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LCD Round-up
TheKillerBee writes "The TechReport has posted a nice comparison of several different LCDs. A plethora of benches are present to help you decide how to spend that Christmas bonus check!" The screen update times still aren't fast enough for gamers, but they still are ever so delicious.
You obviously don't work in the IT industry, I can see. Perhaps you're a superhero from another dimension who's crimefighting organization still gives bonuses?
The screen update times still aren't fast enough for gamers, but they still are ever so delicious.
What??? I've been gaming for years on an LCD monitor... what the hell is wrong with the update times? 60Hz is ample for 3d gaming, especially when on an lcd you can't actually see 60Hz flicker... Obviously you don't have an LCD, and you are just spinning the same crap that every other uninformed CRT user is.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Why are the Macintosh LCD monitors not represented? They work quite well not just with Macintosh computers but with PCs as well, as my desktop can easily demonstrate. Additionally, Apple's patented display has none of the viewing angle problems the author complains of. Hardly representative.
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
And I'm about 2 weeks from getting a 17" monitor. I've looked at Sony, NEC and Viewsonic in person and so far the NEC 1700+ series look great, but still $650 is enough to give pause. There are cheaper, but you get what you pay for, and a 17" for $550 may be one sorry investment.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From the article:-
"The good will have to really outweigh the bad and the ugly if you want to justify an opulent LCD purchase to your boss, to yourself, or worse, to your significant other."
Obviously LCD still hasn't bettered CRT so keep you old monitor and spend the dosh on something else instead.
The pixel response time of LCDs has improved dramatically over the years, but CRTs still have the edge. What's most worrying about pixel response times, however, is that LCDs with similar pixel response time specs don't always show the same performance in the real world. It's really something you have to check for yourself. Slow pixel response time = ghosting and streaking.
Despite the years that lcd's have been around I still don't get why people buy them over crt. Yes they take up less space and if you poke them you can make cool designs, but past that they suck. I just hate it when I'm scrolling and the page gets all blurry, it's like a bad cam version of a movie.
thanks!
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
Don't you mean that Christmas Severence Check? Or even more likely that Christmas Unemployment Check?
The first manufacturer to go to an all-LCD lineup doesn't get it's products reviewed?
Besides pushing the technology, they've actually got LCDs that are decently bright and easy to profile and calibrate. I wish they'd reviewed some of Apple's displays - I'd like to see if the dollar premium is really worth it. (The easel adjustment on the 17", 22" and 23" is pretty killer though!)
We should see some major improvements in LCD screens mid part of next year as the new USBII.v video I/O bus comes out. It' not commonly known but the LCD monitors are actually limited by the throughput coming off the video card bus as the speeds are limited by the half-duplex nature of the connection into the monitor. They use a pretty sophisitaced full-duplex emulation which works pretty good, but you can see the colors are not quite as sharp and the vertial scan rates are limited which makes the whole LCD experience look a little washed out.
This will change next summer when the new spec gets implemented and we see a true full-duplex communication between the monitor and your video card. Of course the monitor people are advertising this as they won't sell any monitors until it's released but I can assure you Aug. at the latest you'll be seeing the big press releases start to come out.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Saying so doesn't make it so.
Do these retailers take Ralphs(California Grocery Chain) Gift certificates.
Thats what I get for a Chistmas bonus!
moo.
Just to set the record straight, many people, myself included, have found that update times less than 30 ms are plenty good for even the fastest games (UT2003 springs to mind). My 15" KDS is excellent for gaming -- I can't imagine ever going back to a CRT.
I'm a real estate whore... I'm currently running 2 19" monitors at 1600x1200 (3200x1200) and I'm seriously considering getting a third. I've looked at LCD's every once in a while and I've never been pleased with what I've found, I can get a very decent 19" for under $200, Viewsonic PF790's are what I'm using now. Lower cost, higher res, I could even get three of these and be right in the middle of the pack pricewise. Apart from the Apple Cinema HD (which I wouldn't mind getting four of) I can't think of an LCD that cuts it.
sig.
No, but facts do. What, do you live in a cave? Apple makes LCDs that aren't attached to powerbooks and iMacs.
I think your facts put lie to the claim that Apple products are affordable and in line with the prices of similar PC products.
If you look a the ones they're comparing, they are all 15" and 17" displays. Apple has one 17".
They are comparing these displays for the "PC" market - in order to use an Apple display on a non-Apple computer you have to get an expensive adaptor in addition to the already over-priced display. The ones reviewed are relatively inexpensive displays.
Cut them some slack, journalists have the right to review whatever the hell they damn well please - if you want a review comparing the Apple displays to other people's displays, do it yourself.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I forget the exact tech, but the basic idea was using a set of 'high-tensile' coupled LCDs instead of the regular LCD cells. Usually their nature means that they can only be cast to minute sizes, far too small for useful work (a 15" screen would require a minimum of 4096*4096 cells, and even then the display would be grainy due to the cell-pitch.
Philips tried to work around this by using flared-end fibre optics, but it'll come as no surprise that this produced an exceptionally blurry and dull image. Sony, however, have found a set of lab conditions under which HT-coupled LCD can be crystallised at sensible sizes.
It'll be expensive to start with, but this may well spell the end of the power hungry CRT.
Sexy LCD 17" Monitors - Part I
Comparison of 17" LCDs: The Heavyweights Enter The Ring - Part II
Cheers
Recently got a Belnea (Euro only I think?) 10 15 37 for my parents new workstation (for behind the Bar, when it gets quiet the computer comes in handy), and it is great... especially with the limited surface space we have. The original version of this monitor was reviewed on Toms Hardware, but the casing was cheap and nasty. Fortunately they heeded the reviews and there have been two revisions of the monitor, for a great price of £255 ex vat,
I did try the monitor with Unreal 2003, but the ghosting started making me feel sick after 10 minutes of play... but I'm not the primary user, and the only games played on it by my parents usually involve cards (as well as internet and e-mails)!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I work with gfx and there's simply no way I'd switch my CRT for an LCD. LCD is the natural and great choice for small devices but not suited for workstations.
