should I buy a 24" widescreen lcd monitor?

[itlnstln]

This plays on a whole other meaning to "clean up on isle 5"
 
Later.........

LOL, nice. I might work in the grocery biz, but in my line of work, though, it would be more like a "SQL injection attack."

[CreamyNutButter]

I would go with CRT whenever I could because of their perfect viewing angle, durability, and price.  My computer is a laptop, however, so I have little choice unless I want to look like an idiot using my laptop.

[Shuki]

If you have the space and can find a decent one there is no reason to not buy a CRT. The only reason not to would be if you didn't have the space or you didn't want to have to drive over to collect one if you couldn't find someone to deliver. Ideally it's nice to have one CRT and one LCD as then you can use them together as dual monitors and get more life out of your CRT.

A high quality CRT can't be beat in colour reproduction, clarity, viewing angle and especially ability to handle motion. Obviously the advantages of a CRT are less if you don't play multiplayer computer games however I still much prefer my CRT for most applications. Especially photoshop when I want photoreal colours. It all depends on what you use it for I guess and the availability of CRT monitors to you, as well as do you want to sacrifice the room on your desktop for one of these.

At the end of the day CRTs are extremely cheap now and so you could save a lot of money which could be spent on keyboards I guess plus you get better quality that you get with an LCD. If you've got the space I'd go for it. Some people are satisfied with LCDs at the end of the day and that's fine, just like some people will be satisfied with rubber dome or membrane keyboards. Each to his own. After a bit of tweaking the colour reproduction on the TFTs aren't that bad I guess. I suppose I'm a bit of a CRT fanatic.

Edit : If I used a laptop, I would connect it to an external screen at home and use it like a desktop with a separate keyboard and mouse and then when I was out use it as a functional laptop. I don't think it would make you look like an idiot

[wellington1869]

in manhattan you regularly see 19" CRT's just abandoned on the sidewalk.  I bet most of them still work.

[Shuki]

I wonder if any of them are decent. As long as you get a version with a Sony Trinitron or a Mitsubishi Diamondtron it should be a top notch monitor plus a flatscreen CRT is so much nicer than a rounded screen.

Is your 19" TFT 5:4 aspect ratio?

[wellington1869]

I wonder if any of them are decent. As long as you get a version with a Sony Trinitron or a Mitsubishi Diamondtron it should be a top notch monitor plus a flatscreen CRT is so much nicer than a rounded screen.

Is your 19" TFT 5:4 aspect ratio?

if you mean is it 'regular' and not 'widescreen', then yes

I dont want an old crt anymore tho. Too heavy (i'm still a student and move around a lot), takes up too much desk space, and uses too much electricity. I know the picture on them can be perfectly nice though.

[Shuki]

Well it depends on what you are going to use it for I guess. I used to check behardware however it seems there are no new articles there for over a year now :/

If you play a lot of games or you are on a budget then I guess a TN-panel would suit you.

If you do a lot of photoshopping etc I guess a pva panel would be best suited.

[DrunkenDonut]

I might have to check out some prescription Gunnars (I have an astigmatism)

Are you sure you don't mean stigmata ?  :heh:

[Shuki]

I thought that was plant related but I was probably mixing up Stigma and Stomata :/

[keyb_gr]

A stigma is some kind of mark, usually with a negative connotation. It also means dot though, and an astigmatism means that dots get bent out of shape (into some kind of lines) by the optical system. Have a bit of same, too.

[itlnstln]

A stigma is some kind of mark, usually with a negative connotation. It also means dot though, and an astigmatism means that dots get bent out of shape (into some kind of lines) by the optical system. Have a bit of same, too.

The lens of my eye looks like a football (or a rugby ball for the non-Americans).  Without my glasses, everything looks like one of those old-school 3D movies if you didn't wear the red and blue glasses.

[DrunkenDonut]

Without my glasses, everything looks like one of those old-school 3D movies if you didn't wear the red and blue glasses.

