I've been thinking of getting a 17" LCD monitor for my 21st but I have a few queries first. The budget is between $700-$900
How do they run for gaming? I heard that there can be some motion blur and stuff.
Eye strain. Do LCD monitors prevent your eyes from getting sore? I?m getting sick of having sore eyes, so this is pretty important. And 15min breaks are for wimps!! :P
Colour and image quality. These two are really important since I do 90% of my artwork on the PC, so the colours and images need to be sharp and accurate.
At the moment I have kickass 17" CRT so I?m a little hesitant to give it up to a "lesser" monitor.
Any info would be great :)
I've a 17" LCD at home and I can say that its not really up to scratch for serious gaming. Lots of ghosting/motion blur even at high refresh rates. Its about 12 months old so they've probably improved since then.
Good thing is that you don't get sore eyes from it. Definitely great for a programmer. I don't really know about colour accuracy, I'm a coder, not an artist. :-) Most of the artists at work and others I know say they prefer to have a 21" or larger CRT rather than LCDs.
Like Chris says, try before you buy. Maybe you can rent or borrow one from someone.
-kul
Eye strain isnt totally related to the refresh rate of your monitor. It does factor into the equation, but it has more to do with the natural focus distance of the eye. If I remember correctly, the normal resting focus distance for the eye is about 10-15', so any prolonged work in front of any monitor is eventually going to result in a coupla sore eyes.
But that aside, i've also been looking around for a new monitor, so i'm looking forward to seeing what people are saying about this.
The quality of the LCD screen will make the biggest difference. Although there are a lot of different brands, they generally use someone else's tubes. Samsung and NEC based ones are really nice. Great contrast.
I have a 17" Prophetview 920dvi. Works brilliantly. I would never go back to a CRT again. The colours are a lot more saturated than on a CRT (the reason why people don't like LCDs), but that doesn't bother me. Everything looks far brighter and... well... nicer :) Refresh rate doesn't play into an LCD very much at all. No glare (as there isn't any glass on it). No radiation. Uses 10% the electricity of a CRT. Better contrast (once again no glass). Weighs 7kg (enough to pick up comfortably in one hand). Hell of a lot less space (great for tight LANing). I haven't had sore eyes since I started using my LCD and that does include many long hours staring at the screen. The down sides are the price, the colour issues (should it really bother you) and the response times (17ms and less should prove no troubles). You can also have troubles with dead pixels, but most manufactures have pretty good return policies towards that (be careful and check them out though). It is also worth noting that I got a dead pixel within a month of having my screen, but it just vanished another month ago. It has neevr returned ?:S Also, don't let your friends touch the screen :)
If you are really interested, go into somewhere like Harvey Norman/Bing Lee and have a llok at their displays. They often have all the bigger name monitors hooked up so you can see them side by side. Ask them if you can have a look at movies playing on them or whatever else. When you have decided, walk out of the store and by the monitor elsewhere :)
I've got a benq fp991. It's 19 inch and fricken beautiful. Like Aven said, the colours are more saturated, brighter and all round better. Images look nicer on the monitor. The bad thing about it is when I spend my time painting a pic on that monitor then I transfer the pic to a comp with a CRT monitor, the image looks worse because the CRT doesn't do the image justice to how it was originally viewed and created through an LCD. Which is a problem. Especially considering most people have CRTs these days. But there's a massive rise in the amount of LCDs this past few months.
It has a 25ms response time which is average. Though I haven't noticed any ghosting or annoying blur when watching DVDs etc. I haven't tested it with Unreal or Quake yet since most of the games I play are slow strategy ones... lol.
I don't know if they're out here yet, but the Dell fp2001 is a great monitor. I think it has a 16ms response time and is 20.1 inches! Has a native res of 1600x1200!! I purchased the Benq because the fp2001 wasn't out here in Oz. Though it was killing me to know the Americans were getting such a good monitor for as low as 750 US dollars...
Read this review for more info on the FP2001:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1918&p=2
And for all the info you'll ever need on LCDs, check this thread out:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m…
Happy shopping!
I use a 19" Samsung 191T and all I can say is I'd never go back to a CTR... nowhere near as much eye strain as with my 21" CRT Trinitron and the actual screen size is practically the same.
Definitely look into Samsung if you're thinking of getting an LCD, I researched just about every brand before buying and at the time they stood out as being one of the best.
Thanks guys :)
I have my monitor set to 85Hz for my refresh rate. I will go into Harvey Norman, Myer, etc and look at their monitors and see what they are like, obviously I wont be purchasing one from them.
I have my eyes on this one- Samsung 172X 17"
http://www.scorptec.com.au/index.php?prdid=00010161
Although with so many out there it can be a little overwhelming trying to find out what ones are good and what ones arent.
Personally I'd go for the Samsung 710 (http://www.electronic-avenue.net/details.php?id=64) which has 12ms response time, 600:1 contrast ratio and 270cd/m2 brightness.
Oh, and did I mention it was black? [;)]
21" CRT at 100 hertz is good [:p].
Im not sure as to yet, but our new computers were ordered over a week ago and a nice 17" Philips LCD was in the order to [:)]. I'll give feedback on it in a few days when the two computers arrive with it.
From what i have seen though, LCD is goooood and as far as i know they just keep on improving [:)].
Latest batch of LCDs are running 12ms refreshes, so the motion blur seen in gaming is getting to barely visible (haven't actually witnessed a 12ms screen physically yet, so my sceptism stays for now @:-) Sore eyes sounds like a problem related to refresh rates. I think (think) that most LCDs have high refresh rates, so you should be set.
Colour accuracy is definitely getting better. Dad bought an LCD around Christmas, and it gave me faith in LCDs. Up until then, I'd have been sticking with CRTs for quite some time. And sharpness is a given, granted that you're running at the screen's natural resolution. Higher and lower I couldn't tell you.
Needless, try before you buy. Don't be a goose and buy without spending some time infront of the damn thing @:-D