One thing I have been wondering for a while, why are there no 17" 1600x1200 lcd monitors? There are laptops that support that resolution with smaller screens, but no monitors, as far as I know.
ROFLMAO!!!
(*hem
In case you haven't heard, we're kinda in a recession!!! The only bank accounts that MIGHT get a X-mas bonus are those with EIN numbers associated with them
There are MANY companies that are not just cancelling X-mas bonuses, but that are taking salray and benifits away from people right now to cover their loses
BTW: Are they still accepting resumes where you work? If not, please forward my contact information to your boss. I WANT YOUR JOB!
Until then, I'm stuck with my CRT. Screw you for making me jellous!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Why is it I can get a laptop capable of 1600x1200 on a 15" screen no bother, but the only 1600x1200 capable LCD displays for the desktop are huge monsters?
I want a monitor with high DPI, not high physical size. I'd pay good money for a 1600x1200 desktop display that was basically a laptop screen in a different case.
The screen update times still aren't fast enough for gamers, but they still are ever so delicious.
The only games where this could possibly matter are the fastest paced shooter games, and even then it is a marginal problem. Certainly isn't a big enough problem for me to want to take up 300 square miles of desktop space with a glorified vaccuum tube.
Besides there are games besides Quake out there you know. Some of us even play them.
They didn't have my favorite "Cornea" brand monitor...ugly brandname, but a very decent monitor generally priced one size lower than what you get.
Anyway, one justification for me for getting an LCD was the idea of not bathing myself in EMF all the live long day...is there any rational reasoning behind that, or am I just being paranoid? (Or just enjoying all the extra deskspace...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I think the biggest downside with CRT computer monitors is the fact that monitor manufacturers still haven't addressed the biggest downside of these monitors, namely the large depth of the monitor due to the way CRT's are manufactured.
:-(
I remember a few years ago Viewsonic addressed this with the A75s model, a 17" CRT monitor that had a physical depth substantially less than other 17" CRT monitors. I'm very disappointed that Viewsonic (let alone the CRT monitor industry) has not adapted the short-depth CRT concept to all their 17", 19" and 21" monitors.
CRT's fast response makes them excellent for viewing fast motion graphics (e.g., high-end games and DVD playback), but monitor manufacturers should be working on shortening the depth of the tube so the monitor can fit onto desks easier.
My Toshiba Satellite with its 1600x1200 is bar-none the most gorgeous display I have ever seen. Granted I don't work in the graphics industry and I don't spend $600 on monitors. Everyone I work with always mentions how beautiful my display is and even our web designers and graphics guys always mention how much they like it. The only thing I wish it had was the ability to input from another video source. (You hear that Toshiba? Add a digital input!)
Personally, I would only consider the Dell 1702FP (a beaufiful 17" DVI panel) or the Dell 2000FP (a huge 20" panel that can be had for $1300 if you apply some Dell discounts). Samsungs are OK but I don't like their panels' piss poor black reproduction. If you want your computer to look hip go get a Samsung, but if you want a screen that delivers beautiful images then Dell is the better vendor even if their case styling isn't as nice.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
The reviewer indicates "Here, I've broken things down Eastwood style" and the procedes to give us the 'Good Bad and Ugly' results of the review.
It's not Eastwood style at all. He (Eastwood) was just "The Good". The "style" he's talking about should either be attributed to Sergio Leone (director) or Agenore Incrocci (writer) though Leone also wrote the story with Agenore.
Ahh, journalism in the world of the Blog.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
I know, it's 10 grand, but check out the IBM T221.
Does anyone know what happened with flat CRTs?. I'm still waiting for a 36" Magnetic Matrix Display to replace my old 4:3 TV set. Should I start breathing again?.
Why don't we see more transflective screens, particularly on laptops? I've only been able to find one decent laptop with a transflective screen. LCD's are great, but now that we have wi-fi, I want to compute outside!
Not to mention that herion is a depressant(like booze and pain killers) and cocaine a stimulant (like nicotine and amphetamines(sp?)).
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
How can a 30ms update time cause "Ghosting" ?
If there is some sort of anomaly that disappears from my view less than 1/33rd of a second, I have a hard time believing I'll notice it. If some Koopa Kid is zipping back and forth from one end of my screen to another in 1/33rd of a second, I think I'll see a trail anyways, given that the human vision takes 1/10th of a second to have a light impulse fade completely out of sight. Or mind. Whereever the slowdown is.
Anyways who doesnt like seeing trails?
daHahaha
Not like I can afford one anyways.
Why stick up for big business?
of course there's also the cost issue, but still what makes the biggest difference to me is dpi.
another advantage you have with a crt is that a range of resolutions can be supported equally well, but an lcd is stuck with a native resolution and has to fake lower resolutions. of course if i had my 1600x1200 lcd, it would be able to fake 800x600 very well (use 4 native pixels per pixel).
doing 640x480 stretched to 800x600 on my compaq lte5380 with its crazy 256 colors looks HORRIBLE! you can't even read anything on it and i wish there was a way i could default the thing NOT to stretch. of course this isn't as much of a problem if you have more colors, but i don't need more than a pentium 133 for a laptop right now.
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
It's too bad that so many people see these as a "replacement" for CRTs rather than an alternative (maybe better for work environments or cramped environments).
... doesn't flicker at 60Hz, it flickers at 120Hz. Your electricity is a 60Hz sine wave, so current flows one way, stops, flows the other way, and stops again 60 times per second. The light goes off momentarily at both of the stops.
A good flourescent system using an electronic ballast, however, increases the frequency to the kHz range and produces no visible flicker.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
So many people with LCDs that they use for games are saying "Yeah, it ghosts sometimes, but you'll get used to it". Screw that. LCDs cost more than *bigger*, better CRTs. So I'm paying more to have a crappier picture in essentially every way (color, speed, viewing angle, brightness are all superiour on a CRT)? Give me a break. Oh, and the "saves valuable desktop space" argument is bullshit, too. What, exactly, are you going to be putting behind your LCD display, now that the space isn't taken up by the CRTs tube? LCDs are cool because they are thin, don't use much power, and have a sharper (though not necessarily better)picture. That's it. Otherwise, they suck.
