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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.
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!)