Slashdot Mirror
Display Format Technologies Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "The differences between LCD, Plasma, DLP, LCOS, D-ILA, and CRT are revealed, as well as their associated advantages and disadvantages, as Audioholics post a new version of their Display Technologies Guide With advances companies like Intel (LCOS) and Texas Instruments (HD2+) are making in chip technologies and cost reductions, one wonders just how soon CRT based TVs will become an antiquity we discuss with our grandchildren as they install their new high resolution, lightweight, affordable displays on their walls."
Why? Because LCD displays suffer from "motion flicker". Black letters on a white background appear to have "double thickness" while you're scrolling or dragging a window around on the screen, rapidly switching between double thickness and single thickness. I have a dual-screen setup with my laptop, using my laptop's LCD screen and an external CRT simultaneously, and I can say for sure that this doesn't happen with my CRT. I don't use this for gaming, so I don't know if the gamers out there call the effect something else, but that's what it looks like to me.
Plasma still exists because it has one advantage over LCD/DLP in the price/performance war: Bigger direct-view screens that can be easily mounted on a wall. Rear-projection LCD/DLP units give better value in terms of screen area but they take up more space. In other words, it's a style-over-substance issue.
Even hard core gaming sites like Sharky Extreme are now recommending optical mice exclusively in all their hardware guides.
I would stick with a CRT, purely because you get more bang-per-buck (how many of us can afford a 21" LCD?). However, there is one important caveat: if you want a good picture, you must get a Trinitron CRT, rather than the normal shadow-mask tube (see here for a good overview of Trinitrons). I recently had to toss my beloved 6-year old Iiyama Trinitron, which always gave an incredibly crisp picture. The replacement, a Samsung 19" shadow-mask CRT, is rather a let down, with fuzzy fonts of the sort you describe. I'm now regretting the fact that I didn't shell out the extra $$ and get a Trinitron again.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
You obviously haven't use the newer ones then. Im using the newer Logitech Mx 300 and NEVER had had the movement skip a beat. Hell, even at the desktop, I can't make the cursor skip either no matter how quickly I twitch my wrist!!
Life is not for the lazy.
The newer technologies are nice in that they are thin and all, which is especially good for monitors. But, they do still have their drawbacks. LCDs don't display black as well as a CRT, making watching movies with dimly lit scenes annoying. LCDs have a very clear picture, but lose some of that sharpness if not run at native resolution or another that divides evenly into it (interpolating from one resoution to another causes slight bluriness or jaggedness of the pixels). Also, I have doubts as to whether the time between failures on LCD backlights is as good as CRT picture tubes.
Plasma is kinda neat, but has a reputation for burn-in and slowly losing brightness over time. If I was to buy a multi-thousand dollar TV, I'd want it to work for 8-10 years until the next big thing comes along.
For now, I'm still a CRT user. 35" Sony Trinitron for TV watching, 21" ViewSonic professional series for the PC. Keeping an eye on the new technologies but they're not quite "there" yet as far as I'm concerned.
I beg to differ. Most videophiles will tell you that CRT front-projectors are still the way to go. You can't beat a 9" CRT tube for most applications - with DLP you can have rainbow effects, and LCDs by their nature always have grids. For pure video, CRT is the way to go for the time being.
Now the 50x (2-4lbs vs 100-200lbs) weight factor certainly means that CRTs are less mobile than their newer digital counterparts, but be aware that there is a definite quality tradeoff.
Myself, I'm installing a CRT projector in my living room. I'll take superb picture quality (and GREAT price) over portability any day.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s= &threadid=361807&highlight=DLP
As LCD monitors get bigger, the viewing angle problem gets more severe. I just got a ViewSonic 19" LCD with supposedly good "viewing angle" specs. The problem is that you normally sit within 2 feet of your monitor. At this distance, your eyes view the top of the screen at a very different angle than the bottom of the screen. With a large LCD like this, there is absolutely no way to view the screen without severe differences in color... the monitor is just too big and you are sitting too close to it. I find myself constantly adjusting the monitor, or raising and lowering my head to try and read things.
This is a problem I never noticed on my smaller (laptop) LCDs, simply because the monitor is much smaller.
Obviously this wouldn't be a problem for an LCD in your living room, where you view it from quite a distance. But large LCD monitors are a problem. (At least mine is!)
I've been developing on LCDs for years now. When you adjust the resolution, set the monitor to just center it rather than trying to scale to fill the screen. That way, your 1600x1200 monitor just has a large black area surrounding the 640x480 test screen. Way simple.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The combined frame buffer and display gamma is targeted to be 1.8 on Macs. This is done primarily through careful measurement and generation of calibration profiles for various displays.
The LCD panels have a non-gamma transfer function that's roughly linear (gamma 1.0). The actual transfer curve is S-shaped, something like a lazy integral symbol. Calibration for LCD panels is done through a compensating table lookup, rather than through a simple gamma equation.
The Mac OS X System Preferences Displays panel includes a Color tab, which in turn offers a Calibrate... option. Try running through the Calibrate sequence in your video viewing environment.
To obtain the best results for video viewing, which is often done under different environmental conditions than interactive computer use, use this Calibrate option in conjunction with a good video standards DVD in the desired viewing environment.
Even the THX Video Adjustment offered on 'THX Certified' DVDs is sufficient, when used with ColorSync Calibration, to produce reasonable results on Apple Macintosh displays.
The parent is correct, large LCDs are being seen now because of the change in Fab processes. It is going to change again real quick. The generation 6 and 7 plants are now being built in Taiwan, with an expectation of opening by fall '04, winter '05.
The parent had one mistake in the story, the fabs are not one meter, but now with G7 plants will be 5-6 meters on a side, with a thickness of a few millimeters. The entire process is done without the use of human hands, the glass is too thin for a human to move without breaking. The wafer process is extremely cheap en mass, letting the price of LCD's slip down. The 40 inch LCD displays are now about ten grand, because they use most of a wafer, the G7 will allow 90+ inch lcds, and will have them be even cheaper than the current 40 inch ones. The industry hope the price decrease will allow for quality to go up, ad the human element is minimized in fab, and the large wafers will decrease the cost to replace flawed models. There may be a few new flaws of course, sagging glass is now a problem with that big a display.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.