Somebody in this topic already mentioned that LCDs are prone to ghosting when playing games -- this is the main thing that's keeping me from buying a new monitor. And so, my question is: are there any flat-panel monitors that ARE good for gaming? Will OLED-based monitors remedy this problem?
Stack your porno mags on all the extra deskspace.
After all, you cant look at porn on a crappy LCD.
shahaha
Why stick up for big business?
I have to say that my viewsonic va800 (17.4") is quite the awesome peice of eq. I'm a software eng by day and a gamer by night... As for the programming side of the coin, any monitor will do, bug screen space is king... that paired with crisp fonts makes the code flow. As for the game side, the lcd I have is very good for games. I have owned 2 other LCD flat panels that were just plain too slow (disposal of pixels) to play games on, but the va800 has it down. Scrolling, full motion, no bluring in the least. Don't get me wrong, not all viewsonics are great for games.. their 15 inch one was just terrible, and a friend of mine claims his 19 inch black viewsonic was too slow for him. Something about the va800 made me keep it for gaming where the others went back to the store. Just my 2 cents for the gamers.
;)
Oh and some of the other PRO's of LCD that make it totally worth it if you have the extra cash and have found one with a quick pixel disposal rate that you are comfortable playing games on:
1) one touch auto sync / setup. Match the res and contrast with a click of a button. No black boxes around your viewing area. BTW 17.4 means 17.4 VIEWABLE.. unlike in the CRT world.
2) no more areas of the screen that you just have to deal with distortion on... Cant count how many monitors are just slighly curved or crooked in the corners or discolored in a fashion that even a degaus coil won't fix.
3) LIGHT and small. This one is under rated. I had a 21 inch monitor at work that was soo big, I couldn't get it all the way in the corner section of the cube where the computer should go and still have a keyboard on the desk. What a joke.. I don't need a big set top TV thank you. LCD's pivot, twist.. all that... turn the screen show a friend. Move the screen to a new location, don't break your back.
4) low power consumtion... quit dimming the lights when you power on your RAY GUN.
5) multiple input and or tuners built in. Some of the lcds have multiple inputs (svideo, multiple analogs..), some even have tv and radio turners with PIP built in (I had a samsung that did that.. TITS!). I can have my ultra 60 and my game PC plugged into mine and hit the 'switch input' button and boom.. there's the other machine. And with all that space i saved for having an LCD, I can have 2 keyboard and mice! JOY!
Thats's about it. I like mine overall... it was 1600 bucks back in the day, now it's like 700 retail. I'm very happy with it... the moral is 'try em all' cause loads of them just do plain suck for disposal rates. I made the guy at the computer store play a DVD on all of them before I considered purchasing one
i suppose these are <voice type="monty python">"not dead yet!"</voice> and are still in the process of dying, though they have been as such for 2 or so years
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
The specifications of the device as it exists on the TX-2 are as follows:
.014 inch and a 13-bit counter will allow measurements of up to 9 feet. Allowing time for 11-foot reflections to die out, the transmitters can be pulsed at 10- millisecond intervals. Since four transducers are used, the total cycle takes about 40 milliseconds, providing an operating frequency of 25 cps. The hardware is currently arranged so that the computer is interrupted when a new count is completed, at which time it reads the counter value and the transmitter number (see Fig. 1). It is left to software to calculate the x, y, z coordinates from the four distances.
The major inherent advantage of the ultrasonic delay method of determining the position of a stylus is that the measurements are all delay measurements where a digital counter can provide a direct digital readout without requiring an analog to digital conversion. Sound is very convenient for measurement purposes since its propagation velocity is approximately one foot per millisecond. Thus, a 1-megacycle counting rate will resolve distance to
I think I would rather get myself a projector then a flat screen. It would make watching DVD a lot better then staring around a 17" screen. And and makes the ultimate 2d ermersion for thoes 3d games.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is is God's gift to monitors? No. But it's big, it's crisp, and comfortable to work with; I ditched a decent Sony 17" CRT in favor of this thing, and I'm happy with it. FWIW, CompUSA also sells a 14" LCD from the same manufacturer for $199.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
All the lcd panel reviews seem to focus on the same thing, cost. When people review crts they don't go out and find the cheapest monitor they can consider that the standard (That's why you have 'budget' reviews).
I've been using an AG Neovo 17.4" monitor for about eight months and it is absolutely fantastic (IMHO better than the mac 17's). The text is crisp and the color reproduction is oustanding. Yes, it's expensive (~$899US), but if I have to look at something for 10+ hours a day I'm going to spend the extra cash. Besides, how many slashdotters are there that don't seem to have a problem buying $400+ video cards twice a year to make sure they get the extra 200fps out of quake3?
As for gaming, I play UT2003 on it all the time without a single bit of ghosting. One thing from the article that the author should have made manditory was the use of DVI. Why anyone would buy a DVI-only lcd is beyond me. Having both inputs is great for using my laptop (analog output only), but the picture is noticebly better through the DVI connector.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Weed is cheap though, you can get an ounce of good stuff for around $300(on the west coast anyway).
Holy crap! Inflation strikes everything I guess. I remember prices like $100/oz not so long ago. Granted, that was here in Alabama and not the west coast.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Here is a review of the big boys in the LCD industry, that review didn't look at the differences between the best of the best.
The Big Dogs
do u think one day later they could make glass circurts like the one in the latest tom cruise movie (i don't remember but this got to do with the one with the pre-crime unit)? it would be cool to have on of these anyway.
I use a sound spectrogram (voice print) display that I scroll in the same way. Synched to the vertical retrace using DirectX and viewed on a glass monitor at over 80 Hz, the scroll is rock solid and blur free. Try this scroll on ANY LCD (even the 20 ms response kind) and it looks like a blurred mess.
