to stare at them dead center, or we get the color shift problem left to right." I figured that someone had sold them on those setups purely for the 'cool' value, and they fell for it hook line and sinker.
He then took me into the finishing room, where, to my pleasure, there were several workstations outfitted with high end CRT monitors with hoods around them. I knew there was no way they were doing catalog work without CRT's, given the pickiness of fashion retailers over the color accuracy in the catalogs.
When I was working at Digital Domain in Hollywood, as well as every other VFX company I've ever worked for, there was nigh an LCD in sight, because you can't do critical adjustment on an LCD.
Despite all this doom and gloom, it IS getting better all the time, and eventually, unless it's replaced by DLP or other "every pixel is a tube" flatscreen technology, then I'll be calibrating my photographs for viewing on LCD, because that's what everyone will have. Until then, I prefer my high end Sony FD trinitron above all else.
--Mike
Not to mention the huge amount of heat CRTs put out! In my old apartment, my gas went out (ok, I didn't pay the bill :P), but my computer room was always toasty warm with 3 CRTs going. You haven't lived, till you've used a Mac SE for a foot-warming ottoman!
The article mentioned that graphic art types prefer CRTs because of a more true color depth? This being the result of the electron gun having better intensity control than LCD. (Article's point, not mine) I'd like to know why SGI makes such awesome flat panels? When I worked with a wide-screen flat panel SGI monitor, I was so taken back by how sharp the image was and how easy it is to read a wide monitor, I never wanted to go back.
But wouldn't SGI reject the LCD monitors due to color quality? What's the story there? Are the SGI monitors better than PC flat panels?
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
LCDs have held a lot of promise, and I have been told that the Apple Cinema display was the culmination of what LCD brings, and I got a chance to use one and was extremely disappointed.
Truly, I didn't see any hint of ghosting effect, and the absence of refresh is nice to know, but has no visual impact. The idea that the signal is kept digital logner doesn't make a damn bit of difference to me, but the more precise usage of the visible screen does.
However, the thing still looked bad in terms of color and brightness. On smaller LCDs the field of vision is pretty good, but when you have something the size of a Cinema display, looking at any particular part of the screen makes the portions away from focus really dark. While LCD tech has drastically improved, it doesn't seem to scale well at close distances (my subjective experience). I have never seen an LCD with an adequate viewable angle. Now OLEDs may become what LCD should have been. LCDs are certainly not worth the extra cash, but an OLED display might be more tempting, all the pluses of LCD with none of the disadvantages...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My main monitor is a 17" HP F70 LCD; it is sharp, brilliant, fast, and clear at 1280x1024. I play StartFleet Command, Wizardry 8, Heroes of Might & Magic IV, Destroyer Command, and Combat Flight Simulator with no problems at all.
Of course, I could have bought three nice 19" CRTs for the same price, but the CRTs would have continued to give me a headache, I suspect. My eyes don't twitch after 12 hours of coding on the LCD... and that's worth something.
My advice -- stay away from cheap LCDs and the bargain 15-inchers. You get what you pay for...
All about me
Over time a few pixels will generally stop working but the HUGE dirty little secret of the LCD industry is that the backlights fail! They grow dimmer and dimmer each month till the monitor is useless with 1-2 years of continuous use.
Might not be as bad for the casual user, but to have the brightness and even the color temp change on you as a graphics designer from month to month is a disaster!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
It is quite ironic that LCDs fall far short when doing color accurate work and doing film editing. Two of Macintoshes greatest strengths. THen Steve "Design over funtion" Jobs comes in and forces all new mac users to use LCDs (Or buy a third party monitor seperately). A little insite into his priorities...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
From the article (2nd page): "To vary the transmission of light through color filters, LCDs use magnetic fields to twist particles floating in a liquid--an inherently less precise process."
No, LCD's use electric fields. CRT's use magnetic fields to focus and scan the beams. Why do tech-oriented mags hire technical idiots?
