Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
The reason graphic artists (like myself) avoid LCD monitors is because of the lack of consistency of luminance across the entire screen. The same color can look completely different because its brightness value doesn;t look the same even though, according to the software, it is. If you are working on any work which requires color accuracy, this will not do. Hopefully the OLEP screens will eliminate this luminosity problem and larger screens will be available at a much more affordable price.
The other problem with CRTs which causes eyestrain is movement. Display a web page on a CRT, then look at a glyph under a magnifying glass. The glyph will be shaking slightly. Even the best CRTs do this, because the scanning process has some inherent inaccuracy. This problem does not affect LCDs. The pixels on an LCD are mechnically fixed and cannot move. When using a digital LCD, there are no PLLs and amplifiers to distort the signal.
The combination of these two things means LCDs cause much less eyestrain than CRTs.
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.
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!