I got the same blurred mess when I bumped the glass monitor refresh to 120 Hz but only updated the scroll every other frame (60 Hz). I pointedly don't get a blurred mess when refreshing and updating at 60 Hz.
What this tells me is that a glass monitor gives a stroboscobic image (it flashes the image and goes dim in between refreshes), and for certain kinds of motion (i.e. a scroll or pan of the entire field), you can do amazing things with glass and get garbage with LCD. It also tells me that LCD will never be any good for motion, no matter how fast the response time, because it is not strobing the image.
In your typical game (or even a movie), only part of the scene is changing over a pretty much static background. On the other hand, if you want a game with a scrolling 2-D display, like a moving "treasure map", you are going to notice this difference. With the right image, the effect is quite striking -- you don't need a "Golden Ear" to hear the difference between a tube and transistor amp.
I suppose LCD will eventually take over, and there will be us few glass monitor holdouts, but the LCD will NEVER do motion well, but the masses of people will resign themselves to LCD's being good enough.
I have one on my alarm clock and it sucks...
Reading between the grammatical lines, I'd say they have to go back and think about exponents some more. The rest of the review is just as hinky.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Kind of funny that two of the most highly regarded makes of LCD monitors are ignored.
Glass/LCD isn't a good distinction. LCD monitors often sandwich the liquid crystals between layers of glass. (Which can shatter, which is no fun.)
Look, let me clear up some common misconceptions.
LCDs do not refresh at a certain rate per second like CRTs. In fact, once a pixel is set on an LCD, that pixel remains set to that color until it is changed.
THERE ARE NO UPDATES ON AN LCD. Each pixel is wired, and stays the same color until it's signal changes.
This is why there is noticable blur on an LCD. On a CRT, we would just see the whole screen getting updated at an incredibly low rate and call it insane flicker. But LCDs simply have a certain delay between when you change the pixel's color signal, and when the pixel gets updated. It looks blurry because it's not uniform rederawing of the screen like a CRT refresh.
There are three problems presently with LCDs that manufacturers will have to address before they overthrow CRTs:
*Even highend LCDs do not have the response time to even deliver 60fps video without blurring, and by far games are the worst thing to view on an LCD with a slow response time. As you look around and maneuver, the whole scene is blurred. The best LCDs on the market right now have around 25-30ms response rate, which is barely above 30fps. I believe we had this debate years ago ( 60 vs 30 ), and if the horsepower in today's video cards is anything to judge by, I'd say 60fps minimum won. I know personally I can't live with anything less. Sure, not everyone needs this kind of response time, but making it avaliable for the performance player is still a necessity.
*Most lowend mass-market LCDs have even worse response times (~45ms), and end up looking terrible when you view a video, or even when you're just scrolling through Explorer. People have come to expect a certain responsiveness and capability after paying for a multigigahertz toaster.
*Very few LCD screens have addressed the fact that their contrast ratios are terrible, even compared to cheap CRTs. I know a lot of you are proponents of LCDs because of their lack of flicker, but the truth is low contrast can cause just as much strain on the eyes, especially when reading.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
..and I do game *development*.
Since owning my first monochrome-screen notebook computer, I've always been a fan of LCD screens. I'm pretty happy with how far they've come. Right now I'm using a nice 18" Dell-branded flat panel monitor through a DVI connector from a GEForce 4 at native 1280x1024 resolution.
I still use CRT's at home because replacing my dual 17" CRT setup would be expensive (but if I could cheaply swap them for LCD's [even smaller 15" ones] - I would).
I won't lie and say that there are *no* blurring issues with modern LCDs, but frankly - it's pretty damned good (worlds better than the first LCD panels) and I'm happy to gain razor-sharp square pixels.
A couple of years ago I bought a 17" 1280x1024 analog-interface LCD from Planar Systems - either the CT1744Z or a direct predecessor, I don't quite remember. It came with built-in speakers (I don't care that much about sound so that was a plus; YMMV) and a built-in four-port USB hub that hadn't even been mentioned in the literature. It was under $1000 then, and is now down to $650 (at Insight.
I just have to say, this is a great monitor, and I wish more people knew about the brand. It never seems to be included in these types of roundups, which is a shame because I think it would do very well. Compared to other LCD monitors I've looked at the Planar is bright, it has good contrast (400:1) and pixel response time (15ms rise, 10ms fall), etc. The interpolation actually works rather well, though I still prefer to get dot-for-dot accuracy on a smaller display area in most cases; unlike some LCD monitors, this one gives you the choice. IMO Planar's combination of performance, features and price spanks any of the monitors that were in this review.
And no, I don't have any relationship with Planar other than that of a very satisfied customer. I just like to acknowledge when people work hard to create good products.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I have a Dell Latitude with a 15" LCD screen running natively at 1600x1200, and it looks fantastic. Why the hell can't I get a standalone LCD with that high a resolution? 15" LCDs max out at 1024x768; 17" at 1280x1024. Half the reason that text is so clear on my laptop screen is the high resolution, and that advantage disappears for a standalone.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Couldn't be stuffed reading the parent post, but...
how about: "Hi! I'm an ABC model XYZ LCD, widescreen, 30ms update, 1280x1024, 300:1 contrast"
And so on?
You get a bonus what?
I thought you meant LCDs as in LCD text displays like CrystalFontz or MatrixOrbital! Shucks...
thelocust[dot]org
In 1999 Apple invested $100 million into Samsung and uses their LCDs for their own displays.
--- What?
Originally, I had walked in to Staples planning on buying a 17" NEC CRT, but for $299.99 I couldn't pass up a 15" NEC LCD. More desk space, easy on the eyes, lower power consumption, easier to carry around, 'coolness factor' Here's my gripes: Doesn't work with the SGI's and Sun's I buy from eBay. What would you expect from 1024x768 @ 60Hz? Can be confusing with Linux at first. Redhat 7.3 (for example) worked fine, but some other's don't detect it right and you get to have some fun. Nothing major, it's just not plug-n-play.
