LCD screens

who uses lcd screens and how do you find them?

the choice is between a 15 LCD @ $375 vs 17 flat panel @ $189. the bigger screen would be nice, but i've heard the lcds are much easier on the eyes and that there may not be that much noticeable difference between 15 & 17.

any opinions?

in friendship,
prad

My wife uses a 15" lcd at work and loves it, at home we have a 21" flat tube. Personally i don`t think the extra money is worth it. Just think of what else you could add to your pc for the $186 youi`ll have left over 😀

I decided to spend big on an LCD screen a couple of years back. I spend so many of my waking hours sat in front of this dam screen that I wanted to give my eyes the best treatment I could.

And that is where LCD wins every time with me. 12 hours in front of an CRT makes me feel pretty sick. But in front of an LCD, I can just about manage it.... 🙂

Large CRTs are HUGE too, so think of desk space too. A large CRT will be inches from your nose on most desks.

In fact, I can only say one bad thing about LCDs - and that is the contrast isn’t great if you are a video gamer. For example, the contrast between very dark colours (think dark areas in Quake) are quite hard to distinguish between. This probably doesn't even apply anymore anyway, as contrast ratios have improved since I bought my unit.

So, in summary, get the biggest LCD you can afford. You will fall in love with it.

-Russ

"not be that much noticeable difference between 15 & 17.
"

This is true. CRT specs have been ripping off the public for years.

Viewable area is all important. And a 15" lcd is approx a 17" CRT.

-Russ

Originally posted by pradtf
who uses lcd screens and how do you find them?

the choice is between a 15 LCD @ $375 vs 17 flat panel @ $189. the bigger screen would be nice, but i've heard the lcds are much easier on the eyes and that there may not be that much notic ...[text shortened]... fference between 15 & 17.

any opinions?

in friendship,
prad

My dad and I both have both bought a 15" LCD, with the current currency rates, the prices don't really differ between Europe and the U.S.

Every time I've been working on my computer and after that take a loot at my sisters 17" CRT (It's takes up here entire desk...) monitor, I get a terrible pain in my eyes because her screen flickers like...erhm...like something that flickers a lot. 🙂

Russ does have a point that if you play heavy games, the LCD doesn't give you the best view and it is often slower too. If you only use your PC for work with the internet, Office and stuff like that, I would recommend a LCD.

Rob should know something about this too, he's a Photoshop master and for programs like that a CRT is better too, at least I've heard.

Olav

My employer replaced all CRT ages ago (4 CRTs per desk!) and it definitely helps fight eye strain!

I was so impressed, at home I now use two 18" NEC Multisync LCD 1850E monitors fed from a Matrox G550 dualhead card. These are good monitors and in fact you can have two inputs to each allowing further sharing (saves desk space!)

If you do decide to buy LCD, the one thing it is worth finding out about is the policy on "dead" pixels.
When I got mine, I think if there were more than 5 dead pixels then the monitor was then faulty and could be replaced - less than this = tough!

Fortunately I had only 1 dead pixel at bottom corner of screen so I don't notice it, but if it were in the centre...

Cheers
Laz

Originally posted by LivingLegend
My dad and I both have both bought a 15" LCD, with the current currency rates, the prices don't really differ between Europe and the U.S.

Every time I've been working on my computer and after that take a loot at my sisters 17" CRT (It's takes up here entire desk...) monitor, I get a terrible pain in my eyes because her screen flickers like...erh ...[text shortened]... a Photoshop master and for programs like that a CRT is better too, at least I've heard.

Olav

thanks everyone - this was most helpful. i was going to go for the cheaper crt, but after reading about your experiences, i have changed my mind. i don't play games (who can when they practise self-discipline here on rhp?), so lcd makes the most sense for sure as the Logical Chess Display.

in friendship,
prad

Originally posted by pradtf
who uses lcd screens and how do you find them?

the choice is between a 15 LCD @ $375 vs 17 flat panel @ $189. the bigger screen would be nice, but i've heard the lcds are much easier on the eyes and that there may not be that much noticeable difference between 15 & 17.

any opinions?

in friendship,
prad

ok so i went to look at some lcd screens (lg, samsung and a few others) at 2 different stores. i couldn't believe it - the quality on some of them were atrocious - blurry and malformed letters!

i nearly got dizzy! some makes were definitely better than others. the lgs were the best i found and there was one 17" (the price encouraged me to forget the make) that was really good, but still not close to crt.

so my question is this: does it take a while to get used to these screens? i have no problems with the screens on the 2 old laptops we have (they are only 12" screens), so i don't understand why i found these such a problem - may be because they were larger? or perhaps i went in there expecting too much. 😠

in friendship,
prad

Beware of monitors. Here is a passage from Neal Stephenson's excellent work, Cryptonomicon, detailing their assumedly imaginary risks...

''Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.

When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company bought their equipment at used-computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a pretty nice nineteen-inch high-res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for his adaptable twenty-four-year-old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used Pentium box jammed full of RAM.

He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns, almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world "this is how weird we are," and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things, to control the machine’s video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to use after he had been hacking for twenty-four hours straight and lost ocular muscle tone), or various settings in-between. Every time he changed from one setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.

One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be, to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka’s face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information into Pekka’s eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.

Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into action in case he died. But he didn’t, and he got even more press because his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand-wringing in local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich high-tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking’s.''

😛😉😀

Originally posted by royalchicken
Beware of monitors. Here is a passage from Neal Stephenson's excellent work, Cryptonomicon, detailing their assumedly imaginary risks...
😛😉😀

Every LCD screen has a native resolution. This is very important - forget about screen sizes for a minute - and think of the maximum resolution that you want on your desktop.

Then compare monitors that support this as their native resolution. An LCD monitor set to anything else than this one resolution they support will look TERRIBLE (very fuzzy, as you describe).

The only people I can imagine who would mis-configure a monitor like this is someone in retail who doesn't actually use the screen!!! (and might not understand the technology)

Of course, CRTs can support multiple resolutions. I don’t see this as a real advantage though.

For the record, I use an LG L1810B (1280*1024) This is an 18.1inch screen. But I also have a laptop with a 15 inch screen which support a resolution in excess of this…so don’t get too hung up on screen size. Looking at a properly configured machine in a store will probably help you decide what is best for you.

-Russ

Originally posted by Russ
Every LCD screen has a native resolution. This is very important - forget about screen sizes for a minute - and think of the maximum resolution that you want on your desktop.