LCD is filling the gap between CRT and OLED pretty well in my opinion. Fact of the matter is, most people don't need professional-level color reproduction. LCD's main attraction for most people is probably its compact size. In all other aspects, it's good enough for the majority of home users.

And despite having some pretty big inherent flaws, I think LCD technology has become very good due to the sheer amount of money that's been dumped into developing it.

There's only one such 22". The Lenovo. Samsung might release one. 1920x1200 24" monitors have a pixel pitch whose dot pitch analogue I stopped using in 1995. No joke.

Primarily the manufacturers' fault, actually. I was surprised the L220x was pre-set at 50%. 85%-100% is pretty common.

I don't have a watt meter. I kind of stumbled into the wrong subforum here : )

LCD’s have their flaws but IMO their pros widely exceeds their cons. As mentioned, the consume less power, also takes up less space, emit much less radiation, are easier on the eyes (given that brightness level are adjusted down to a sober level), so really, unless you’re a hardcore gamer or using Photoshop on a semi professional level (needing accurate colour reproduction), I would find it hard pressed understanding why anyone would go with a CRT.

Matija,

I understand you point, if you really want a high quality LCD you have to pay some premium money and I would have to agree with you that those screens are (IMO) ridiculously overpriced. But I’m not so sure however, that I would go so far as to state that the tech is failed, although I agree to some extent that the tech at times are somewhat overmarketed.

But it *is* a failed tech when it comes to, well, tech and not marketing.

TN: awful vertical viewing angles, poor colour reproduction
*VA: awful horizontal viewing angles, black crush
*IPS: horribly expensive, contrast barely reaching good levels nowadays

I can't think of many people that had problems with CRTs if they were running at an acceptable refresh rate and contrast. On the other hand, I can think of a lot of people (myself included) that have problems with various LCDs. Some of them take no more than five minutes to make me feel like my head is going to explode, some induce the urge to vomit - I kid you not.

I have a couple of cheap TNs at work. They are perfectly acceptable if I run them at a non-native resolution. However, set them to native, and I'll get a headache almost immediately, coupled with a burning feeling in my eyes. A friend had issues with a particular MVA about a month ago, it made him feel very uneasy (by his words, it was like having a bad dream), but I had no problems with it. Then he switched to a PVA monitor that he adored, and I puked on his carpet a little. That said, I had no problems with other PVA monitors I've seen. One more funny thing: another friend has a dog that runs away from an IPS he's using.

At the end of the day, in LCDs it's CCFL we're looking at, pulsing at frequencies that we cannot see but only feel, and it's all subjective and individual how and if we react. However, people in general get more nervous and tired under CCFL, which are a problem in a lot of "sick" buildings.

it works for some people. hence individual choice. till a better technology comes along for producing acceptable images cheaply, then LCD's are full of win.

S-IPS are unfortunatly, ususally not fast enough. *VA panels offer a good compromise IMHO.

I have a S-IPS on my laptop (thinkpad T60p ) and my Dell 2407WFP uses either a PVA or an IPS (still haven't found out which one as both technologies have been used on this model).

Me too, I can hardly see how LCD technology has failed. Maybe they're not perfect, but that doesn't mean they're a failure

actually, if I recall there were also a couple of eizos too - not consumer grade though

Failed technology? Man, I would love to be such a failure.

Would you rather lug around a sewing machine size Kaypro than use a laptop?

And a few folks talk about having problems looking at an LCD. After having worked on CRTs for 20 years, having an LCD is sooo much better. After working several hours straight of staring at a CRT, then getting up from it, I used to be amazed how fatigued my eyes would be. Now, that does at happen at all when I use my LCD monitors. I think it is mostly about the convergence. No such problem on an LCD since you drive the pixels directly instead of trying to keep 3 beams converged over the entire monitor surface.

I was one of the last ones at work to switch to LCD because I had perfectly good CRTs, but man do I love my LCD monitors now that I have switched.

I'll take your CRTs!

(BTW, I'd personally never use a laptop. Turned down a great job last year because they wanted to give me one such machine from hell.)

I'm starting to smell a troll going on actually

Uh, why? Because I hate laptops?

well... lcd vs crt seems to me like a typical trollemic issue...

now that you mention it, desktop vs laptop would fit perfectly too

Well, that's because LCDs are superior to CRTs, and some people don't realize that....

*ducks*

Matija,

I would be happy to give you the CRTs, if they were as cheap to ship as an LCD

BTW, I recently "lost" a 21" Mitsubishi Diamondtron in excellent condition, the guy sold it for roughly $200 half an hour before I'd withdrawn the money from an ATM... Gah.

