Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: wolfen on February 16, 2009, 05:24:05 pm

Title: New Monitor
Post by: wolfen on February 16, 2009, 05:24:05 pm
Well guys and girls, I have a new monitor. I've had a new video card for a few weeks now, its a Nvidia 8400gs 512 meg ddr2, but my old monitor all but died, I had the brightness up all the way and couldn't see the ships I was trying to target half the time, so I broke down and bought a Acer 193W LCD monitor, and MAN IS THIS THING ROCKS! I have the brightness set almost at rock bottom on this thing and every thing is like reality now plus I went from a screen resolution of 1024x768 at 72Mhz to 1440x900 at 85Mhz :) I will NEVER have a tube type monitor again (I hope)
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Sololop on February 16, 2009, 06:27:49 pm
CRT's are gross. Once you go flat, you never go back.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: wolfen on February 16, 2009, 06:30:18 pm
Right on brother, my two kids are using crt's but their computers are Frankensteins anyway running 98 on one and xp with only SP1 on the other. As son as I can build them descent computers, they will have LCD also .
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Enigmatic Entity on February 16, 2009, 06:51:01 pm
 Same situation at my house - one CRT is still good enough to use, the other has a high pitched whining noise, indicating imminent destruction. And there are two that don't work. If you're an electronics enthusiast, there's plenty of capacitors, resistors, insulated copper wire and heat sinks up for grabs. If you had one with built-in amplified speakers in it, then you should be able to extract that section and use it somewhere else.

Otherwise, dipose of them your way. :drevil:
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: The E on February 16, 2009, 06:54:46 pm
Question: Why is this in General Freespace?  :wtf:
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Sololop on February 16, 2009, 08:14:32 pm
I guess 'cause monitors are used to view Freespace?...Maybe?... Uhhh, ... Um, Could be moved.

Anyhoo, I never thought of hacking away at a CRT. I got one in my garage. Maybe in the spring I'll harvest it.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Vip on February 17, 2009, 01:24:41 am
Blasphemy !!! CRT FTW !

No, really. All the LCDs I was unfortunate to use made my eyes plainly hurt after no more than an hour. Reading text on it is plain gross. And I have a free, constant effect of blur on it. Perhaps all those new, shinny and helluva expensive LCDs don't have those disadvantages, but I ain't paying several hundred bucks for a monitor. My cheap CRTs (which are harder and harder to find nowadays) don't have such problems though. And there are no problems with resolution issues, etc.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Pred the Penguin on February 17, 2009, 03:59:21 am
No CRTs in my house anymore...

They'd die way too fast where I live. =/
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: paul1290 on February 17, 2009, 08:34:02 am
I guess 'cause monitors are used to view Freespace?...Maybe?... Uhhh, ... Um, Could be moved.

Anyhoo, I never thought of hacking away at a CRT. I got one in my garage. Maybe in the spring I'll harvest it.

In my opinion, taking apart a CRT on your own isn't such a great idea since they sometimes contain all sorts of toxic chemicals, especially older ones.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: wolfen on February 17, 2009, 03:23:52 pm
Question: Why is this in General Freespace?  :wtf:
this is in General Freespace because I started the thread here, the only reason i started the thread here is since I've been in Freespace this is about as far down the bbs list as I have been :)
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Sololop on February 17, 2009, 03:38:52 pm
In my opinion, taking apart a CRT on your own isn't such a great idea since they sometimes contain all sorts of toxic chemicals, especially older ones.

Yeah, I wouldn't touch the tube part. Those things are under pressure I believe, and with the chemicals you said, if it broke, would cause problems.

All the LCDs I was unfortunate to use made my eyes plainly hurt after no more than an hour. Reading text on it is plain gross. And I have a free, constant effect of blur on it. Perhaps all those new, shinny and helluva expensive LCDs don't have those disadvantages, but I ain't paying several hundred bucks for a monitor. My cheap CRTs (which are harder and harder to find nowadays) don't have such problems though. And there are no problems with resolution issues, etc.

I have two LCD's in my house. One is older, and a lot cheaper than the second one. I tried to game on the first monitor, it was immensly dark, text looks bad, moving images have a blur and just overall poor experience. The second monitor, however, is much better, but still too dark for my taste. The best LCD I have had the experience of using, is for my Laptop. But it is very expensive.

So yeah, LCD's do suck if they are cheap. You have to go get the pricy ones for a good experience. Hopefully their price will drop as CRT's are more and more phased out.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Wobble73 on February 17, 2009, 03:47:17 pm
I have a 19" inch LCD monitor at work, I have a 19" inch CRT. I prefer my CRT. *SHRUGS*  maybe it's 'cause I get to play games at home, but the screen seems bigger and the colours are brighter!  *edit* No, more vibrant, that's the word */edit* Plus, I can view at almost any angle, which seems to be a problem with my laptop lcd screen?
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Enigmatic Entity on February 17, 2009, 05:52:25 pm
Laptop monitors suck for wide viewing angles. Most of the time you get "X-ray" vision [inverted colours] or some sort of fade to grey or black effect.

