Slashdot Mirror
LCD Overtaking CRT
prostoalex writes "IDC has a new report out, claiming that revenues for LCDs by the end of this year will top the CRT revenues. The only market not susceptible to the shift will be gaming and graphics-intensive applications, where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet."
Burn out a pixel on the LCD's and you're stuck with a very annoying glitch.
well, sure revenues are going to be more, they cost a helluva lot more
i sell illegal drugs
The price is still a bit overwhelming, so I don't think it's only the gaming community refraining.
I'd love to have one, but not for the price of a P4 3ghz.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
Despite this statistic, I think it'll be a long time before CRTs become an uncommon sight on a desktop machine.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Just a note: revenues are different from unit sales. Since LCDs typically (always?) cost more than comparable CRTs, the revenue figures are likely inflated.
I'll be interested to see how long it takes for UNIT SALES of LCDs to surpass CRT monitors. My guess is that it will be within 2 or 3 years.
With these narrow angle displays being standard i can expect to surf porn at work and still get away with it
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
I have no intentions of buying an LCD monitor until the prices are more reasonable. I mean, really, who wants to pay $700+ for a 17inch LCD Screen? not me...
The trick for making LCD revenues pass CRT is simple: Make the LCD monitors more expensive.
Thank you, I will be here all ze week! Don't forget to tip your waitresses!
It would have been interesting to see things expressed in units sold along with revenue. Since the average 17" monitor is probably around half the price of an average 15" lcd (give or take), you can sell a lot fewer of lcd's to generate the same revenue as that of the crt's.
While LCDs are gaining popularity, the cost of an LCD is still much greater than a CRT. Therefore, while the revenue from LCDs might be higher, the number of units is still lower.
A valid comparison would be a 21" monitor. The LCD version would probably cost at least $1200, whereas a CRT could be as low as $600. The same number of units are sold in this case, but the revenue is different by a factor of 2.
Another interesting thought is how much of this growth is accounted for by the growth in laptop sales. You don't see many CRT toting laptops anymore...
I'm on Windows 2000 right now so I get to use pretty much any hardware that has ever been made by anyone anywhere just by plugging it in and waiting a few seconds. I am interested in switching to Linux because I have a lot of free time on my hands and I was hoping to amuse myself by editing text files so my mouse scroll wheel would work.
Cunning linguists
Revenues are going up, yet prices are going down.
This can only mean that they are getting more mainstream.
The only market not susceptible to the shift will be gaming and graphics-intensive applications, where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet.
And graphic intense (Photoshop? Gimp?) programs need high refresh rates? I understand gaming but why would refresh rates matter as much as image quality on LCDs?
Someone who will not pay $700 for a 17in monitor should try and remember 7 years ago when you could not get a good 17in CRT monitor for less tham $700. A 17in LCD was nearly $7,000.
If only Bill Gates had a penny for every time Windows crashed... oh wait.. he does!
In the graphics design realm it's rarely about refresh rates (unless you're working specifically with animation or motion media production). The color calibration just isn't there yet, the level threshold dropps off at the bottom (reducing the low luminosity contrast) and turns to glare far too low in the histogram (almost eliminating useful high-luminosity contrast).
They're also sensitive to heat, both from the operating environment and duration of use causing further shifts in appreciable color and (perceived) refresh.
OLED display's promise to eliminate the contrast and color calibration issues, but until those are more viable in cost and lifetime graphics design will still rely alost solely on CRT's.
Any spoon would be too big.
... costs five times as much as another technology can sell 1/5th the volume of the other, and still have the same revenue.
Personally I will be a lot more impressed when the volume of sales of CRTs is less than the volume of sales of LCD screens at the same or higher resolution.
Considering a 15" LCD is visually compariable to a 17" CRT, and I have seen pricing along the lines of $500 for 15" LCDs and $99 for 17" CRTs, I don't really expect the crossover to happen this year.
-Rusty
You never know...
Higher revenue leads to companies thinking this is a viable (desktop) technology. That will stimulate more research, more development, and more production.
And that means that one day they'll be cheap enough for me to own; a simple pricewatch check shows that I could get a 17-inch LCD monitor for $333 OR spend $329 on a 21-inch CRT monitor. Which do you think (given only $350) I'd rather do?
Also, this article makes an interesting claim that LCDs haven't done as well as they might've because "the human eye needs to see 25 frames per second to be tricked into thinking that motion is continuous, and LCD monitors have often failed to meet this specification". Um, my laptop LCD has a fixed 60Hz refresh rate. If that's what Computerworld is talking about, they're full of it.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Am I misunderstanding something, or was the article author just intending a more generic meaning of refresh rates?
