Tom Reviews 13 LCD Displays 254
n3r0.m4dski11z noted that Tom's Hardware has a review of 13 LCD Displays
for anyone who has been thinking about making the leap from the CRT to that
fancy shmantsy LCD stuff thats all the rage with the kids these days.
As usual, they do a pretty good job explaining the issues. In this
case comparing CRT and LCD technology, as well as covering a ton of
screens.
Tom Pabst (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/0111
...which says that the KT266a chipset "blows away" the NForce, when the performance differences are right around 2-3%.
Overall, I still like the site and most pf the reviews, though.
Re:Quality?--it's the stores that suck! (Score:5, Informative)
A properly set-up LCD running at its design resolution looks sharp!
Re:Quality? (Score:3, Informative)
LCDs by nature are sharper than CRTs (Score:5, Informative)
In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article [tomshardware.com], color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here [grc.com], Slashdot covered it here [slashdot.org], and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here [pineight.com].
Ars Technica LCD buyers guide (Score:5, Informative)
one he missed.. (Score:1, Informative)
My LCD is better for my eyes (Score:5, Informative)
The screen is so much sharper than any CRT at high resolutions. I am starting to consider replacing my 21" sony trinitron (sp?) on my home desktop machine with an LCD. I want more screen real-estate than these 13" screens, but the prices keep coming down.
If you have eye problems as a result of using a CRT all day long, I highly recomend a high-res LCD.
-Pete
Re:Quality?--it's the stores that suck! (Score:2, Informative)
The best thing about it is being able to pivot the monitor to play vertical mame games vertically. It works great in linux as well
What about video cards? (Score:3, Informative)
However, from what I understand about LCD screens is that they need to be mated with particular video cards (digital, of course) in order to even come close to high-quality laptop LCDs. Laptop manufacturers mate the best LCDs with the best, tuned, video cards in order to achieve the best display out there. With a much wider array of desktop LCDs and video cards you'd be hard pressed to be able to perfectly match a digital video card to a LCD display without massive amounts of time, money, and trial-and-error.
Samsung.... (Score:4, Informative)
The Samsung 170T is godlike, especially with a DVI connection. It has a 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.26mm dot pitch, and it's bright enough to be painful to look at in dim light. The 160-degree viewing angle will remind you of a CRT. Oddly enough, it's not much more expensive than their (far inferior) 170MP and other 17" models.... which explains why most mail-order houses are usually sold out of the 170T.
I've replaced every CRT monitor in my house (three) with 170Ts, and couldn't be happier. There is only one dead pixel among the three.
Sadly, however, the other Samsung monitors are all junk, no better or worse than everything else in the slush pile at CompUSA. I imagine the 170T is blown away by the 210T, but those are even larger, more expensive, and (probably) harder to find.
Re:What about dot pitch? (Score:4, Informative)
Non sequitur. There's no such thing as dot pitch on an LCD, just like there's no zoom, trapezoid, degauss, etc. Those are relevant only to analog CRTs.
Each pixel of an LCD (at maximum resolution) is exactly the size of the associated RGB screen elements. It doesn't move. It doesn't wiggle across phosphor dots, because there are no phosphors.
Planar PV174 (Score:3, Informative)
Specs:
* 17.4" LCD. 1280x1024 resolution
* up to 75Hz analog, 60Hz DVI. (as it happens, when running analog I found it preferable to run at 70Hz to avoid some slight flickering)
* Built in speakers (I don't use them)
* Built in USB hub (don't use this either)
* Built in pivot (don't use this - the model is available in black or white with a pivot or clear/translucent red/trans blue without pivot)
* 220cd/m2 brightness
* 400:1 contrast
* 160degree viewing angle
* 25ms refresh (15ms rise, 10ms fall)
Frankly, from the research I did at the time the specs were far better than anything else in the 17" market (not to mention the extra
I have a friend who uses the Planar 15" LCD on his Mac and is also very pleased with the way it performs.
Why you should go ahead and buy an LCD. (Score:3, Informative)
This is absolutely untrue. Most LCD monitors are either driven through analog VGA or through a standard digital interface (DVI.) Of course, the DVI-driven displays will provide higher-quality images.
And what makes you think that OLED cards will have open-source driver support, anyway? IMHO, if the drivers work well, does it really matter if you have the source code? It seems good to try for the utopia of all-open-source, but not purchasing a great monitor just because the drivers aren't open-source seems a bit overboard.
"...dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred dollars down the tubes."
Whoa. Stop there. If you spent $200 on an LCD monitor, no wonder you're complaining. The low-end monitors are crappy. I have an SGI 1600SW [sgi.com] with Multilink Adapter that will soon be driven by a Geforce3. I spent over $1000 on it, which is more than I have spent on most of my computers. However, it is worth every penny. I would not trade it for any other LCD and I certainly wouldn't wait for a still-vapor technology.
Yes, LCDs are pricey! No, LCDs are not for everyone. But for those of us who want an absolutely gorgeous display -- one that every person who walks into your house will say "Wow!" about, and one that never makes your eyes hurt -- we are more than happy to pay for an LCD.