Does anyone out there know of the environmental impact of LCDs vs CRTs. I know that with the traditional CRT their is a high toxic metal content - lead, phosphorous,cadmium, barium and mercury. Also I think that they take more energy to produce. I have not seen similar concerns expressed with the production and disposal of LCDs. It could be of course that one can recylce the content of a CRT but not that of LCDs. Any comments welcome.
Semper ubi sub ubi
That's one nice chunk of hardware. But, did you happen to checkout the power consumption on that bad boy? 135W! That's a tremendous ammount of power for an LCD! IIRC, Viewsonic's 19" LCD eats about 50 watts, which was about on average for LCDs that size when I was researching my next purchase.
Heck.. My Viewsonic P220F 22" CRT is rated at 160W average, just 25 watts more than the IBM LCD.. Still, I would not mind at all, if one landed on my lap.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
One thing that really upsets me about thes LCD reviews is that the authors are totally lazy. They say "LCD's are more expensive up-front, but they're smaller and save desk space." Fine, but that statement is useless without numbers.
1) Real estate
Save desk space? Whatever, LCDs let you save floor space by getting a smaller desk. So, how's this pay? Well, the initial cost of the LCD should probably go up a bit, since most folks don't have a narrow desk. So, tack on $50 as a base cost for a new desk. (If you shop at IKEA, you can get a new top and re-use your existing legs, driving the cost down towards like $25. If you're seriously rich, maybe you'll drop $500 on a new desk, but you probably already own the LCD.)
So, now the repeating costs. A 2' desk that's 6 feet wide will save you 6 aq'. In Manhattan, a 1000 sq' apartment is $2000/mo. or $2/sq'/mo. In Pittsburgh, it's more like $.10/sq'/mo. Obviously, where you live makes a difference. So, annually, we have:
LCD Savings
Cheap cities: $7/yr
Expensive cities: $144/yr (no wonder that every business in Manhattan buys LCDs as a matter of course)
Note that the payoff period for the desk is more than 9 years in Pittsburgh, so there is about 0 space savings.
2) Power
Unless you live in California, I think electricity's about $.07/kW/h. Let's assume you use power saving reasonably and stuff. If you work at home, or multiple people use your computer throughout the day, the monitor's probably going to be on like 12 hrs/day. If you're a more causal user, it's probably more like 4. If you use your computer to read email once a week, you don't read slashdot.
So, according to the article, monitors use 100w, LCDs use 50. Assume you use your computer 260 days per year (5 weeks/year not using). For the heavy user, CRT is 100*12*260*.07/1000 = $21/yr. The causal user is $7/yr. LCDs are half that, for a cost savings of $10 and $4.
So, how expensive are LCDs? Well, 4 years seems a reasonable length of time to own a monitor. So here's a comparison for a 17" LCD and 19" CRT (which have about the same viewable area). Assumes the initial cost of the LCD is $650(+50 in Manhattan), CRT is $250. Lists the cost difference of an LCD:
Manhattan (heavy use): $152 less
Manhattan (light use): $144 less
Pittsburgh (heavy use): $260 more
Pittsburgh (light use): $384 more
Hopefully this ads a touch of rigor to your buying decision. I suspect that if you live outside the energy-subsidized US, the energy costs will become more significant. If you live in a hot climate, you might want to factor in A/C costs (see below). Also not factored in is the reduced eyestrain with LCDs. For those of you who work long hours, this is probably worth the LCD price on its own.
For another take on TCO, which is more detailed WRT power & cooling, but seems less useful to me, check out this page.
I have a 15" Eizo LCD flat panel, and it is by far the best monitor I've ever owned. Very fast pixel disposal, very even colors and brightness from top to bottom. Wide viewing angle. About the only bad thing I can say about it is that you can't rotate the screen 90 degrees, but I'd never use that feature, anyways.
Excellent brightness and contrast. Black is excellent. Eizo also has image smoothing built-in, but I never use it.
Great for gaming. Unreal Tournament and Castle Wolfenstein are totally smooth. No ghosts. No slowness.
If you're in the market for an LCD panel, make sure you audition an Eizo, as well. Fantastic monitors (CRT and LCD panel both).
Click on this link, download the program called TF32, open any WAV file, click with the left mouse to first place left cursor than right cursor, click to down arrow to zoom in, and work the scroller control to scroll the spectrogram. Try this on a CRT and then on an LCD, and then contact cspeech@chorus.net if you think I don't know what I am talking about.
I sure hope your eyes are good. My Dell C800 has a 15 incher that will do 1600x1200 and I tried coding on it -once-. I could recognize shapes and colors, and if I got really close I could read words ... but functionally on a 15" 1280x1024 is about as good as it gets.
... get one, a 15" LCD is almost exactly the same size as your 17" CRT - spend two weeks with it and you will never go back to glass.
Sure wish my desktop 15" LCD could do 1280x1024 though - it is an Envision with incredible color, crisp, clear, the black is about the darkest black I have ever seen and the whites are klan white - but 1024x768 is not quite enough real estate to make me happy.
For the nay-sayers on LCD's
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Ummm... Taco? Could you please stop eating my display?
I have a Samsung 181T (18 inch thin bezel) TFT LCD. I have had it since Jan/Feb this year. I play Ghost Recon without noticing any problems even looking for ghosting. I watch DVDs exclusively on this monitor and never noticed any problems.
In my home office in the summer, it produces a fraction of the heat of my 19" CRTs. It has also allowed me to push the monitor farther back on the desk to increase the distance to my eyes and give me more workspace to clutter up.
Not being able to use lower resolutions doesn't bother me. I bought a decent GEforce3Ti200 video card and run everything at 1280x1024 (Ghost Recon at 1280x1024x32 bit colour looks pretty amazing on this one compared to my 19" LG and 19" Viewsonic CRTs!... also when I compare the colours on my LCD to the colours on the CRTs, the TFT wins hands down especially whites). I've done plenty of photo editing and everything always looks crisp, bright and colourful. The 181T is also very good even when you're looking at angles.