/syle
First, as previously mentioned, LCDs are more expensive per monitor than CRTs, so a smaller amount of total sales will still yield the same net revenue.
Second, the new wave in desktop computing appears to be smaller, thinner machines. Almost every computer advertisement these days sells LCD displays, because they look pretty and save space, so they make for good advertising -- and as a result they sell better.
Finally, of course, this is the year of the laptop. (Steve Jobs said so, it has to be true!) I'm afraid I can't provide any hard evidence, but I think the percentage of total computers sold that are laptops is increasing at a pretty fast clip, and that of course boosts LCD revenues.
All told, there are plenty of reasons LCDs have gained in popularity; this isn't that much of a shocker.
-- shayborg
Recently my 21 inch CRT failed and I had the need to get a new monitor. I checked out a lot of different options but as it turns out i ended up with a 19 inch lcd and i think its just wonderful. The ghosting in FPS games is small but noticable but its not so hard to adjust to and i dont see any ghosting in any other apps, including viewing divx movies and watching DVDs. before you pass judgement on LCDs you should check out this latest generation. With each new series the problems become smaller and less annoying. Also i no longer need a fan in my window to cool my office off, my old crt threw a lot of heat.
Won't you be my my neighbor?
Until LCDs get cheaper than CRT, most corporate customers will still avoid them.(especially in the current economy where the bean counters are in charge)
This is old news. At work I regularly talk to salespeople from Eizo, Philips and Compaq. They all saw LCD revenues overtake CRT revenues somewhere halfway last year. Also, even a considerable number of graphics people is already buying or considering large LCD's. Not in the least because LCD companies are doing everything to produce screens that even these demanding people will accept.
Well of COURSE they're selling more LCDs than CRTs. LCDs are the "new thing" in monitors now, they're spiffy and flat and they're getting cheaper too. They're lightweight and easier to carry, and take up much less deskspace, and you never have to worry about getting those awful curves at the side of the screen in those weird resolutions... ...so naturally, everyone's replacing their dead, broken and outdated CRTs with these new-fangled things that are just getting better and better. Never mind that the screen's not so bright and moving pictures on the screen don't look quite right, or that games don't look quite as well on them, or that they still cost more - they're new and getting better, that's what matters.
;)
Seriously though, flatscreens are nice. Wouldn't you buy one if you had to replace your old CRT that got colour-warped when someone left it next to magnets too long, or died when you dropped it?
Even in a business environment CRT still has benefits. It has variable resolution to begin with, and can be adjusted to match the needs of the user. A CAD user will want to run 1600x1200 at very least; other people may want resolution as low as 800x600.
One of the big questions is where are all these CRT's going to end up? I have no problem finding takers for old computers, but nobody wants to take 15in and soon 17in CRT monitors. Selling them on eBay doesn't work because usually the shipping is 3x more than the monitor itself. 21in CRT's that cost $1500 three years ago are going for under $100. I've seen quite a few companies with closets full of old CRT's.
Ha-ha, yes it was intended. Anyways.
> gaming and graphics-intensive applications, where
> the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet
It's getting harder and harder these days to complain about refresh on an LCD. Granted it's not as good as a tried and true CRT, but the point is that LCD's running at native resolution are doing quite well. To the point that an average person won't notice any difference between a CRT and an LCD.
My better half owns a recent LCD. She plays plenty of games on it, from everquest to the latest sim city title to crappy web based flash games. I haven't yet taken the chance to "stress test" with a round of quake but for the most part I've been pleasantly surprised to how well the LCD responds to modern games. The images are bright, reasonably crisp, and it does all this over a crappy legacy analog vga port.
Maybe a "videophile" will find stuff to complain about, but I've found myself quite impressed by the performance an LCD can offer. These days I consider them equal to a CRT.
Been eating dogfood lately?
...with LCDs is that they're generally lower res at a given size than I'd run an equivilent-sized CRT at. In other words, I can crank a CRT to a higher display resolution than an LCD can.
To get the res I'm used to on a 21" CRT (1920x1440), I need some $3k 24" LCD display.
I do a lot of graphic work, and I have to agree: the CRT is just more reliable. I have an iBook I preview stuff on to see what a design looks like on LCD (a lot of light-coloured stuff on white will literally dissapear on LCD), but I always work on the CRT (nice 17" Trinitron flatscreen, mind you).
About the games, though... I've played Wolfenstein and other fast-moving things on an iMac and I didn't see what the big deal was for those. It looked great to me.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I have the same problem with my CRT.