LCDS
Pros:
weight
Cons:
Pixel Burnouts
Ghosting
Price
Viewable Angles
Native resolutions
Monitors
Pros:
Cost
Picture Quality is Better
DVD & Movie playback (No ghosting)
Ajustable Refresh (its not a con, when its selectable!)
Ajustable resolutions
Cons:
Size
Humm, Ill stick with my 22 inch flat screen monitor which is perfect. Ill use a LCD for when space is tight, thats it.
Here is an article entitled "LCD Panels and Customer Expectations". It talks about "stuck pixels" among other things.
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.
My laptops have LCD displays. My IPAQ IA-1 has an LCD display. And we have an LCD display on the console switch for the servers, because, when the power is out, I want 24W on the UPS, not 240W.
That's it. For everything else, for now, CRT's are superior. The 19" monitor I'm working on right now displays 1600x1200 crisply, can go higher if I really want to, and yet, can produce 800x600 without artifacting.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
One of the "questions and answers" claims that
when purchasing a tube-type (CRT) monitor, "any CRT will do".
I won't bother being graceful here. That's a bunch of crap.
Cheap monitors are junk. The CRT is the major difference between cheap and good-quality monitors. I am typing this on an NEC MultiSync FE950+ which is a beaufiful flat-face CRT monitor. It costs a lot more, but it is worth it. The other two monitors on my desk (a Sun/Sony 20E20 and a Misubishi DiamondTron) are of similar quality. They will last me through several computers...in fact, the Mitsubishi already has.
Refresh rate matters for CRTs because low refresh gives you "flicker". Refresh is irrelevant with LCDs because there is no "flicker" because there is no electron gun lighting one pixel at a time.
I've long had problems with monitor flicker, even 85 Hz refresh. (I like having both high refresh and high resolution so I never really did the 120Hz thing...) I haven't had any problems with refresh since getting a LCD.
Your point about larger screen size reducing eyestrain remains relevant with LCDs however.
--LP
Umm i think your a little confused. There is a big difference b/w 32bpp and 32bit color depth. Most(all?) consumer level cards max out at 24 bits of color information per pixel. When you set "32bit color" You get 8bits Red, 8bits Green, 8 bits Blue, and 8bits of something else.
What that something else is depends on the card and the drivers. It can be alpha channel, z-buffer, stencil buffer, accum-buffer, or just wasted in order to get better alignment(and to have a bigger number).
Now, that being said high end graphics cards/workstations will let you have higher color depths, I have seen 30bit(10R 10G 10B, and the other 2 bits used for things like multi sampling) and 64(16R 16B 16G) mentioned, although I have not had the luxury of seeing/using these systems myself.
Kevin
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
There are advantages to both. The contrast on an LCD is lousy for photorealism, but for text they can be excellent. The monitor that came with the apple cube is quite nice, so you have a bit of a biased opinion there....
I think they would be okay for a lot of graphics design work, but not photo editing.
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
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
My understanding - and I'm sure someone will rush in to correct me if I'm wrong - is that the pixels themselves last virtually forever (like LEDs), but the backlight (a flourescent lamp) burns out after a time.
:-(.
I think that could be as short as two years of constant use. I hope I'm wrong
Anyone have more details?
D
Now this makes me wonder, I thought most graphic designers used Mac, but Apple only supplies these with LCD's these days..
Has anybody told Apple that this probably isn't a good idea?
True, though there is always the option of buying an G4 without an Apple-brand LCD and instead opting for a Real Monitor.
There are much better CRTs that Apple would ever sell anyway... such as the LaCie Electron 22 Blue III... with glare hood, color calibrator, and nifty Mac/Win software.
Why are square pixels bad? What's better - _round_?! Or would you prefer some wierd rectangular pixel? Seems to me the most pixel per space would be square or rectangular. The nice digital cameras (high-end ones) have square pixels in them, so the original picture is being taken with square pixels in the originals now. I'd rather have square pixels.
I just bought a new notebook, a Dell Inspiron 8200, but I'm still waiting for it to arrive (still a month away).