It was expensive, but I stare at the monitor for hours on end and work in text most of the time so it's reduced eye strain and there's no glare, just a gorgeous matte finish.
I bought the Samsung MP151, for much cheaper than what they listed, and with the tv tuner. Amazing thing. You can working on your computer while watching tv on PIP, which can be placed anywhere in the screen. Or you can switch it around, turn it into a tv, using the remote to switch either from PC to TV to the other 2 video connections. The speakers aren't half bad. Replaced my desktop speakers and my ati tv wonder. I'm thinking about hooking up my dvd player and my vcr to this guy. I strongly recommend if you are trying to free up space.
doesn't give a cash bonus but they give you the week of Christmas off. In many respects, that's even better than cash since we get to spend more time with family.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
(I guess "CRT" is just an Apple trademark for Color Raster Technology).
Well if it is, you can expect a stack of cease-and-desist letters from Apple lawyers tomorrow morning.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Okay, I'm looking at the displays page on the Apple store*. All of the LCDs list an Apple computer as a hardware requirement.
That, obviously, can't be the case, but I'm wondering what PC hardware I need in order to use one of these puppies?
(* That link'll probably give you a "session timed-out" error on that link. Just click "return to store", then scroll down for "displays" on the left side menu.)
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I have the pleasure of working on an apple 22inch cinematic display at work, and use a 21 inch CRT at home. I would give my left pinky (i mean i dont use it) to have another Apple LCD. There are simply awesome, and for all you gamers that say LCD suck for gaming have simply never playing quake3 on this monitor...As nice as the apples monitors are, they still dont compare to http://www.formac.com/p_bin/?cid=solutions_display s_gallery2010
They are simply the best in the world
how to spend that Christmas bonus check!
(bitter humor)
No no no! Since none of us will be getting a Christmas bonus check from our employers, we should give ourselves a bonus check!
Order a bunch of these babies for your office, and then steal one! Now THAT'S a bonus, and is what Christmas in the IT world is all about!
(/bitter humor)
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Earlier a commentator mentioned tha slow update times of LCD screens as a bane for gamers and the condition got labeled 'Ghosting'. Ironically enough the thread was labelled 'Hello Ignorance'.
The Worldcom NOC is still in the process of replacing over 100 20" SUN screens because of the real ghosting issue. To wit, screen will show ghosts of previous screens that can take over ten minutes to fade (and if that monitoring view is used often, the view can become permanent). It's not the same physical condition as CRT burn in, but the effect is the same.
In summary: Don't plonk a large sum down on a LCD monitor until either a reviewer addresses whether that model is ghost free, or you've seen that model in a production deployment behaving itself.
i have spoken with LCD fluorescent tube manufactures. supposedly, these tubes dim significantly after a few years.
unfortunately, these tubes are not end-user replaceable.
so, you spend multiple times what you'd spend on a CRT, only to have the thing lose half of it's brightness a few years later. the simple solution would be to replace the tubes, but you can't because the LCD unit is designed to be disposable.
until it is possible to easily replace the fluorescent tubes in an LCD panel, i won't be investing in this technology.
I'm planning on spending a fair bit on a monitor at some point. CRT? LCD? Nah, gimme a 50" plasma. Currently they're 1366x768 max, though hopefully 1920x1080 (max HDTV res) will appear at some point. Has anyone out there gamed much on one of these babies? There's gotta be a rarely-used conference room someone here sneaks into...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Hmm. I have a pair of NEC 1530V monitors connected to a 1.2Ghz PIII with GeForce4 MX440 video card. Playing RTCW I get around 80-90 FPS on interior scenes and maybe 40 on exterior.
I don't notice any blurring, or have any problem playing the game. There may be some, but it's not substantial enough to be an issue.
Contrast is an issue in games. Whenever I start up the game, I have to go in and manually adjust the contrast settings. Once I do that, then I can see in all the dark corners, etc.
I'd have to say your comments are based on the LCD screens that we had available 4-5 years ago, or even on some of the cheaper laptops today. Either that or you are exagerrating the issues.
I'm on 24x7 call during Christmas this year, but I still have a job. On top of having some great coworkers, an interesting job, and a technically literate manager who ISN'T an ass, that's not a bad bonus at all!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The thing that really puts me off LCDs is the resolution scaling...as a gamer, I like to be able to play all my games at different resolutions depending on the kind of performance I can get at any particular res...not having the same visual quality at anything but geometric multiples of the native res kinda defeats the purpose...
The best thing about this monitor is that you can rotate it and use it in a portrait orientation...
This really doesn't seem to have caught on, and I confess to being surprised... after using a display like this for a while, you'll wonder why you could *ever* want it the other way around for documents, programming, web browsing, etc, etc... about the only thing a landscape display is good for is games.
The SGI 1600SW. It's getting old, but it's still the king.
You might want to hold off a couple of years. I have one of the 2nd gen plasma screens (the current new ones are 3rd/4thish) and using it as a monitor pretty much sucks. If you use it at the native res it looks okay, but nothing to write home about. Definitely better than any of the TV-out including the matrox and much better than any of the consoles but the graphics are not sharp. Also the most glaring problem the screens do get burn in AND they have horrible brightness compared to LCDs and monitors.
With that said, the DVD watching and console gaming experience is pretty much second to none. I prefer the screen over LCD projectors.
--- I do not moderate.
Relating to the topic but not really; has anyone found a Prophet view 920 ANYWHERE?
Seriously I've been looking for months, both this and Tom's give it good reviews.
I read many posts saying that LCD will never catch up a good CRT, that LCD still have a long way to go, that numbers don't lie, etc. at least wrt fast moving things on-screen and action packed games.
All valid points, I concede, but I want to give my experience. With my workmates, we usually give up the lunch break, have a quick sandwich, and fire up Unreal Tournament on our laptops. One year old stuff, mind you, nothing groundbreaking (Asus L8400 and Acer 212TX). Original UT, not UT2003 - the latter doesn't even install on the machines!