I game on an LCD monitor all the time, and i love it. I find it way easier on my eyes. Now, granted, i have a slight visual disability, but i don't think that would make LCD's "better, just for me".
"...where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet."
;)
I believe the poster is mistakenly trying to apply CRT terminology to LCDs. The refresh rate of a CRT, which is the number of times an image is painted on the screen per second, doesn't quite apply to LCDs. What does apply, however, is the response time. This is usually measured in ms and refers to the time period for a pixel to completely change its state. Response times are typically around 25 ms, but are often slower for black -> white transitions. Slow response gives the effect known as ghosting and makes these panels undesirable to gamers.
As for the graphics artists, it's kind of a mixed bag. They get perfect geometries as a trade off for true color. Most modern LCDs operate at only 24 bit color.
The office user/casual gamer makes up the vast majority of the population and won't notice any of these downfalls. Thus, despite the price, these things are selling like hotcakes due to the easiness on the eyes and uber-coolness. Besides, chicks dig em.
"Software is like sex. It's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
I just bought 2 of them with dvi inputs and a new video card with dual dvi out (was an Asus card, Geforce 4 mx440) and I couldn't be happier. Both of them are perfect, no dead or bad pixels. And to my surprise, there is almost no streaking when I play UT2k3 or UT.
I guess the manufacturing process has reached a point where they can get it perfect most of the time (my laptop has a bad pixel in the upper right corner but that doesn't bother me).
I was worried that I'd get one with some dead pixels and hafta go through the hassle of returning it, but then again, I heard that Dell has a pretty good return policy for that kind of thing.
So anyways, a month and $1000 later (they were 15" ones) and I am entirely satisfied with my 2 lcd monitors... I might even tell my parents to buy one for their computer... I say go for it!
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Pro's:
- Small form factor
- More power efficient
Cons:- poor color support
- poor resolution
- poor refresh rates
- easily damage
- blown pixels irreparable
- additive color model
- poor viewing angle
- expensive
so why should i want to buy one again, because it seems LCD hasnt got much going for it on the desktopCRTs take a large amount of real-estate when it comes to the desk in which an employee has to work. In the long term, a farm of CRT cubicals versus a farm of LCD cubicals will consume a much larger portion of energy costs (considered company overhead). Display costs alone are appropriated from a specific budget. However, rarely does a department ever worry about the higher cost of energy until the overhead budget continues to swell. This does indeed turn the heads of bean counters.
Cheap CRTs have the notoriety of having short "brightness" spans so much that a company would rather purchase a more expensive brand name just to ensure that the longevity of the display device will be sufficient.
The company I work for alone has begun the mass upgrade of computers throughout the building. So far, it's about a 8:2 ratio of LCDs to CRTs. Even so, the CRT purchases are for individuals who require 21" screens. The average LCD purchase is for a 17" screen.
The banks in the city I work in have begun adopting LCD screens over the small CRT monitors to reduce the amount of breaks necessary by tellers to relieve eye-stress, theoretically increasing productivity.
Hospitals (a big corporate customer base) have begun the mass adoption of LCD screens because they take much less space than their CRT counterparts and produce a much smaller amount of electrical interface when turned on or off.
These are just a few examples of how LCDs are more practical and efficient - spearheading the adoption of LCDs as the display of choice.
Ayup
Right now my wife and I use three CRT-based monitors. Two of these (17 inchers. Mine, of course), were picked up at the ARC for $4.99 each and either is easier to look at than any LCD monitor I've looked at except for the beautiful, monstrously expensive Apple Cinema Display. And even that doesn't look as good as our 21" Viewsonic G810. ("Look at", not "show off.")
I'll deal with the heat. I'll pay for the electricity. You find a source for extra eyes _then_ maybe I'll be interested...
My main computer has an LCD, and I can stay up late gaming or coding on it with no problems. But those CRTs man those will make you see lights and burn holes through your brain. Ouch.
"revenues for LCDs by the end of this year will top the CRT revenues."
Of course, according to current street prices, it only takes ~25 19" LCDs to make the same gross revenue as ~100 19" CRTs.
Revenue is an extremely poor indicator of a new technology's presence in a marketplace.
Last time I heard of that, the flyback transformer had been cracked. It wasn't a severe issue...it just meant that the crack was vibrating, causing the noise.
Unless it was a cheap monitor, your transformer should have been overspecced. As a result, you should still just be eating into a margin. It may result in a slightly decreased picture quality, though. Try the highest and lowest resolutions on your monitor, to see if you can see the difference. It's up to you whether or not to shell out the money for a new display.
What's this Submit thingy do?