Does this mean you can watch those 3D movies without wearing the glasses? :heh:  (kidding)

Everything's fuzzy without my glasses - can't read signs at long distances, etc. I don't believe I have any other conditions though (i.e. astigmatism). I think I still have my first pair of glasses around somewhere from grade 10. My glasses have been getting smaller and lighter over the years.

My way of dealing with having to stare at screens all day isn't to get more glasses, but buy the highest quality display you can afford, set native resolution for LCDs, or whatever you want for CRTs, sit back and relax. Something I don't do enough is to take a break, look at and refocus your eyes on something other than the screen. Although this summer we seem to have an influx staff that are easy on the eyes.

Oh, and to divurge further from the topic.. gotta love ill will press.. My current favourites are Amityville Toaster and Kavorkian Scarf  

[D-EJ915]

Well a plug for Eizo is my right monitor has 27275 hours of usage and is still going strong so even though they are super expensive they last forever.

[Shyfe]

An MVA with low input lag is the best monitor in my opinion as it does everything very well.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1032393379

This is the one I am using (I got it for $260 shipped). It is often rebranded. The one I am actually using is called the SVA 2400w. It also comes as a Soyo. Careful though, they often mix and match TN and MVA's in there.

I definitely recommend an MVA over a TN. I have a solid TN (HP) right next to my budget MVA and I can tell you that the MVA is much much better. The more expensive option is the IPS which is for professional graphic designers for its accurate colors and insane viewing angles. They cost a lot more but there was a sale for a great H-IPS one for $400 just a few days back (24"). The SVA 2400W I'm using appears to be discontinued. Oh well, good luck. In my opinion, mechanical is to MVA as TN is to membrane. Once you switch, you'll realize how bad the old one was.

[Shuki]

I've seen a lot of computer displays and even the higher quality ips panels which are 8-bit rather than 6-bit like most TN panels, utilising dithering in order to replicate 24-bit colouring they all paled in comparison to high end CRTs.

I would say a good TFT is like a good rubber dome keyboard, and the CRT is the mechanical. However if you are going to get an LCD if you can get one of these with an MVA panel and as low input lag as they claim I guess you could do a lot worse

[keyb_gr]

I would say a good TFT is like a good rubber dome keyboard, and the CRT is the mechanical.

Then a good TFT would have to be something like a Topre though. Not a fan of that analogy.

In any case, one should be careful with super bargain monitors. These may not have brightness adjustment via the backlight but rather a fixed backlight brightness with the panel taking care of the rest. If you want to run these at medium or low brightness, the contrast will be pretty lousy, not to mention the gamma being pretty far off. I'd rather have a tiny bit of brightness-dependent hum from the monitor (though the better constructions should be pretty much free of that).

[bhtooefr]

But the whole process went something like this :

They do still sell PCI video cards, get something crappy that's the same brand as your current card (ATI and nVidia usually don't play well together,) and use that.

You're right tho, you don't really get that much more working space on a bigger screen. No matter how big the screen is, its unlikely going to be large enough to comfortably get two documents of any sort open on it at the same time.

Eh, once you get 2048 pixels wide, it becomes better. I can work with 2 documents with room to spare on my 2048x1536 15" panel in my ThinkPad. And, the IBM T221s that I'm getting are 3840x2400 22.2", which is a resolution and size specifically selected to reach 200 PPI (204, actually,) and be able to display two letter or A4 pages at 100% zoom side by side.

also I wouldnt run it at that high a resolution. My eyes cant take it. I'd prolly do 1200 by 1000 range. I dont need screen real estate, I'm happy with how much info I can put on the screen around 1200 pixels; I just want slightly bigger text on it, thats all.

For the correct aspect ratio, 1280x800 is a standard resolution that would look right. If you want to go to ~1000 pixels, there's 1440x900 and 1680x1050 on either side. One thing to keep in mind with an LCD, though, is that you'll lose crispness if you run anything other than the optimal resolution or something that it's divisible by, and the next lowest resolution that'll divide evenly is 960x600, which is too low for normal use.

