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.

Comments

What about Apple LCDs?

[vought]

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!)

17" 1600 x 1200

[DOsinga]

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.

Depends on the game

[sjbe]

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.

One big problem (literally) with CRT's

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Re:One big problem (literally) with CRT's

[RatBastard]

"Short Neck" CRTs are pretty costly to produce. They need stronger magnets, get knocked out of alighment more easily and suffer higher incidents of misconvergance, IIRC. While they are a nice technology, they tend to be fairly costly in a pretty cut-thorat market segment.

Re:Hello ignorance!

[UnknownSoldier]

> 60Hz is ample for 3d gaming, especially when on an lcd you can't actually see 60Hz flicker...

I concur. I have a 17" AOC LM-700 (1280x1024). First thing I did when I bought it was:

- Play Diablo 2 at 640x480 & 800x600.
- Play Quake 3.
- Watched some DVDs with high action. (Jackie Chan & James Bond.)

I was concerned about potential ghosting and other artifacts (namely aliasing at fractional multiplicative resolutions: 800 does not evenly divide into 1280), but everything looked good. (The LCD applied bi-linear filtering to 800x600 resolutions)

Where LCD's *really* shine (pardon the pun :) is for coding. Text is crystal clear !

Sure a pure green gradient (white to pure green) on my LCD has banding (I figure the LCD only has ~ 7 bits for green), but pictures look great on it whethere they are still or moving ones.

I just wish this review, and Tom's would do a *comprehensive* LCD review.

Cheers

Re:LCD vs CRT

[Triv]

here's a few reasons:

1. LCD's are smaller, have less of a depth to them.
2. LCD's are silent, CRT's have a horrible whine.
3. LCD's don't have that annoying screen refresh that gives people (me, anyway) an awful headache.
4. LCD's use less power. It ads up in the long run.
5. LCS's are brighter, at least in my experience.

YMMV, of course, but those're all the reasons I switched to LCD.

Triv

More to the picture than pixel response time

[Latent Heat]

Remember those old DEC monitors which had this slow-crawl text scroll which actually allowed you to read text while it was scrolling?

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.

No Sony? No NEC?

[Junks Jerzey]

Kind of funny that two of the most highly regarded makes of LCD monitors are ignored.

Standalone LCDs have low res

[jjohnson]

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.