Well, just today we totalled a 20-0 CTF, with our lame LCDs. We were four, against four "godlike" (= max difficulty level) bots. I know that bots, even max skill, aren't a match for human creativity, but still, we managed to wind up a nice score on LCDs.
Are we really good (I dearly doubt that), or actually a slow-refreshing LCD isn't an unsurmountable obstacle in fast action playing?
Can I say "just good enough"?
A while back I was in the market to replace my second monitor (previously a ViewSonic 15" CRT) with an 15" LCD. I have a 17" Apple LCD as my primary display and absolutely love it.
I figured that since I have both DVI and VGA out (Radeon 7000 as a second video card), I would look for LCDs with DVI in. I was amazed to find that DVI-capable 15" LCDs generally run anywhere from $70-$150 more than a similar VGA-only LCD.
Does anyone have any idea why this is?
(And, yes, I read the reports that said that DVI did not add that much to the display quality).
I ended up with an NEC 1550V running VGA because of the cost/quality.
(And for everyone knocking Apple LCDs - running the NEC next to the Apple, the Apple is clearly a better monitor. The NEC is nice, but the Apple is even better so)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
is a standard power interface, when i can use any power cord from any other screen to power another, then i'll think about buying them. our customers have anywhere from 2 to 30 computers all with a mish mash of monitors, but when one goes i can always swap it iwht a spare from the back shelf and have no problems, with LCDs they tend to use proprietary power supplies, and that ain't good enough.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
From what I've read OLED should address that. The OLED itself responds instantaneously and the transistors don't need to be built on glass which has limited the type of TFT that can be built, though /. has another story on the front page about Sharp's remedy to this problem.
15 and 17 inch?
Why downgrade? Everyone has a 21 inch CRT, right?
Although there's many aspects that effect the performance of a screen, viewable area is by far the most imprtant.
The only people who should be interested in this are people who have very tiny desks, people who travel with their PC (most travelers use laptops), or people who live in areas where electricity is very expensive.
Congrats to the laptop buyers who are benifiting from lower LCD prices due to idiots wasting money on a crappy LCD when they could have a professional quality CRT for the same price.
And BTW since my CRT refresh rate is 100Hz-120Hz, my sensitive eyes don't get strained after a full day of staring at my beautifull, huge, high quality CRT.
I recently purchased a nifty Toshiba 5105-607 which was, sadly, neglected from the last shashdot poll concerning laptops.
I have a 17" lcd monitor and I dont' know the manufacturer the but monitor is awesome. The max rez (which i run at) is 1600x1200. One thing I wonder is why LCDs are so expensive when the total cost of this laptop was purchased for $1500 off of Fleabay (and probably around $1700-$2000 msrp). It tends to make me think that LCDs (alone) are overpriced (since something similar to this would cost an easy $1000).
Btw I'm not a monitor freak but for Warcraft and Unreal it's performed quite well. Actually this is my only gaming machine and i think for hte majority of people otu there it wouldn't matter (since I do consider myself an avid Counterstrike player where ghosting really counts).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
But the Iiyama has much blacker blacks and whiter whites than the CRT. BY FAR. I cannot STAND to look at the Hitachi unless absolutely necessary. Compared to the LCD, the CRT looks blurry and washed out. My eyes actually ache after looking at it for a while.
Statistics are not everything. Go to a retail store and have an actual LOOK at a screen before you buy it. Who cares what some number says, if your EYES are telling you it looks awesome?
Health.
For two reasons:
Lower EM than CRT. For those that have to stare at monitors all day, not being bombarded with EM radiation and beta particles is a definite plus. Even todays "low-radiation" models still put out a good dosage (I don't have figures to back this up).
No flicker. Even at 120Hz, a CRT is still continuously blanking and retracing the image, and your brain has to continuously reconstruct the series of pictures and blanks into a static picture. With prolonged exposure, this leads to massive fatigue, as well as eye strain. Don't believe me? Try waving your hand in front of your CRT while it's displaying a white background. Now try it with an LCD. Compared to the CRT, it's like looking at a sheet of paper. Much more comfortable.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Advantage of LCD, not CRT.
Now where's that 'preview' button?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It seems to me that, unlike a crt, which scales in three dimensions with increased screen size, an lcd screen should have cost proportional to the screen area. So why can't I buy a 30inch lcd for $1500?
Viewing angle - When viewed from the side, above, or below, images on LCD monitors become noticeably darker, and colors start to get washed out.
Bullshit. The colors on my 16" Sharp LT-1620 do not look any different from even a 80 degree angle looking onto it. If you buy a cheap TFT with no anti-glare and giant bevels (as all these seem to have) then you get what you pay for.
My Sharp was about $700 for 16", and I got what I paid for. Quality.
Stretching requires interpolation, which inevitably degrades image quality, especially noticeable when displaying text. (CRTs, by contrast, are capable of syncing to multiple scan modes and showing multiple resolutions natively.)
Again, I call bullshit. CRTs are made up of many round phosphors just like TFTs are made up of many square pixels. A CRT has a native resolution just like a TFT, except it's a bit higher, and because the pixels are softer and more rounded, you don't notice the effects of scaling so much.
That said, my Sharp scales superbly, and even has a feature to adjust the amount of scaling, and how 'fuzzy' it is. I can get non-native resolutions looking excellent. Again.. this is not something you can do on cheap TFTs.
Their thoughts on 'color resolution' are also mostly BS too.
And why did they pick a whole bunch of TFTs that suck? Not a single screen there has a 25ms response time, VGA *AND* DVI input, and a resolution of 1280x1024. It's either one or the other it seems.
My Sharp has all of those features, as well as anti-glare.
Get out of the review business.
mogorific carpentry experiments
3dfx tried marketing one of their graphic chipsets that had a feature that did just that(ghosting trails). I already had that affect by default on my gaming LCD monitor. Yes I use an LCD for gaming as do my other fellow gamers.