Well, some people still do prefer CRT screens, although I don’t belong to that camp. I have used a few good CRTs in the past though (before going LCD) the one I was most satisfied with was a ViewsonicP227F screen, and that one was actually pretty nice, picture quality wise anyway.


To bad, also to bad you live in Croatia since I have a brand new and sealed Samsung Syncmaster 1100MB CRT screen for you here, please, don’t ask me why I kept it around, I just cant seem to get rid of components collecting them, it’s a bloody disease. I mean, I know I’m never ever going to use it so why keep it? now, get over here and pick it up before I change me mind

Of course some people still prefer CRTs, i don't have anything to say about that. I just think that discussing this over and over again seems to me like a typical mac vs windoze kinda post...

but hey everyone's free to discuss whatever they like, right? just don't count me in

FWIW, I have an MVA Viewsonic VP930 and the horizontal viewing angle is huge.

My friend has a TN Viewsonic VX922... and side by side, you really can't tell the difference. Just don't go with the out of the box settings. The VX922 has so much brightness and colour it was ridiculous.

I've never knowingly seen an IPS panel.[/i]

I hope my 19" CRT will last until OLED display's are around 150 - 200 € cheapest model's... But I think that is bit too much to be asked but I always can hope this old war horse can do few more years. I got this 19" Dell P992 100 Hz Trinitron with 10€'s from my friends work place, when they got new TFT's. It has worked sweetly, even its somewhat noisy monitor, like CRT's usually are.

I still think CRT would be best for gaming with 0 ms Response. However I think I'd still prefer TFT in desktop use.

I've used a NEC FP2141 diamondtron 22" CRT for the last 5 years, and it's held up pretty well. 1280x960@120hz -- very easy on the eyes. It's like staring at paper (although staring at a 2d surface all day isn't good for one's eyes, anyway). There's a slight misconvergence that's cropped up around the corners, but it isn't too bad. I may end up getting an LCD soon, although this CRT should last a while longer.

Years ago I bought a Sony G420 19" CRT for about €700. It was a great monitor and I was happy at 1280x960 85Hz. Then after roughly 3 years and two months it died on me (3 years warranty *growl*). I got a 17" Dell Trinitron (that would make it a Sony tube, right?) for cheap, also a very good CRT. But after a long time with a 19" screen, 17" wasn't enough for me (even if it also did 1280x960 85Hz very well) so when I had the money I got the Dell 2405FPW that I'm currently using. It was about €1000 at the time but I think it's the best thing I ever got for my computer.

It has a PVA panel and consumes ~44W at my current setting. 0% brightness of course and even that is too bright for me so I use the video settings in the OS to lower the gamma just a little bit. I will never go back below 1920x1200 on my primary system. I almost never run applications maximized, most of the time I have two programs side by side.
I don't even want to think about how my setup would look and what the power consumption would be with a CRT that size.

Once I thought I cared about monitor power consumption. Now that I bought 24" monitor last month my view has changed. I wouldn't go back to 19" monitor even if it didn't use power at all. It's almost painful to use 19" monitors after the upgrade. Really, there's just no going back once you get a bigger monitor. I love that I can watch movies in full HD resolution, have 2 pages open on my PDFs etc...

I bought a BenQ G2400W for 360€. I just couldn't justify the price of more expensive panels, so I bought monitor with TN panel. It has proven itself more then adequate for my needs.

I don't care so much about the power consumption either, since while my computer is on almost 24/7, my TFT is not. The best thing with TFTs are the reduced depth compared to a CRT. When I used my 19" CRT I had a 70cm deep desk with a shelf behind it to add another 30cm. Now I use a smaller desk, just 60cm deep. Not insignificant when you live in a small apartment.

Sorry to send us back up the thread a bit, but I just can't help myself. Jessekopelman, you are awesome. Life is going to be so much easier now that I know the best way to be green is simply to consume more! Happy days!!!

But seriously, another thing to take into account was in a column in the Guardian this week. It says that LCDs use a gas called nitrogen triflouride and this is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Its release is not covered by the Kyoto protocol. Apparently some boffin at the University of California has done some research and is a bit concerned.

BTW I hypocritically didn't take those things into account when I bought my LCD. They're just nicer than the old CRTs aren't they?

Surely good CRT monitors do have a better color gamut, but what I really hate on CRT screens its their impossibility to get perfect geometry even in the most advanced models with lots of settings.

Moreover I now use two screens both at home and office and two CRTs would just occupy to much space on my desks.

...just my 2c

My 2c too...

Maybe people who, after switching from CRT to LCD, realized that they hate CRTs, did it because they had low quality CRTs to begin with?