I guess 'cause monitors are used to view Freespace?...Maybe?... Uhhh, ... Um, Could be moved.

Anyhoo, I never thought of hacking away at a CRT. I got one in my garage. Maybe in the spring I'll harvest it.

Keep to the circuit board and you shouldn't have any trouble with whatever's all over the inside of those tubes. Stay away from the hammer away and don't drop it [the monitor] - you wouldn't want shards of poisonous glass all over your garage floor. :nervous:
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: wolfen on February 17, 2009, 06:32:29 pm
So far I'm not having any problems out of mine, color is way better than the crt, and the graphics are life like, to the point you'd almost believe your looking through the forward screen on a real starship.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: pecenipicek on February 17, 2009, 06:42:10 pm
discussing on the monitors... i loved my good ole AOC 19" but it finally gave way to a cracked power converter. so i tossed it out and got a Hyundai 19" widescreen (x91w i think it was...), it was a piece of lousy crap to be honest. so i changed with a friend for a Samsung SyncMaster 931BF. Very nice, even tho getting the colors tweaked just right is a horrible task.

Then i bought an Acer Aspire 5530. That LCD trounces everything i laid my eyes upon. As in, humiliatingly rapes the samsung and the hyundai.



even tho all 3 are probably 18-bit interpolators, the acer one is the best one. side viewing is no problem, long time working on it, no problem, colors? strangely enough, on vista x64, the default color profile is the best one working. its a joy to work on this little bugger.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Enigmatic Entity on February 17, 2009, 07:26:15 pm
discussing on the monitors... i loved my good ole AOC 19" but it finally gave way to a cracked power converter. so i tossed it out and got a Hyundai 19" widescreen (x91w i think it was...), it was a piece of lousy crap to be honest. so i changed with a friend for a Samsung SyncMaster 931BF. Very nice, even tho getting the colors tweaked just right is a horrible task.

Then i bought an Acer Aspire 5530. That LCD trounces everything i laid my eyes upon. As in, humiliatingly rapes the samsung and the hyundai.



even tho all 3 are probably 18-bit interpolators, the acer one is the best one. side viewing is no problem, long time working on it, no problem, colors? strangely enough, on vista x64, the default color profile is the best one working. its a joy to work on this little bugger.

Please tell me that's not true...  :p

Fixxored.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: pecenipicek on February 17, 2009, 09:11:02 pm
which part? :p
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: CP5670 on February 17, 2009, 10:35:02 pm
This thread belongs in GD.

I am still on my four year old Mitsubishi 2070SB CRT. The colors and focus have remained perfect and it's one of the very few out there to support 2048x1536 at 85hz. It is great in every way except for the 20" (viewable) screen size. I want something larger than this, but without the numerous issues of LCDs. They are good for office work but I have yet to see one I would consider acceptable for gaming, especially in a dark room. In fact, I find that FS2 brings out the worst in LCDs in terms of motion blur and Hi-FRC dithering (on TNs), more than any other game I have seen.

Display technology sucks all around these days. The good CRTs are long out of production (the few still being made are garbage), LCDs have stagnated for ages now and have seen almost no improvements since 2006, and OLEDs are still at least a year away from mass production. When OLEDs finally come out though, they should resolve every problem of LCDs except for the fixed resolution.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: BloodEagle on February 18, 2009, 12:47:03 am
Rather than go into the age old 'I think LCDs suck' rant, I'll add something new old as all Hell.  One company, a while back ('04?), managed to get a CRT display (24-29" IIRC) to be around a foot thick by changing the angle of the tube.  They foolishly decided not to produce more than a handful of these.  :mad2:

The CRT can still be improved.  It's a shame that no one in the monitor industry has the testicular fortitude to continue R&D on it.  :(
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: Fury on February 18, 2009, 12:55:16 am
Vacuum tubes got replaced by transistors, imagine what kind of computers we'd be running if that didn't happen.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: CP5670 on February 18, 2009, 02:38:57 am
Quote
One company, a while back ('04?), managed to get a CRT display (24-29" IIRC) to be around a foot thick by changing the angle of the tube.  They foolishly decided not to produce more than a handful of these.

It was Samsung, and those thin CRTs had especially poor focus around the horizontal edges. They were only made into TVs instead of computer monitors due to this, and I can understand why they never took off.

The loss of focus at large screen sizes is a limitation of CRT technology in general, and the reason why we never saw any computer CRT over 22.5". OLED should provide most of CRT's benefits while allowing for bigger screens.
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: BloodEagle on February 18, 2009, 07:17:46 am
One can only hope. :/
Title: Re: New Monitor
Post by: wolfen on February 18, 2009, 06:57:36 pm
I got a 32 inch Samsung TV thats about 6 inches thick once, don't have it anymore, it died, but the one I have now is a CRT  32 diaginal. Yea its analog, but it has a vga port in teh back , kinda wiered for a 2004 TV set, but it doubles as a computer monitor for watching those few movies that I download but can't convert into dvd format.