[Bob-san]

Buy a cheap LCD.

[Mongoose]

Hell no, I'm not getting ****-loads of ghosting every time I try to play a game.  And besides, unless you know of some magical money font somewhere, I don't exactly have the funds to do so.

(Plus, it still wouldn't fit, even with an LCD.)

[S-99]

This is why i like crt's better than lcd's. You have to pay a pretty penny to get an lcd that has 0.7ms redraw time or less. My 19inch samsung wide screen lcd cost me $214 in 2007 (people will probably tell me to get it online, but i live in alaska, and that would have been 70$ shipping, i saved like $20 just buying it locally). It's still a great monitor and good for games. You only notice the ghosting if you're actually closely looking for it, and even then, it has a great redraw rate. Really the redraw speed on it is not noticeable at all. Cheap or old lcd's are another thing.

Crt's have always had what i consider to be better picture quality compared to any lcd. Also, refresh rates on crt's you can actually take advantage of and notice a difference. Refresh rates on lcd's is a wierd thing. An lcd at 85hz or higher really seems about the same as it being just at 60hz. I just leave them all at 60hz. Combined with the backlighting, and the redraw speed, bumping an lcd to be higher than 60hz has never been worth my time (an lcd at a higher refresh rate seems no different to me than being stuck at 60hz).

A crt higher than 60hz, you notice big time, especially when combined with vsync (helps out big time with minimizing graphical tearing, keeps your frame rate stable, and keeps more resources of the video card free for doing other things...really makes for some smooth video output in your games, especially fso). Crt's don't have that lcd redraw problem. The only reason i own lcd's today is for the less electricity consumption and more desk space.

After that, a lot of people are convinced that old crt monitors are not HD. When in fact they are, anything over 640x480 is above standard definition. My lcd monitor can do 1440x900; that's only 180 pixels below 1080p, another reason i don't give a **** about getting a better lcd screen.

As far as old clamshells go, it's just really the shoddy case for why i'd  never own one. I'd feel better about the shoddy case if it wasn't proprietary so i could do stuff like toss in a non dell motherboard. I've passed up a million empty clamshell cases i would have happily used for housing my hardware. I don't care if a computer case is all pink and girly looking, if i can put my computer hardware in it, then i'm extremely happy because i just saved like $50. The fact that you could take a clamshell case and flip it on it's side and do the two tabs thing and just open it up not needing a screw driver was handy, albeit somewhat of a delicate operation because they were easy to break.

[Bob-san]

Hell no, I'm not getting ****-loads of ghosting every time I try to play a game.  And besides, unless you know of some magical money font somewhere, I don't exactly have the funds to do so.

(Plus, it still wouldn't fit, even with an LCD.)

Never noticed ghosting on a modern LCD. A problem on older LCD's, sure, but TN panels have a fast response and (regardless of color quality or CCFL backlighting) don't easily ghost. If you have $160 or so, you can get a decent LCD. Otherwise, odds are backlighting will suck.

[Liberator]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009179

23" 1920x1080 50000:1 contrast ratio 5ms resposnse time

And I even like the color ;-)

[Mongoose]

Never noticed ghosting on a modern LCD. A problem on older LCD's, sure, but TN panels have a fast response and (regardless of color quality or CCFL backlighting) don't easily ghost. If you have $160 or so, you can get a decent LCD. Otherwise, odds are backlighting will suck.

I really do wish I had $160 at hand.  But I'm at well below that, and I don't have any prospects for income for the foreseeable future.  So the big-ass CRT remains...

[S-99]

No, stay with the crt. Don't give it up! You have better picture quality with darker darks, and brighter brights. Still no redraw problem. Don't go to the over bright side!

[Androgeos Exeunt]

A CRT monitor can still be useful. After three years of seeing LCD monitors, I still prefer my IBM crate's 15-inch CRT.

[Bob-san]

A CRT monitor can still be useful. After three years of seeing LCD monitors, I still prefer my IBM crate's 15-inch CRT.

My opinion was the reverse when I finally made the switch ~18 months ago. My good CRT was dying (becoming dimmer and colors getting b0rk3d) so I went along and replaced it with a 19" 1680x1050 LCD. Then, a few months ago, it became the supplement to a 21.5" 1920x1080 panel.

[CP5670]

I have a good CRT that still works fine and does 2048x1536 at 85hz, but it's only 20" viewable (marketed as 22"). I would like something with a larger screen size and don't mind spending some money on it, but I have not seen any LCD I would be satisfied with. If there is any 120hz glossy IPS out there at 26" or higher, that would be worth a look, but otherwise I might look into one of the big DLP projection TVs at some point. A few of them apparently do proper 120hz.

Never noticed ghosting on a modern LCD. A problem on older LCD's, sure, but TN panels have a fast response and (regardless of color quality or CCFL backlighting) don't easily ghost. If you have $160 or so, you can get a decent LCD. Otherwise, odds are backlighting will suck.

It's easy to see in games that maintain a constant 60fps, and is more visible in flying games or top-down RTSs than anything else. In fact, FS2 exhibits some of the worst motion blur I know of in any game. LCDs seem to have reached the limits of the technology in this respect. The fastest ones today are no better than the fastest ones 3 or 4 years ago.