IDC has a new report out, claiming that revenues for LCDs by the end of this year will top the CRT revenues.
Could that be because a lcd costs like 3x that of a comparable crt even though there is no real increase in production costs?
so, I play games every once in a while (thanks Transgaming), and am thinking of getting a new monitor for my home computer. My question is, are the refresh rates so slow that it's practically impossible to play games on them, or is it only a problem for those people who are the gaming equivalent of an audiophile.
considering that I do mostly non-game stuff on my home-computer, I'll probably get an LCD because they're easy on my eyes, and they look so damn cool, but I was just wondering about the gaming degradation factor.
Dude, to me that high pitch is a sign of impending death. I've had 2 monitors die on me (CRT) and the sound was the thing I noticed both times. I won't place a bet on WHEN but I'd guess you have about 6 months after the point it gets REALLY annoying.
I love my LCD but reality is that ghosting (blurring of moving images) is very noticeable on LCDs. They are nowhere near CRTs for watching movies and such. However, for text work (99% of my time) I love it. The decision boils down to WHAT you do with your PC. If you game or do a lot of multimedia, it's not as good as a CRT. In my case, I couldn't go back to CRTs since I'd lose the "crispness" of text on an LCD.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I have an 18" Hitachi CML181SXW and it's plenty good enough for all the games I play, including shooters like UT 2k3.
I don't know what people are talking about when they say that LCD's are not ready for games. I don't notice any ghosts or any other strange artifacts when I play games.
Who cares about refresh rates if the resolution is laughable. For about $250 I can buy here great 17" 95kHz flat screen CRT. This means 1600x1200 (at 75Hz) which is essential for me. I could sell arm and leg and both kidneys and still wouldn't buy LCD with these specs.
;)
Robert
PS. Don't complain about ``tiny, unreadable text''. Use larger fonts as I do and you won't have to bother with AA fonts -- it's done in hardware
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
I've seen a case where this was happening and propping the monitor up at a slant would stop it from happening. It was really weird, but I eventually tried turning the refresh rate down and that fixed it.
broke users who demand quality.
cheap LCD monitors look like my old laptop monitor. I didn't complain too much about the laptop because it was only a laptop. No way I'm paying twice as much for a monitor that doesn't work as well as my dinosaur of a CRT.
"no way I'm paying" means "I can not afford", in this case.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
The only market not susceptible to the shift will be gaming and graphics-intensive applications, where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet.
not quite. For gaming it may be refresh rate- for "graphics-intensive applications"(which I take to mean photo/graphics editing, prepress, etc.), the problem is mostly that CRTs blow away LCDs on color quality and consistency. My laptop's screen takes a while to "warm up" the backlighting tube, and you get a color and brightness change. They're also grossly inferior in resolution on the desktop market; 15"(17" crt equivalent) can only do 1024x768. My 17" monitor can do 1600x1200. If you want 1280x1024, you gotta get a 17" LCD(19" CRT equivalent.) That's LAME. Why are NONE of the laptop screens, with great resolutions, making it to the desktop market?
You also get wildly changing brightness/gamma/color depending upon the viewing angle, so bad that the top of the image can look different from the bottom of the image. Move your head slightly, boom, change. No such problem with CRTS; you can look at them at almost any angle.
Whatever happened to that technology whereby they switched to an intermediate color (gross simplification: instead of A -> B, go A->E->B) to get faster response? I think it was mitsubishi that had it? Let me guess, they found people were happy with shitty refresh rates for now, so wait a bit to milk even more $ out of people by making them buy new screens later.
Lastly- profit margins, of course they're higher. The things are bloody expensive and the "latest" "thing", despite being inferior in EVERY regard except a)pixel positioning(only with digital output) b)power use c)desktop space.
They loose on price, color rendition, viewability, and resolution.
Had a Samsung 15" LCD, but now that the big high quality CRTs can be bought on the cheap (used), I found myself switching back. There is just no comparison to a 20" Trinitron running 1600x1200 32bit color at 85hz.
OK, they're small, light, low-power, low-emissions, and they SUCK to look at off-axis. They also suck for extensive motion or really high quality images.
LCDs are fine for moderate graphics, web browsing, and office apps. They're still not good enough for games, for CAD, or for multiple viewers.
You can now buy LCD TVs. They're expensive and they suck. Plasma is much nicer to watch, and the prices aren't that different anymore. If plasma _can_ come down in price, then I predict that LCD will dissappear from the TV market.
