help with shopping for LCD monitor

DaRuSsIaMaN

DaRuSsIaMaN

Geek Comrade
Hello everyone. I have read up a bit on LCD monitors, so I'm not totally clueless. But still I feel like I'm not informed enough (only thing I read was this entire article on howstuffworks.com).

Basically, I'm not quite sure which features are most important to me. I am willing to spend money on this, so I'm not necessarily trying to get a bargain. A good deal would be nice but what I really want is for it to be good! Also, I want 19 or 17 inch, not bigger. And regular aspect ratio, not widescreen.

So first and foremost, I am looking for a monitor that will work well like a business monitor. I'm gonna have to do a lot of school work on my computer, which means a lot of staring at text in word documents, web pages, etc. I want all that to display very well. However, I also want to play games, since I do play sometimes, so I don't want to see any ghosting or for it to look crappy otherwise. I'm just saying, though, I read some reviews on monitors that say stuff like "this is great for games, but doesn't display text too well". Something like that is not for me! I'll be pissed if it displays text poorly and my eyes get tired! In other words, I want it to work great in both worlds but I'm more concerned about the non-gaming aspect. So, to satisfy this demand, what features should I focus on most? I don't understand, for example, why one monitor might not display text as well as another when they all basically have very similar stats. What is most important for me? brightness, contrast ratio, response time, etc?

Help greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Also, i searched for other threads about monitors and am in the process of reading through some other ones discussing LCD issues/concerns, but if anyone remembers or finds any other threads that may have good insights or answers for me, links to them would be appreciated as well.
 
get a 19" monitor. for gaming, you should get a monitor with a low refresh rate 8ms or lower. also contrast should be high, or else your games would look ordinary. This is probably all you would need. also check the warranty, coz you might come up with a monitor with a dead pixel, so watch for that too.
 
The best way to know if a monitor is right for you is to view it in person. Specs are a great tool for narrowing down your choices, but they are no replacement for hands-on experience. Go down to every shop you can and see if you can find the monitor you are thinking of buying. You never know, that slightly low spec one you shunned in favour of that extra inch of screen may beat everything else hands down in ‘real world’ performance.

If you want your games to look good, high contrast and high brightness, but low power comsuption is a very good combination because this will give you impressive visuals and your display will hopefully last longer.
I'm basically saying don't rely on review. People have different opinions, and you never know, they could even be colourblind :D
 
personally, i prefer gaming with a CRT monitor than with an LCD monitor. The CRT just gives the picture a 'solid' feel than the LCD, i have nothing against the LCD, just when it comes to games is a different picture. by now, LCDs have surely matured, but i still prefer my CRT.
 
yes well the stuff they are saying applies to all else as well, but the one thing with 19 lcd is they run at 1280x1024 wich is the native resolution for a 17 inch so the picture won't be as good on a 19 as a 17 because the screen is enlarged. Also refresh rate for crts it the equivilent of response time for lcds, so in a sense the better response time the better the refresh rate which makes it easier on the eyes. Alother thing you would really want to look into would be really good contrast ration 500:1 at least, contrast ratio is difference between the darkest and brightest colors, black and white so you will be able to tell between letters and the background. That said i would recommend a 17in lcd 600:1 contrast and 8ms response time but 12ms should be ok to. also look for something that has really good blacks or dark colors, should be in a description or review
 
Swansen said:
Also refresh rate for crts it the equivilent of response time for lcds
Click to expand...
Not quite true sorry.
TFT displays still have refresh rates. Refresh rate is how often in Hz or seconds the screen turns the on and off. The faster refresh rate, the less flicker.
Response time, be it be Black-to-White or Grey-to-Grey, is how long it takes to refresh the screens image in milliseconds.
 
As for dead pixels - don't Samsung offer a guarantee that their screens will ship with zero dead pixels? That's be something to consider as well as dead pixels can be annoying.
 
Yes. Most companies now offer Zero dead pixels for either one or three months.
[ot]My Acer for example only offered Zero dead's for two weeks. It now has two lazy and 1 dead pixel. I just need two more and i can get it replaced :D[/ot]
 
Great help so far guys, thanks! Okay so can someone explain the deal with refresh rates further? I thought the whole point of LCD's was that they don't need to continuously refresh the entire image like a CRT does, since there's no electron gun moving back and forth. The LCD controls each pixel individually, doesn't it? That's what it basically says here. And also here under the bullet that says "less eye strain". So doesn't this mean that every pixel continuously stays either lit or turned off for the entire time until it needs to be changed? For example, if there's nothing moving on screen (like say u're just reading a page of text), then all the pixels just sit there and there's no refreshing being done at all .... right?? Am I getting this correctly? If I am, then why the hell is there even a refresh rate measure? I don't get it.
 
true, LCDs are almost flicker-free so it reduces eye-strain. you don't have to worry about the refresh rates the resonse time is what counts when you game, the lower the response time, the faster things on screen respond which prevents ghosting during games. now this is where CRT monitors still trumps. LCDs however are maturing so much that it is nearly up to the CRT's standards. don't worry about refresh rates when you get an LCD because they're almost flicker free, instead, look for a monitor that has a response time of 8ms or lower if you're getting a monitor for gaming.
 