I went for one of the new UltraSharp (aka Enhanced UXGA) LCD.
Has anyone seen one of these LCDs, or have any comments on their performance?
I'd love an OLED display like everybody else, but until they can come up with a blue OLED that can survive more than a couple of hundred hours, you ain't gonna be able to buy one.......
:)
Unless you feel like replacing your screen on a monthly basis
I ordered an 8200 as well, but didn't get the Enhanced version of the display. This discussion is making me think I should call them up and dump the extra $100. The contrast ratio increase is quite significant.
I wish I could get it with LOWER resolution though. I'm afraid that 1600x1200 on a 15" monitor is going to kill my eyes. I think this stuff is just designed for Windows, where you are expected to bump the font size up. Oh well, I guess I can start 16 terminal sessions at once.
This is a shameless plug. But it has a good drool factor so it shouldn't be shunned too bad.
/.
I work for a company, Rainbow Displays, that is making a 37.5" tiled LCD. This was previously covered here on
The display resolution is 852x480. This is actually a tiled 3x1 display. Don't expect it in stores soon since we are just starting to get a pilot line (400/month) going.
The pictures of the display on the web site suck. one could say that they are fake and the product is vaporware. Far from it though. While there is still a lot of work to be done, the displays work and are gorgeous to look at.
BTW, a lot of plasma displays I have seen have VGA and DVI inputs.
What I wish someone would make is a kit consisting of everything except display module, which one could buy directly from IBM. That is: a plastic housing for the display, a power supply and a video card. The video card needs to be driven by 4 24-bit LVDS transmitter chips, which were $8 each when I looked in it--I think the chip may have beeen the National Semiconductor DS90CF581. 4 x $8 = $32 chip cost x 5X markup for retail = $160 additional cost of video card plus cost of two LVDS connectors (using the hokey rule of thumb that I've heard that total electronic component costs are typically 20% of the suggested retail prices of the resulting product).
Without the need to stock the display component, there would not have to have such a big mark up to cover storage, damage, etc. I think the kit without the display could easily cost under $1k.
The video card would be the significant engineering task. The two LVDS streams have to be kept in sync, so you cannot just use two of the LVDS cards that can drive an SGI-1600SW display. It looks like you really do have a make a new video card. The big question that I had not gotten around to researching was whether were was a VGA chip or chip set that could deliver the digital output for two screens without convering the signal to analog,that is deliver two 24-bit parallel streams (the display interface is basically that of two 1024x1536 LVDS flat panels, side by side). There are a number of dual head VGA cards. I just never got around to looking into whether it was possible to get digital output from their chips.
I think that if a kit like this were available, some computer retailers would assemble it and the panels to offer the finished product, and that would reach untapped section of the flat panel market that I think there should be significant deamnd for (a $3k 20.8" TFT for CAD, engineeringing, graphic art, etc.).
One minor drawback that might slightly impede the popularity of this display as it gets closer to the consumer range is that the housing for it is currently not very thin. The housing is about four inches thick, making it a bit less sexy looking from the side than most other flat panels.
<whinge> I submitted this story 3 days ago </whinge>
They probably read your accompanying description and just found your tone of voice too irritating.
Oops. I meant to links to existing products based on IBM's 20.8" 2048x1536 ITQX20 module. Here they are.
Raintree Systems IN 2080-50 and National Display's Nova have the standard IBM dual LVDS digital inputs. I think there was an outfit in the UK called "Gemini Electonics" that was going to produce a similar device, but I could not find a link to them right now. RealVision has a dual LVDS video card for driving these monitors, although they promote it more for the electrically identical 6144x1536 grey scale version of the ITQX20. Finally, IBM's T-210 apparently uses the ITQX20 module, but only allows analog input, and only at something like 30Hz if you want to full resolution.
I have no financial relationship to any of these vendors.
The big problem with LCD's is that they're optimized for one resolution, which is not a great idea IMHO. At least the newest LCD's don't have the motion blurring problem that made LCD's very unpleasant to use on multimedia applications.