Does anyone know how plasma holds up to high resolution text? LCD may end up being a footnote.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Hmmm, so the only thing that keeps lcd's from being perfect is frame rate? Wrong. If you are really trying to view greyscale images in detail you'll go nuts staring at the dots on an lcd. That is analysis of say MRI or CT data in medical applictions. It's not that you'll really see the individual dots but the image will look fuzzier than on a good Trinitron
.
While I agree with a the posts pointing out that LCDs are much more expensive than CRTs; however, this does state that LCDs are getting pretty decent market penetration.
The one main issue I currently see if LCDs, is that they are really good at a specific resolution/refresh rate and everything else either has borders or looks crappy. CRTs also have this limitation; however, looking at a CRT running too high for it's dotpitch looks alot better than a LCD doing the same.
Hopefully, we will begin to see the ability of the OS to run at a specified resolution, and then scale everything to a proporanite amount. I know work is being done on this, but the greater need for it can push development along.
For those of you who aren't sure what I'm taking about try this. Set your monitor to 800x600, then 1024x768, and so on going higher and higher. As you can see everything begins to shrink down in size the higher you go. With scaling it would work differently.
Let's say your monitor's native resolution is 1280x960. You will always run at this resolution; however, the everything is scaled. If you have it scaled to 640x480, everything would be 2x the size it would normally be. Sure having 1/2, and 1/3 of sizes and make things look odd, but it's better than what we currently have.
As for games using this technology. You could have a 3d game. It's running in 1280x960, everything is the same size as at 640x480; however, everything can be alot sharper looking. Some games currently do this, but most still have there HUDs shrink the higher you go. With this 2d objects can also be scaled easily. Also it won't be the responibilty of the game to do this, the OS and display drivers will handle it.
Finally by having the display drivers doing the calculations for scaling, other effects can be added. If anyone has tried any emulators such as the SNES ones, you will see that there are a variety of rendering options. You can select how images are stretched/scaled or more advanced things like Super Eagle that antialias 2D and give it a unique look. Since the display driver is doing the rendering of the scaling, these other effects could be added. Most likely they could even be done in hardware on your graphics card.
With all that said will I be buying a LCD display soon? Nope, I'll wait until they can do 1600x1200/85Hz. I need my games to run smooth. :)
The new 16ms response time LCDs are great for gaming. I bought the new NEC LCD1760NX-BK (black) LCD monitor last month.
The monitor's 16ms response time is good for gaming and much better than the 17" Dell 1702FP (40ms) which I had returned.
There is also much less color banding with the NEC compared to the Dell; however, some color banding is still visible, most notably with my digital photgraphs. Additionally, the colors seem to be off slightly, with colors veering towards blue.
I do not consider the color-issues major as it is only a slight problem and I am not a graphic artist for which it would be a MAJOR problem. I would not buy this monitor if colors were terribly important.
The biggest complaint I have is that there appears to be a small vertical spacing between pixels. This results in a very faint, but disturbing, 'striped' effect. I find it highly distrubing in applications and especially while viewing photographs. I do manage to forget about it occasionally. I never notice it during games.
The NEC is a great monitor for gaming, but nothing else.
I don't get it, why are people so in love with LCDs? It seems to me, that one in ten people would actually benefit from them in any serious way (mobility or desk-space saver). My computer moves maybe once every two years, and I have a big desk... why the hell do I need an LCD? I think most people are in the same boat.
The advantages to CRT are screen size, price, resolution, contrast, and refresh rate. LCD is mobility and depth? Seems like the clear winner in most cases is CRT. I wouldn't trade my 21" Sony or my 19" Iiyama for any consumer LCD.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
There's a sucker born every minute. ;)
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
Despite this statistic, I think it'll be a long time before CRTs become an uncommon sight on a desktop machine.
... that "less than 5% market share" must be wrong too.
;)
You must be wrong.
When I watch TV shows, almost every computer has an LCD display.
Come to think of it, there's an awful lot of Apples too
TV wouldn't lie, would it.
LCDs don't last very long, comparatively speaking: backlights fade at an alarming rate (noticable within 18 months to 2-3 years, depending on the screen), and the colors can fade. A CRT of comparable price will easily outlive an LCD by 2-3 times -- a good CRT will last 10 years without reduction in quality, minimum.
:)
So not only are they not as bright, not as contrasty, and not color-accurate, with limited viewing angles and severely constricted color gamut, they wear out quickly and cost much more!
The Age of LCDs is not here yet. But let's hope that misguided reports like this spur more development of better, competing technologies
---- My Design, Code, Ruby on Rails blog: http://www.slash7.com/
I heard somewhere that it's difficult to see a LCD monitor clearly unless you're directly in front of it. If that's true, it would make working with co-workers or training a bit difficult, since the people on the sides would have trouble seeing. Since I don't have one, I can't check that very easily. Anyone have experience with this issue?
