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Budget LCD Monitor Round-up
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has just posted a new 8-monitor budget LCD round-up. It starts off like a traditional review, but their discussion of color accuracy is the best I've ever seen."
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Sure, but like their discussion of DVI I do have at least one issue regarding analog-DVI. I have a DVI monitor, which also works on analog and noticed the difference when hooking up the DVI cable (when I got my ATI AIW wizzo graphics card) Analog offers a softer image which may be more desireable. With DVI I can tell subtle shades from pixel to pixel, tiny as they are at 1280x1024, yet with the softening of lossy D/A/D conversion it's far less obvious. The only real downside being fuzzier letters. Letters already can be a pain because of the anti-aliasing attempt to split a 1 pixel vertical line between two columns of pixels, especially if you're like me and run at high res and small fonts.
I'm still using a Samsung 172t (w/500:1 contrast ratio, w00t) 2.5 years old and only 3 stuck pixels, no pixel smearing, either. Only downside is I can no longer pile things on top of a monitor.
Those images would have been slightly more convincing without the severe jpeg compression, BTW.
should have used a nice picture like this
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does anyone have any insight on what I can do with a slew of Laptop LCDs that I have...
I have about 20 Laptop LCD screens that I would love to be able to use, but it looks as though you need to get a $200.+ controller for these screens in order to use them as "monitors"? Is this true? Is there any cheap/free way to put these things to use.
It seems that the cheapest monitor to make these days would be pure digital - digital DVI support only.
Instead, budget monitors come with analog only - which means more complex support circuitry, A/D converter, etc. than what it takes to support digital input.
Since almost all video cards come with one DVI port these days, at least, why not ship something that would be better, cheaper, and likely, more profitable? How about flipping things around and making the analog input optional (and more expensive)? I guess that would make too much sense.
jh
Making judgements on budget flat panels is much harder than the pricier brands in my experience. Budget brands get their LCDs cheaply by saying they'll take a manufacturer's leftovers that fail the quality standards of the bigger name customers. That doesn't mean that all of their budget displays are bad; the budget buyer gets quite a number of perfect displays and almost perfect displays because they have to get something delivered.
For a brand that has high quality assurance standards evaluating one or two displays can be an effective evaluation, but reviewing a budget display this way is meaningless. When you're looking at brands that don't have quality standards and good return policies, then statistics like failure rate, customer satisfaction, and other non-visual stats can tell you whether it's a good risk to put your money down or not. You may get a great monitor; you may get something that's crap. But unless you're looking at the actual monitor you're going to buy in person, its the other stats that are going to tell you what your odds are of getting a great display for dirt cheap.
Not even close. The CRT they tested, which, admittadly isn't the greatest of the great, had a contrast ratio of (now sit down for this one) ...
9,415 to 1.
Yeah. Read it again. Nine thousand, four hundred and fifteen, to one.
A great LCD is in the 800:1 range.
"My 17" CRT does up to 1600x1200."
No, it can't. It may be able to *sync* and *scan* at 1600x1200, but it can't actually display that resolution.
The shadow mask (or aperture grill, as the case may be) on your monitor probably doesn't go anywhere near 1600x1200.
You're basically using an analog version of antialiasing.
So yes, CRTs have great contrast. But take the actual numbers with a lot of salt.