The ghosting effect is not enough to cause any problem for all the gamers I have met. Escpecially any decent quality LCD panel nowadays. The quality image makes up for any ghosting overall regardless.
LCDs not gaming capable is just FUD.
Black not a bad pixel.
I picked up a 172t, the big brother of the winner in this shootout and it is awesome
I got it for $550 from ecost and everything about it is awesome. Had the writer of this article been able to get his hands on a 172t (which were recently backordered for miles) I am sure that would have won. The clarity compared to other lcds I have seen is awesome. I cant wait until it is worth it to get a new 8x agp nvidia card with dvi.
--------- I have no signature
Ok, Honestly, what on earth do people put behind their LCD monitors? You're not going to have the plane of the screen any further away from you, so you've got about a foot or so of dead space behind your LCD. (Maybe more for huge CRTs put in retirement, but mine just hangs a few inches off the back of the desk.) I'd almost think of putting a mid-tower case behind there, but then I'd be reaching around the side every time I needed to eject a CD or turn the machine off, and on the other side I'd be able to see all the cabling coming off the back of the case.
You know, I like LCDs, but other than the refresh rate problem and blurring, I do a bit of tinkering with graphics, and I play a few games, so I like to change my resolution once in a while and not have to worry about having the graphics look like garbage 'cause I'm not at my native resolution.
man tunefs | grep fish
They buy their hardware from the same Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers that make everyone else's monitors. Just because they have a fancy shell doesn't make them any better than the rest of the non-Apple LCDs that roll off the same assembly line.
It seems that the Korean companies have reached what the Japanese companies had in the 80s -- in the 70s it used to be cheap "Jap Junk" and Japanese products were truly that cheap and that poorly made. Then in the 80s they started kicking out higher quality stuff at a slightly higher price and now they make world-class products.
Korean products in the 80s were cheap and absolute junk. Remeber the early Hyundais? Same with the electronics industry -- Samsung used to make cheap but not-so-great products. Now they are the leader in the pack for LCDs! They make the LCD panels for the best in the business:
* Dell monitors
* Apple monitors
and their own line (higher models) kicks some butt.
From what I have read, Samsung is able to produce the LCDs themselves fairly cheaply but the most expensive parts are the integrated circuits they have to get from Japan to make the LCDs run, do interpolation and handle analog input.
What I *wish* they would do is sell a stripped-down model with the quality Samsung LCD panel and *no* analog inputs (just DVI), *no* interpolation and otherwise minimal electronics from Japan. My computer is more then powerful enough to handle software scaling in the very few instances I need it and if I use DVI I have no use for paying for all the electronics for analog also.
The probelm is their damn marketing departments. They assume that anyone who wants a quality picture will want all the bells and whistles also and thus only encorporate all the junk into their higher priced models. Also, they assume that anyone who is "l33t" enough to use DVI is also willing to pay a premium even though the DVI electronics is cheaper then the analog->digital circuitry.
Please, for the love of God, make a LCD with a quality screen and skimpy on the bells and whistles! I would definately buy one. Until that day comes, however, I will just wait.
I consider myself a "gamer" at times (I play a lot of games, but I also do real work) and I absolutely love my LCD (a ViewSonic VX900 for those interested.) There are certain instances where there's a little blur in games, but it only occurs over certain colors and you don't even notice it if you're not looking for it. The "text blur" people speak of is nonexistant; I can scroll as fast as I want with no problems.
I will make this suggestion, however. If you're gonna drop a wad on an LCD, you might want to consider dropping a bit more on a video card with DVI. DVI drastically increases image quality over VGA, as it's a full digital signal rather than a digital signal converted to analog and back to digital. As with any big ticket item though, check out your options before you buy, obviously not all LCDs are created equal.
I'm just using the drivers that came with my Matrox G450. Works wonderfully...
sig.
I handle OEM's for Samsung Electronics Visual Display Division/R & D. I can assure you Samsung is at least one of the suppliers manufacturing the Dell 1702FP.
Samsung does not manufacture units for Apple...that would be LG. Perhaps we are talking about panels versus monitors?
I use a Dell Ultrasharp 20" LCD:
25ms response time and everything (usually you can get one on sale - and they are always on sale of some sort - for about 1200 (that's US DOLLARS) or LESS).
I play UT2k3 on it (considered a much faster paced shooting game than others) -- and no problems.
remember -- your eye can only catch 30 fps of refresh (if it's not strobed), and a little while before, you can't even get 25 out of the video-card for Quake 3 -- and we survived that just fine -- i don't see why everyone is bitching about 60Hz refresh / 40Hz refresh is not good enough.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This ghosting debate is much like the tube vs. transistor debate. It's going to go on and on and on well past the time LCD's (or OLED's?) have taken over and the only CRT's you can buy will be four or five times the price they are now. I game on a couple different LCDs (both on laptops) and have noticed no annoying ghosting effects. That's not to say they aren't there, but when I am playing at 1024 at some 100-150 FPS, it just really doesn't seem to matter.
tinfoilmedia
To see the effect, you need to scroll at a slow, constant rate. You can either click on the arrow buttons on the left or the right of the scrollbar thumb, or you can select from the Play menu to scroll at the speed of waveform playback (a 2-4 second display interval of a music or speech WAV file is an optimal display interval).
I am not trying to diss folks who spent money on LCD screens -- I have one at home and one at work. I am trying to convince people that there is something going on with the physiology of vision here, and the difference in the slow spectrogram scroll between the CRT and LCD is something that hits you over the head -- it is not something subtle like the tube amp/transistor amp audio listening example.
The spectrogram is a very narrow, specialized application, but if they stop making CRT's any time soon (like Apple going all-LCD), I am not going to have hardware on which to show smooth-scrolling spectrograms. The spectrogram is not like a 3-D game where you have multiple things moving at different rates. I would concede that the LCD blurries for that kind of scene is something like the people who swear by tube amps and others who think the tube amp people are fanatics.
As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this
kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed.
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3
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