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
LCD would take over CRT by even bigger margin if it were not for bundling of CRT monitor with many PC systems. 9 out 10 bundled monitors are CRT. OTOH, most people purchase CRT separately. Thank god, we don't have MS selling hardware, else we would be paying for CRT monitor whether we buy or not!
They're pretty amazing (the bigger ones at least). I've used Trinitrons for years (and have a 17" FD at home) and the new Apple displays blow all of 'em out of the water.
/drool
I've got a digital 17" Studio Display on my desk at work. It's incredible: very bright colors, no flicker, wide viewing angle, zero distortion, one-cable connect (for video, power and USB) and 1280x1024 resolution.
At my other job we have a digital Dell Ultrasharp, and while still better than most CRT's, it isn't nearly as nice as the Apple display.
We've got a coupla 15" iMacs and 15" studio displays as well, though, and the picture isn't nearly as nice on those.
Oh, and there are rumors of Apple introducing a 30" model with the next revision of their displays.
Yes. Alpo brand is the best. Wash off the chunks and use them as you would ground beef in your Hamburger Helper. Mmm-MMM!
i have a 15" Envision LCD and it doesn't like some linux distros. The Mandrake installer just gave me "Out of Range" on my monitor. I think some LCDs are very inflexible w/ sync rates etc..
Not necessarily. I have an LCD screen that you can see well from all sides. My laptop has such problems, though.
Which means that yet another new three letter acronym product will sell more than the older three letter acronym product!
Chris
1. I don't like the ghosting because I game (FPS mostly) and watch videos a lot.
2. I change to various resolutions. I noticed stretching is ugly and black borders are annoying (no stretch).
3. Price especially for the bigger LCDs.
For now, I will just wait until LCDs are cheaper and improved.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
WOW! Who woulda thunk?
But mass production will bring LCD prices down, possibly lower than CRTs since much lesser glass is used, and outside of manufacturing costs, intellectual property etc, the raw materials are cheaper than that for CRTs. When they get closer to the price of the CRT, they should really finish off CRTs for good.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The only market not susceptible to the shift will be gaming and graphics-intensive applications, where the refresh rates of LCDs are not satisfactory yet."
LCD's aren't satisfactory my ass. My Samsung 152T works better in at Tribes 2 and Q3A:Urban Terror better than my Viewsonic PS790 by a longshot. And no, it doesn't ghost. Perhaps because it's one of the pricy ~$400 models.
You can get a 17" LCD from Hitachi with a 12ms refresh rate. At 60fps, 1 frame is 16.67ms, so this is good enough.
I recently purchased an Acer AL732, and I find it quite good for gaming.
It's 17", does 1280x1024 and the refresh time is 16ms (which equals ~60 fps). Apart from it having a "locked" resoloution (it does a good job on stretching lower res stuff, though) I find it to be very comfortable, not to mention the fact that it's a helluva lot smaller depth-wise than my old 19" Targa monster.
It accepts VGA, DVI, S-Video and Composite (I have it hooked up to a VCR, too) and it even has tiny little CRT iMac-style speakers built in. (All types of cable, apart from DVI, are included)
More info
Eat the rich.
It seems to me that most of the people complaining about LCD's, dont own them or use them almost exclusively like me. LCD users all have witnessed both sides while most CRT users have never used a decent LCD longterm (not counting naff laptop screens). I beleive that if most of the CRT-groupies actually go out and purchase a decent LCD model, they wont be able to go back. Sure they arent perfect, but overall the extra crispness, zero flicker, zero noise, low power, and mmmm DVI input just are plain better, once the price drops a little lower, im sure they will overtake CRT's in quantity sales
- Shrapnel
Many people complain about the fact that an LCD has a "native" resolution and all other have to be interpolated. But I don't understand why this isn't equally true of CRT monitors. I can empirically see the difference, but I want to understand the theory.
.25mm, it would have just over 1600 horizontal pixels. How then does it support resolutions like 1280x1024?
A CRT monitor, like an LCD monitor, has discrete pixels, at least in the horizontal direction. These are defined by color dots or stripes on the front of the tube, and the distance between dots/stripes of the same color defines dot pitch. The drive signal for the tube is analog, but ultimately it has to energize these fixed resolution phosphors.
If I'm doing my math right, a 20" viewable monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio is about 16" wide, which is 406mm. At a typical dot pitch of
As pointed out numerous times above, CRT's still rule for a great many things, whilst LCD's tend to be alot easier on the eye for most desktop apps.