Swansen said:
yes well the stuff they are saying applies to all else as well, but the one thing with 19 lcd is they run at 1280x1024 wich is the resident resolution for a 17 inch so the picture won't be as good on a 19 as a 17 because the screen is enlarged.
Click to expand...

Man, thanks so much for that! I would have never noticed this. But yeah u're right, all the 19 and 17 inch have the same 1280x1024 resolution. That explains why all the 19 inch ones have higher pixel pitch. They all have 0.294 whereas 17inch ones are all at 0.264, and the 20.1 inch ones also have smaller pitch than 19" ones with 0.255mm. This kinda sucks I think. 19 inch was my size of choice but now I'm trying to avoid it cuz of that lol. Maybe the difference in image quality is unnoticeable and I shouldn't worry about it??
 
remember teh golden rule: the bigger the screen, higher the resolution, better the quality.

As long as you put the resolution higher than the native one, you should be fine.
 
roy92 said:
remember teh golden rule: the bigger the screen, higher the resolution, better the quality.
Click to expand...

Not neccessarily, in general things go like that but it isn't always true, like in the case of the 17" and 19" screens. They both have the same resolution.

roy92 said:
As long as you put the resolution higher than the native one, you should be fine.
Click to expand...

On an LCD using anything other than the native resolution leads to distorted, blurry images.
 
Okay I just realized something today. 1280x1024 resolution is not the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. It would have to be 1280x960 for it to be 4:3. 1280x1024 resolution is more square than the standard. So ... i guess this is kind of a dumb question, but still ... things will look a tiny bit unnatural on this resolution, won't they? Everything will be slightly squeezed. Today I was looking at movies playing on widescreens in a computer store and it looked dumb: peoples' faces were just unnaturally stretched wide. So it will be the opposite effect with this kind of aspect ratio: everything will be a little bit squeezed together unnaturally, right? Although I bet it would be hard to notice cuz the difference in ratios is small...
 
Well it won't nessesarily (sp?) stretch it to fit the window. When I watch a widescreen movie on a standard 4:3 15 inch screen (I don't / can't stretch it across both for some reason) it just runs is widescreen with the outer edges at the edge of my screen and then has the black bars at the rest to kind of 'block' the rest of the empty space out.
Kind of like this: (# indicates black empty space / indicates where the movie is played)

+---------------------+
|###############|
|###############|
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
|###############|
|###############|
+---------------------+


Whereas you're wondering if the movie would stretch to fit like this right?
+---------------------+
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
|/////////////////////////|
+---------------------+

I think it's down to the software you use to play DVD's as to whether or not things get stretched. I use PowerDVD and when a movie is re-sized it doesn't re-size to fit the window, the movie stays in proportion as you scale it down / up.

Is that the kind of thing you were wondering about?
 
Matt555 said:
Is that the kind of thing you were wondering about?
Click to expand...
Well yeah, you pretty much understood me correctly in terms of movies, Matt. But I'm asking more in the general sense rather than just the scope of movies. Let me refine my question a bit.

Okay, when I compared 2 computers for sale right next to each other, which had the exact same desktop backgrounds, but one had a widescreen display and the other did not, it was obvious that on the widescreen display the background image was simply stretched horizontally to fit the entire width of the screen. Wouldn't this happen in games also? Unlike movies, games don't have widescreen editions. So everything would just be unnaturally stretched horizontally. (speculating, since I never tried playing on a widescreen) In other words, in pretty much every situation/application other than watching widescreen movies, a widescreen monitor would just stretch everything. Right?

Okay so my overall question is, if everything I said above is correct about widescreen displays, isn't it true that a similar stretching effect takes place with 17 and 19 inch monitors using the 1280x1024 resolution? Except in this case the stretch would be vertical and not by as much. For example, if I put up a picture of myself as the desktop background (not that I'd ever actually do that lol), I'd look slightly unnatural: I'd be a bit more slender than in real life. And again, the same slight vertical stretch effect would happen in any games (so everything would look slightly taller than originally intended by graphics designers). And going back to movies, the same thing would happen unless the software put black bands at top & bottom to force it into 1280x960. This is how I see it. Sooo ... am I understanding all this correctly??
 
not really there should just be more of everything, thats a bad way of putting it but oh well, anyways 1280x1024 is 5:4
 
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