This is the nice thing about CRT's--they look good over a wide range of resolutions. On my MAG DX1795 monitor at home, I run 1024x768 @ 75 Hz, though I can in a pinch run 1152x864 @ 70 Hz if I need to see larger images.
Today's really good 19" monitors from Sony, NEC, Idek Iilyama and Viewsonic can display all the way up to 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz very cleanly, though at 1600x1200 resolution objects on screen are displayed a bit too small for my taste.
I recently got an 8100 with he UXGA display, and I had all of your fears, and they've all since been eliminated. It's flat out the best display I've ever used. Text is small, but it's so sharp that it's very easy to read. People who look at it are amazed. And I can't find a single dead pixel on the thing.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
during the last 25 years of working with computer and video screens:
1. Uncalibrated monitors are worthless except for texual information. Might as well be black and white. Hardware calibrated is best. Calibrated by eye with test patterns is better than nothing.
2.) Ambient light is key. Correct light is a source behind the monitor (no other sources) that is roughly (no more than) 20% as bright as the light from the monitor, and has the same color temperature. Refresh is key. Incandescent is best, or match the refresh of flourescent to monitor refresh. One of the best ways to get a headache is standard office setup: overhead flourescents oscillating at a different, subliminally perceived, refresh than the monitor's subliminally perceived refresh. And at a different color temperature. At first, you don't notice, but your brain is going "WTF!?! Are you TRYING to hurt me?!?!"
3.) Trinitrons suck. All inline tubes suck. Triads of dots, not stripes, are best for displaying anything not rectilinear and vertical. Trini's are nice and sharp when looking at office buildings; look at curves (or rotate the office building 14.3 degrees) and your res has just dropped through the floor due to aliasing) As Joe Kane (Google it) said, "When I look at a Trinitron, all I see is stripes".
There's LOTS more. but I'm too drunk and tired. But I've calibrated my TV's since 1990 and my monitors since the first 24 bit display hit the market, and my point is, hardware is the least of it. The least. Anyone who knows what they're doing can make a POS display look better than a zillion dollar unobtainium, proof of concept flim-flam, and with a little homework, you can too. The work's all been done for you (and me, I didn't make this shit up, I learned it). Go find it and use it.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line. -- Oscar Levant
ehh, no. The color is RGBA. The last byte is used for the alpha channel (determines the pixel's transparency).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
ehh, no. The color is RGBA. The last byte is used for the alpha channel (determines the pixel's transparency).
Eh no. The last bite in a texture is (well can be) alpha, not on your screen.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Saying LCDs are bad because you can see JPEG compression artifacts is like saying microscopes are bad because you can see germs in them.
... indeed, the DivX v. DVD comparison starts to make DivX look pretty good.
.... it is very nice (although interestingly the DVDs have many more atifacts than either the raw ieee1394 or MJPEG video does, on both the CRT and LCD ... go figure).
Absolutely. I watch my old DivX encoded B5 episodes on an LCD, as well as my current crop of Enterprise MPEG4 encoded episodes, and on the 18.1" LCD you do see the artifacts (though it is quite watchable from typical TV viewing distance).
Watch the same videos on a CRT and most of the artifacts go away
Do the same thing with MJPEG or raw ieee1394 on the other hand, and the LCD, sans the glare of the CRT, looks much better. No flicker, no glare, just crisp, clear, beautiful video. And for viewing DVDs
And on my 4x3 18.1" ViewSonic I've not been able to create scaling or motion artifacts (though on a colleagues 16:10 SGI Flatpanel they are regrettebly there, in the form of ugly horizontal lines about 1/4 inch long, that go away if a max screened xine is moved one or two pixels to the right. Most odd.)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Duh, einstein! RGBA color is used in intermediate calculations, but it's ultimately rendered as RGB. Now did you have something informative to say?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
No this didn't actually happen to me. Crumbz, why did you bother to share at all? Why is your comment modded up?