I was lucky enough to be donated a knackered 17" LCD (casing was cracked, but the screen was fine), and gave it a whirl. It's hooked into my dual head GFX card, so that I can use it in conjunction with my 19" Iiyama. Besides giving me acres of desktop real estate, it allows me to pick and choose the best screen for the job.
LCD: coding, web browsing, word processing, all the usual junky "casual user" stuff - text is just nicer to read on an LCD, esp for hours on end.
CRT: playing movies (better maximum density), playing games (yeah, some of the newer LCD's have virtually no ghosting now, but I don't have one of them - and besides, I can't run all my games at the same res as the screen), manipulating images and video (all but the very best LCD's have totaly sucky colour temperature variations and low contrast), anything that requires me showing more than one person.
Some people will get an LCD and never look back. But at the moment I believe a great many will still find a cheaper CRT more suited to the more "demanding" apps. Sure it might be bigger, uglier, etc etc, but it's just another example of not following marketing hype and picking the best tools for your application again.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
While not come down here to the United States and use the American dollar to buy your LCD display.
You say you want a decent 15"? That's small. Why not go with an 18 inch, say the Dell UltraSharp 1800FP. It is pretty decent at $444.
I bought a 17" generic LCD over the winter holidays (a Cornea MP704), which used the same internals as basically all the other cheap generic 17-inchers from around that time. It was around $450 bucks & the best computer purchase I made in the last two years. If you use a display for any extended period of time, an LCD is just so much nicer on your eyes. As a double plus, games like Unreal Tournament/Quake/Doom play just fine. I have not noticed *any* of the delay in refresh rate purported by these news media articles. I think it's one of those theories no one bothered to check out against the latest crop of LCD's.
Color work, otoh, is for CRT's.
At my work we are experiencing unusual effects of replacing CRT's with LCDs: The LCD-displays seem to magically attract street-tiles and bricks. Especially when there's a windows between the LCD and the original location of the Brick. Also, these fenomenen are mostly appearing at night. And, even more strangely; after the brick has reached the direct vicinity of the LCD, the LCD is repulsed by the presence of the brick, causing it to magically leave the room. The result is that the Brick is at the original location of the LCD-display: inside my office and the LCD is at the original position of the brick: outside.
To prevent these strange fenomenon we have installed make-it-unbreakable foil at our windows, making them able to even resist "AK-47 fire". The result were street-tiles that traveled with even more kenetic energy thereby completely dismanteling the window-post.
The fenomenon has left us startled, but for now we would advise everyone to rethink their display-choise as long as these particular type of monitors are much more often disappearing then CRT's.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
Fear the business minor.
My monitor at work hasn't moved in 2 years. If I spent 750$ for a display that was only 20" and had a resolution of 1600x1200 I would go insane. Plus I am one of those people who likes his refresh rate set up to 85hz otherwise I get a headache. So why should I shell out the money for the LCD what are the real advantages? I actually want an answer here, don't just say, better eye sight blah blah blah. Show me a sight that is run by a company that knows optometry and have them tell me that it's better on my eyes. A good flat screen trinitron CRT is just as bright as a LCD.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
who are our moderators. They must be canadian if they modded these posts as being funny.
Yes, I hear they have started their shock and awe campaign.
Dell UltraSharp 1800FP 18-inch LCD $444
They don't have an infinitely high refresh rate, hence why you can't set them at above 60hz in most occassions if you also want a good resolution. You said 60 hz and infinitely high refresh rate in the same sentence.hz is a measure of cycles a second.So how can something be 60 cycles a second and infinite cycles a second at the same time? And the LCD they tried to give me at work that was at 60hz constantly gave me headaches. Show me a Graphics designer, a Cad user, digital movie editor, high end gamer that likes them. Also I still don't understand what's the advantage to the normal user, that wouldn't use that s-video on his desk at work. Plus he doesn't move his monitor at work, so weight and size mean nothing. Flat screen is a fad. But I like it because it made my 21" trinitron really drop in price before I bought it.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I've heard that CRT's are better for gaming than LCD's. I am somewhat of a gamer, and if this information is true, then I will stick with CRT's until the bitter end. However, I'm wondering, are my sources correct? Is there a noticable difference between CRT's and LCD's with respect to gaming?
