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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."
Always good to shoot for good Ausio/Video Equipment like speakers and monitors, since they last longer than PC internals and they aren't pushed into obsolecence as quickly. I'll keep using my 17" CRT monitor untill it dies. Then I'll look at a 21" perhaps...
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Plasma sucks!
After paying an arm and a leg for a Plasma screen, I can honestly say that it sucks... worst dollar to value ratio ever. The resolution is okay (I'm not talking about the gateway/circuit city peice of shit that has EDTV resolution)... the picture isn't anywhere near as good as you can get with LCD or DLP... I really don't understand why Plasma still exists!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Wake me up when the industry figures this out. Now _that_ will blow everything out of the water.
My favorite display format technology has always been paper.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
You must have had some pretty lame CRTs in the past then. I'm reading this on a crisp 21" CRT at 1600x1200x85. Using a CRT I can use a high resolution for my desktop and still have access to lower resolutions 1280x1024x100 to use with video games. I can have my cake and eat it too.
Of course the monitor weighs 60 pounds, but my computer don't do a whole lot of moving.
They forget to mention projectors, you get a bigger image cheaper than plasma
While an LCD monitor has much to recommend it on the grounds of space saving and visual clarity, I find one arena where it is left in the dust by a CRT: game playing. When rushing around in a FPS, the picture on an LCD monitor turns into a blurry, muddy mess; on a CRT, by contrast, it remains crisp.
In an unrelated but related point (think "tea and no tea"), I find that optical mice are great for day-to-day work, but fall down during FPS play: when you figure that someone is filling your back with lead, and you need to do an instant 180 degree turn, an optical mouse simply can't handle the rate of movement. A traditional ball mouse is the only choice; however, you have to make sure its clean so that the ball doesn't jam when being rolled at high speed. A good tip to keeping your balls clean is to rest your beer on a different table to your keyboard/mouse.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
I am typing this from a 19" CRT screen that costs just #150 for a 1600x1200 desktop. A LCD of that size and resoloution are over #1000! I dont need the space savings, Desks are cheap, LCDs are not!
The article is an excellent beginner's guide to display technology formats, however, they make that oft-repeated forcast that soon LCDs will be cheap. We've been hearing that for years. Active-Matrix displays have been in use in Notebooks for 10 years and still they are the most expensive part of the notebook. They've certainly come down in price, but I wonder why so many people latch onto this belief that soon they will be so cheap they'll replace everything. Every couple years we hear about a world-wide "supply shortage" which jacks the price of LCDs up about 20%, there are inherent limitations in the design process which require an entirely separate production line to produce a 15" display, a 19", etc... What about Hot-Pixels? How happy would you be to spend $10k on an LCD display that has hotpixels?
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
I still can't figure out why the gamma on the PC and the Mac are so far apart. Hell, the gamma on a windows system is much lower than a Mac and even darker than a CRT TV!!!
Why is this? And why is there not a universal standard by which a display is to be callibrated. Sure, you could argue that there is already 3 standards, but my question is why not just one standard?
As a visual artist I find it irritating to have my imagery appear darker on a PC and when I play a DVD, I notice that the display on my Mac is much brighter than my TV.
I'm sure movie producers and directors get annoyed by this as well.
By setting an international gamma/color calibration standard, all visual media would benefit not only because of consistant display but lowered production costs as well.
Gee, with all of these new, flat monitors and TVs, my cat loses out on the most comfy, warm place in the house.
Even hard core gaming sites like Sharky Extreme are now recommending optical mice exclusively in all their hardware guides.
The article was slashdotted, heres my personal guide:
CRT - Still probably capable of the best picture for now (especially at the high end, think G90). Requires much more maintenance than digital technlogies (convergence, etc.). Essentially infinite on/off contrast, not quite as good ANSI contrast. No screendoor. High end guns capable of fully resolving 1080p.
DLP - Best contrast numbers of the digital technologies. Consumer units limited to 720p for now. Screendoor is pretty limited. Some people may see rainbows on one chip devices due to color wheel (pretty limited on new HD2+ machines). Most machines not terribly bright when compared to LCD. Limited to projection devices.
LCD - Poor contrast, very hight black level. Most screendoor of the digitals. Can be in projection or panel configurations. Considerably less expensive than other digital techs. Scales to higher resolutions than DLP for now.
LCOS - Least screendoor of digital technologies. Often appears "smoothest" or most like a CRT to people. Contrast numbers not up to DLP's standards. Not a large number of LCOS unites on the market for now, but looks like more will be coming soon. Many see it as the ultimate sucessor to CRT rear-projection.
Plasma - Least bang for the buck of the digitals. Only a flat-panel technology, no projection. Reletively poor contrast numbers.
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!)
It's not a bulb: if it costs more than a hundred bucks, it's a lamp. That way you feel better about being raped.
In the final table, the author chose not to highlight the winning cells if they happened to be for CRT solutions. CRT is a winner in 5 of the 12 catagories: Contrast Ratio, Brightness, Longevity, Burn-In, and Viewing Angle. More than any other solution.
I know that Direct View (and Rear Projection) CRT's days are numbered, but as of today, no other solution provides the same picture quality, at any cost. It will be at least 3 more years before videophiles start making the switch to something better. I'm guessing the winners will be DLP and Carbon Nanotube Field Emission Displays.
After Viewing All other technologies (at the time), I purchased two televisions - One A CRT Projection Sony (HDTV) 46" and a Panasonic Plasma (EDTV) 42" (both highly recommended on almost every method of research I performed). Hands down, the Panasonic kicks the Sony's ass, I have NEVER seen a better picture (I've only been to best buy, circuit city and The Big Screen Store, and there ilk). The real word black level performance (eye candy view) is just as good. Matter of fact, I bought the plasma just because the room that it's in was so small. I planned on using the Sony most of the time, especially for movies. The plasma is so much better, the CRT justs sits there most of the time.