[Bob-san]

I have a good CRT that still works fine and does 2048x1536 at 85hz, but it's only 20" viewable (marketed as 22"). I would like something with a larger screen size and don't mind spending some money on it, but I have not seen any LCD I would be satisfied with. If there is any 120hz glossy IPS out there at 26" or higher, that would be worth a look, but otherwise I might look into one of the big DLP projection TVs at some point. A few of them apparently do proper 120hz.

Never noticed ghosting on a modern LCD. A problem on older LCD's, sure, but TN panels have a fast response and (regardless of color quality or CCFL backlighting) don't easily ghost. If you have $160 or so, you can get a decent LCD. Otherwise, odds are backlighting will suck.

It's easy to see in games that maintain a constant 60fps, and is more visible in flying games or top-down RTSs than anything else. In fact, FS2 exhibits some of the worst motion blur I know of in any game. LCDs seem to have reached the limits of the technology in this respect. The fastest ones today are no better than the fastest ones 3 or 4 years ago.

Tri-monitor Eyefinity solution. How about three 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 panels? Though a single 2560x1600 would be a touch bigger (or at least a good bit wider).

[CP5670]

Eyefinity is a cool concept, but I wouldn't spend any significant amount of money on it. It would only work well in a few games (old enough to maintain good framerates at that resolution, but still supporting custom resolutions and FOVs) and the borders between the displays would be annoying.

In any case, I don't know of any 1920 LCD that takes a 120hz input, and those are the only ones I would consider. The computer monitors that support it are currently all 1680x1050 TNs that are otherwise mediocre, but there are a few DLP projection TVs that do it.

[Mongoose]

Our 40" Sony Bravia runs at 120 Hz, though I can't say I've ever attempted to hook up a computer to it.  Might be fun someday, though.

And speaking of this whole subject, over the last few days, I've experienced very clearly a huge downside of ever-increasing monitor resolutions: playing older games on them.  I've been replaying the entire Myst series, as it's been a while, and the first two or three games were intended to be run at a maximum of 640x480 full-screen resolution.  Obviously enough, even when running a comparatively-small 1280x960 resolution as I am, this results either in the game occupying a postage stamp's worth of real estate in the middle of the screen, or else looking like absolute ass when blown up to full-screen.  I don't even want to think about what would happen on a 1920x1260 display.  It's enough to make one wish that some company out there would continue making high-quality smaller 4:3 displays at something like 1024x768 native resolution, just for the sake of all those old applications that don't handle the high-res treatment very well.

[CP5670]

Yeah, I will keep my CRT around for those cases even if I get something bigger. However, 640x480 is fairly easy to deal with since it can be scaled up exactly to 1280x960, which fits pretty well (with black bars) on most of the standard LCD sizes.

I don't know about that particular TV, but there are a lot of TVs that claim to support it but actually don't. They only take a 60hz input and interpolate the frames in between, which is useless. The TVs that advertise support for 3D stereoscopic content are the only ones that do true 120hz.

[Bob-san]

Eyefinity is a cool concept, but I wouldn't spend any significant amount of money on it. It would only work well in a few games (old enough to maintain good framerates at that resolution, but still supporting custom resolutions and FOVs) and the borders between the displays would be annoying.

In any case, I don't know of any 1920 LCD that takes a 120hz input, and those are the only ones I would consider. The computer monitors that support it are currently all 1680x1050 TNs that are otherwise mediocre, but there are a few DLP projection TVs that do it.

I'll put it like this: it's getting even better. AMD finally got around to allowing Crossfire and Eyefinity. Next drivers release will include bezel compensation; when playing full-screen games, pixels will "disappear" underneath the bezel, while still getting full width (versus the Matrox solution, iirc, which left a black bar of pixels on the outer edges). Having a bunch of 16:9 screens in portrait mode (so it's (1080x3)x1920, for example) would work pretty well. The tough thing then would be finding a DisplayPort-compatible monitor (I know Dell was selling a 22"/24" 1080P for $210/$250 with Displayport), preferably one that you can rotate the screen into portrait mode (which it does). Once your CRT is starting to give up the ghost is about when I'd ditch it. I used my CRT (a 17") for about 6-8 years. A decent monitor, but it can't hold a candle (haha pun) to these two LCD's I now use.

[CP5670]

In my case, the CRT I have was one of the top end models and its 20/22" screen size is the only reason I want to get something new. So a big TV at 60" or higher seems attractive from that point of view. A projector is another option, but those tend to be more expensive and are so far limited to 60hz as far as I know.

As for Eyefinity, it would be good if someone just came out with a display without any bezel to get around that issue. Although there is still the issue of running games well at such a resolution. Current single GPU cards couldn't handle three 1920x1200 screens and multi GPU setups have various other issues.

[Wobble73]

How come this thread went from CPU's to VDU's ?


I call for a thread split and to be renamed "What VDU do you use?"
 

[General Battuta]

I can't keep track of all these 3LAs.

[CP5670]

I call for a thread split and to be renamed "What VDU do you use?"

Good idea.

[Enigmatic Entity]

All those LCD TV's that boast about "600Hz Sub-Field Drive" here in Aus...

I did see a Panasonic plasma TV that was almost like looking out of a window with really clean glass, but was $4k and also most people can't fit 127cm of TV on their desk.