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
But from using, I can guess why. With CRT, there is no harm in allowing both high and low resolutions, the lower resolutions are not impacted quality wise just because the monitor can go really high. With LCD displays, it is a much different story, anything smaller than the LCD native resolution will be scaled by the monitor (or shrunk to a smaller area) by some digital scaling technique. While you can have some pretty effective techniques with digital scaling, anything with detail (i.e. text) is a bit distorted and strange looking no matter the technique used. Thus, there is a greater emphasis on having a resolution that would look the best to the most amount of people. Add to this that dead pixels become much more of a problem as the resolution increases (probability increases, and even at 1920x1440 a dead pixel is noticeable), not to mention cost is more directly impacted by the pixel count.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Technically, LCD displays don't have a refresh rate, but they do have a maximum change rate which is effectively the same thing in this case.
On an LCD:
1 / (response time) = maximum frame rate
Whereas on a CRT:
refresh rate = maximum frame rate
So you can loosely compare refresh rate to the inverse of the response time.
Most modern LCDs operate at only 24 bit color.
How many video cards can put out more than 8 bits per primary? Only really high-end graphics people are going to care about that anyway, the gamut is probably much more important.
LCD's are nice but I hate that they have to stick to some native resolution. I'm sure 1024x768 is good right now, but what'll happen when a newer os will require 1600x1200 just to look decent. Bigger LCD's with huge resolutions are great, but using Windows at that res is just unbearable. What's up with everyone having +5 mods?
.smell my feet.
updates are not the bottleneck here. it's the time it takes for a pixel on an LCD to change colors.
For every 10 CRT purchases there is an LCD purchase. That's how much they cost, anyway.
What square pixels?
1280x1024 is rectangular pixels unless your Sony is really odd, a very few LCD displays are 5:4, but no CRT I know of displays them that way.
It's also one reason I'll never buy an ATI card, their drivers for Windows have never included 1280:960, only 1280x1024, and i don't like mucking about either in the registry or with PowerStrip.
You should factor in the extra running costs of a CRT into your equation. LCD's don't have to be the same price to be cost competitive.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...altough your point about insurance is well-taken--still not a lot of money. Moreover, still better deals can be gotten at local retailers which intermittently have cheap-after-rebate sales; these are still far more common and far less expensive for the same size display.
As for eyes, it's already been noted that LCDs refresh more slowly than CRT screens; and despite what lackluster experience you may have had with cheap CRTs, my ~$100 17" (bought two years ago) has served me well. I hope that with invested time and resources, affordable, useful LCDs will come soon; the key to this is demonstrated profit.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
LCD's have been around for YEARS, sure they have gotten a bit better, but they still are just LCD's. The markey is being kept at high levels due to industry collusion, not by market forces. The typical shitty LDC/TFT display, say a 17 incher, costs about 150 dollars to manufacture, they are made by robots for christ's sake! The mark-up is typically 200 percent. In many cases more! This is NOT NEW technology, it is exploited technology. It, like the CRT monitor is merely a one channel television screen! Get with the program and boycott the assholes trying to sell you mature technology at premium prices!
And if they ever get refresh rates fast enough to play games on, resist the higher prices they will SAY they incurred, but really did not. It is a limited technology and soon will be gone...new technology is on the way!
Why does Overscanning on a CRT TV bother you. All broadcast video is produced with this in mind so you're not really missing any picture. Just check out how a DVD menu appears on a computer monitor next to a TV - the computer will have wasted space around 10% (title safe area) of the outside edge.
You're not missing anything, not until we all migrate to 16x9 HDTVs on LCD/Plasma
When I watch TV shows, almost every computer has an LCD display.
Well there's a reason for that. The flicker from the screen refresh on a CRT causes huge problems for 24fps film. Look at a local news cast sometime... they often do stories with computers in the background (mind you they are using tape... it's worse with film).
They actually have special monitors with hardware to synchronise the refresh with the film. It's not cheap.
If your bored one day take a video cam and point it at your monitor. Then change the refresh rate. Impress your friends with your knowledge of interference patterns.
I prefer PUTTY =)
15" LCD=$299.95
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Who was the totally lacking in any knowledge of electronics idiot that modded the above as a troll?!?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I got one at a computer show last weekend, a used Compaq 1610 (Sony W900 guts) for $399.. MPlayer plays DVDs scaled to 1920x1200, and they look AWESOME..
;)
I spose when >22" 16x(9|10) OLEDs come out and price drop in a few years I might reconsider, but if you have the deskspace the 24" widescreen is quite a conversation piece
Of course, fiddling with the service mode is not risk free.
What I don't understand is why cheap TVs have this. Nobody tries to fix them. If you pay $100 for a TV set, and it breaks after the warantee expires, even a simple repair would cost you more than the set's worth. Even if it is under warantee, most places will just give you a new set rather than mess with it.
The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth. And there are
searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark.
-- Fred Saberhagen, "The Berserker Wars"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...