There are actually some people on IBM_T2X_LCD that don't ever run their monitors at full resolution, and only got them because 3840x2400 scales down to more useful resolutions evenly than 1920x1200 does, and it also has smaller spaces between pixels due to the very high DPI. (3840x2400 scales down to 1920x1200 and 1280x800 evenly.) Of course, most of the discussion among those with the need for vision correction is where to get cheap glasses, and how to write your own scrip to get T221-optimized glasses. :lol: (Apparently there's some $39 glasses site that they all like.)

Is your 19" TFT 5:4 aspect ratio?

if you mean is it 'regular' and not 'widescreen', then yes

4:3 is "regular," 5:4 is actually closer to square than a regular screen. But, a lot of 19" CRTs are optimized for 1280x1024, a 5:4 resolution.

Anyway, on the topic of panel types... I've not used a *VA panel for an extended period of time. Small TN panels don't bother me, but that's because I can have the entire panel in my field of vision. I like IPS panels, and don't mind the horrendous latency. 25 ms is a very good IPS panel even today - my last three IPS panels have been a 35 ms 12.1" 1400x1050 panel from 2007, a 30 ms 15" 1600x1050 panel from 2006, and a "30 ms" (more like 60 ms overdriven - you can see it actually bounce around the new target color for a while) 15" 2048x1536 panel from 2004. That said, I don't mind it for gaming - motion blur is important for smoothing out the picture, and makes lower framerates acceptable.

However, viewing angles are downright excellent, and so is color reproduction. The main issue (other than slow response time) is a "color grain" effect, and AFFS (BOE-Hydis's IPS patent dodge) panels are much better about that (but still, the ThinkPad X61 Tablet is the grainiest display I've seen, and that is AFFS. Color grain on an IPS display is caused by coatings distorting the light. Matte coatings do just that. IDTech's IPS panels tend to have "semi-matte" coatings - enough just so that the grain isn't really noticeable, but it's not glossy.)

Basically, I'd put it like this: TN is the rubber dome. Some are better than others, they are fast (just like rubber domes are quiet - something that's a big deal to some people,) but their viewing angles aren't great, and their color reproduction isn't always great. *VA is the Cherry MX (I specifically didn't say the stem color, I'm sure there's a Cherry black of *VAs.) Some are slower, some are decently fast (although a good TN tends to be faster,) they have decent viewing angles, and decent color reproduction. IPS is the Topre in price, and the buckling spring in most other ways - color reproduction (feel) is excellent, viewing angles are perfect (170 degrees on the WORST of them, and mine's a 170 panel that's more like 180,) but they're SLOW and sometimes annoying with the color shimmer if the coatings aren't done right.

[Shuki]

A lot a older 19" TFTs were 5:4 commonly however I don't understand why 4:3 CRTs have a suggested optimal resolution which is 5:4 I much prefer correct aspect ratio and use 1280*960

However I can't see how you can leave CRTs out your analogy. I would say most people who try mechanical keyboards would prefer them over cheap rubber domes. Although some may prefer cherry blue switch, cherry brown or buckling springs.

The higher quality of CRTs isn't opinionated however, in tests performed on these monitors CRTs came out better in all aspects. I can understand people not wanting one due to the huge size and weight of them. Surely though if you look at a high end CRT and a high end TFT you can see for yourself which looks better.

[bhtooefr]

It wasn't a monitor analogy, it was a LCD panel analogy.

And, while I'm at it, the Virtually Indestructible Keyboard would be a passive matrix display.

[Shuki]

Oh I guess I misunderstood. It's sad that they still don't make CRTs I think there is a small market out there of people who buy them. I dunno if it would be enough to make a significant enough profit margin. Also I am assuming that CRTs are nowhere near as cost effective as LCD considering LCDs seem to be always dropping in price whereas decent CRTs always remained at a fairly high price.