BTW, I thought this Tom's Hardware article was horrible. Instead of focusing on the wonderful high-end LCDs, this article is dueling the low-end LCDs. Most of these monitors are awful. I would recommend that anyone who is in the market check out the following:
Low-end: IBM T-Series 15" analog [ibm.com]
Midrange: Samsung 17" 170MP with built-in TV tuner and PIP [futurelooks.com]
High-end: The SGI 1600SW with Multilink, since discontinued; any Apple LCD
Whatever you do, I wouldn't recommend paying less than $600 for an LCD. Also, definitely read the shopper.com reviews before purchasing. Their thumbs up / thumbs down system is a good way to figure out what people actually thought of the product after bringing it home.
Good luck...
Another Advantage of LCDs... (Score:3, Informative)
While this isn't a problem with TVs (which refresh at 60Hz), it was a MAJOR problem with my 21" Viewsonic CRT display, which, in order to get the benefit of the 1800x1400 display, had to be refreshed at 75Hz (going at 60Hz caused too much flicker on that huge display). Needless to say, trying to read tiny text, when the whole screen is shimmying back and forth at 15Hz was headache-inducing at the very least.
This was when I shelled out the big $$$ and got a nice new SGI LCD (SGI 1600SW [sgi.com]. It has a good viewing angle, good contrast ratio, runs at 1600x1024 (enough to display two web pages side-by-side), is light-weight and compact (especially compared to my 75 pound Viewsonic P815), and best of all, had no electron beam!
So if, like me, you have a problem with ambient magnetic fields, then I think that the only solution (until OLEDs come out, of course), is to get an LCD. And they're nice. Really nice. In fact, after seeing my display, all my friends went out and got LCDs as well. The only problem is that they're not nearly as cheap as CRT displays.
A bit higher-end but still affordable... (Score:3, Informative)
I just got a new LCD myself! ViewSonic just released last year their VG191, which is a 19" TFT. It's MVA, 1280x1024, 500:1, 250 nits, and it pivots. I love it very dearly.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg191.cfm
I got mine for $860, though prices seem to have gone up a little since last week (?). I think this makes it a great alternative to those ridiculously expensive ones like Apple's Cinema display. (Especially since I could not find a GeForce 3 with DVI-out at higher res than 1280x1024).
Anyway, the real point of my post is this: If you go for a high-end LCD, do yourself a favor and get one that *pivots* or at least a VESA wall adaptor. I thought this would just be a kind of fun gimmick, but there really is nothing like reading a webpage in portrait mode. I leave my monitor like that almost all the time, in fact (I like to have a widescreen movie playing across the bottom of the screen and emacs up at the top.
Re:Very bad review (Score:3, Informative)
At one point the review states (emphasis added):
"Another shock WHEN READING THE MONITOR'S SPECS - with a contrast ratio of 200:1, a brightness of 200 cd/m2, a response time of 50 ms and a vertical viewing angle of 90 and a horizontal of 120"
So it seems that "their" conclusions are just copied right from specs given to them by the manufacturers. This means that any comparison between figures which they name is meaningless. Manufacturers test displays under different conditions, useing different test criteria, and then exagerate performance to an unknown degree. For a mesurement to be of any use, every monitor described must be tested with the same equipment, under identical conditions, using the same performance criterion.
Consider the measure of viewing angle. The drop in luminance as a function of viewing angle is a continuous function. So how big is the viewing angle ? Well, it depends on what the monitor manufacturer considers to be an acceptable degree of luminance loss, that is, where he arbitrarily thresholds a continuous function.
Consider measurements of luminance and contrast ranges: You can crank the luminance all the way up, and you can crank the contrast all the way up, but what happens when you do both at once ? Are luminance and contrast ranges independent variables, and if they are not, to what degree does your choice of one limit the other ? Did every manufacturer measure contrast range at the same luminance levels ? Did every manufacturer measure maximum luminance at the same contrast setting ?
The point here is not that the manufacturers are to blame for how they portray performance. Rather it's that, to present a credible comparative review, you must make mesaurements yourself, so to hold the testing procedure and performance criteria constant.
"... While the L365 can display very dark shades perfectly, whereas its rivals always tend to display them as black, it has certain problems displaying lighter hues accurately.
"
The obvious explanation is that he's set the brightness and contrast on the L365 so that the contrast saturates at the top of the range, and he's set the other monitors to saturate at the bottom of their ranges. Then he describes the L365 saturating at the top of its range, as if this is some great insite, and like it tells us anything at all about the L365.
Oh, and let's have a look at the their test methods section:
"We used N-Test for the following purposes...to verify whether the frequency is set automatically"
1) WTF is N-Test, and if they are too lazy to tell us, why can't they at least link to it ?
2) If they did this, why dont' they tell us the results ?
3) Why don't they tell us the results of other tests which they claim to have done ? Except for the part about surfing the internet and playing quake, the claim that they did tests smells like horseshit.
"We surfed the Internet...We ran
Lets summarize: They claim to do tests, but they do not give us the results of those tests. The results which they do give us are not their own results, but instead are copied from those given to them by the manufacturers. Their conclusions are therefore useless for the purpose of comparing the perfomance of displays, the fundamental aim of a compartive review. The authors are pissed that Samsung did not give them a monitor for testing purposes, though they did not give their own test results for any monitor which they were given for review. The only plausible use which the authors did make of these monitors was to play games and surf the web.
Re:Wasn't there a new way to do the LCD driver? (Score:2, Informative)