I always put money first to ergonomics instead of fast CPUs, so I used very good CRTs. My first own CRT back in 1997 already had almost flat screen surface, when practically all the other CRTs I ever saw were round in every direction. I did pay the equivalent of 1000eur for it back then, and it was only 17" in size. It never made my eyes or any other part of me sore, even when staying the whole day in front of the computer. I enjoyed reading on screen just as much as off screen.

I can't say the same for other people's CRT monitors. If all my experience about CRTs would be from those other ones, I too would hate CRTs with passion, and doom their existence.


Pros and cons of CRT:

- need to manually calibrate the geometry
- needs to warm up for stable geometry
- heavy and large compared to screen surface
- power hungry
- blinks unless proper refresh rate is configured
- sensitive to nearby magnetic fields
- degauss makes a loud noise
- some CRTs don't have a flat screen surface
- analog VGA connection makes the image quality depend on your GPU

+ black is black; good contrast without excessive brightness
+ no input lag whatsoever
+ no pixel refresh lag whatsoever
+ resolution scaling is not a problem
+ any viewing angle works

Pros and cons of LCD (with digital connection):

+ perfect geometry
+ thin and light; easy to wall-mount
+ uses less power
+ does not blink
+ image quality does not depend on GPU at all

- black is usually far from black
- too bright
- buzzes when brightness reduced to tolerable levels
- cheaper panels have bad viewing angles
- input lag
- pixel refresh lag
- cheaper panels can not show as many colors as CRTs

Please add to my list of pros and cons.

I'd just love to see SED displays starting production. They would have the pros of both CRT and LCD but just a small part of the cons. Or failing that, maybe OLED.

I stopped using my dualhead CRT setup about half a year ago, in favor of my new shiny 30" LCD, but to get low input lag (just 11ms) with that large screen size, I could not get one with a built in scaler, because there's just a couple models this large that have scalers, and they have horrible amounts of input lag.

If only the blacks were black, and I could get zero input lag with a built in scaler, then LCDs would truly be the best displays, but now it's pretty much a draw for me.

I type this as I sit with a 19" CRT and a 27" LCD side by side.

I love the size of the LCD screen, and the slimness and the power saving, the digital input, indeed all the inputs are useful and nice to have. If only it had the response, colour range and sharpness regardless of resolution on the CRT next to it.

If only the CRT had the antireflectiveness of the LCD - which when viewed when off is like staring at a dark flat black painted wall.

They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Now if only there was some way to combine the two ...

"lm" summarized strengths and weaknesses of both display types quite well. I agree with those points.

The reason why I like LCDs is because I have only used cheap CRTs. Cheap CRT vs cheap LCD => LCD win (IMO).
High quality CRT vs high quality LCD => ??? (since I have no personal experience with either of them)

My personal experience with cheap CRTs:
+ all resolutions
- but all of them look like crap
+ good colors
+ black
- often poor power factor correction during power on or degauss (power spike dimms room lighting)
- annoying coil whine (alternating depending on monitor orientation, refresh rate, resolution, etc.)
- geometry problems (not always possible to correct with on-screen menu calibration options, temperature variable, resolution variable, refresh rate variable, etc. = total pain in the arse)
- often ending up smoking... literally
- will deteriorate over time, geometry errors will get worse, picture will get fuzzy, capability to display high resolutions will suffer
- refresh rate sensitive, flashing image with wrong refresh rate, or as display ages with all refresh rates, total eyesore

My personal experience with cheap TN panel LCD displays:
- one resolution (but that one is usually enough as most software support multiple resolutions)
+ at least that one resolution actually works properly
+ perfect geometry
+ easy calibration (necessary for VGA input only, and that has "auto" calibration option)
- poor black
- non-perfect colours
- constant whine from backlighting (luckily very quiet one compared to CRT coil whine)
+ whine is at least constant and not alternating
+ doesn't create power spikes during power on
+ no sensitivity to external magnetic fields (incl. speakers)
- trailing (due to poor refresh rate)
+ no blinking (due to poor refresh rate)
- some but not all displays/TVs lack backlight control completely (brightness only controls pixels, black WILL remain the same gray even if brightness is reduced, reducing brightness => reducing contrast)
+ low power consumption relative to screen size and brightness
+ available in big panel sizes, while weight and depth will usually remain in moderation (13" CRT may outweight 26" LCD)
- bad pixels (dead and stuck ones)

Maybe I have had bad luck with my CRTs since none of them have actually worked more than 2 years before: smoking, developing excessive geometric distortion, becoming fuzzy, becoming so dark that compensating has caused severe reduction of contrast and loss of black, or starting to whine loudly.

But I do acknowledge there's better CRTs and that LCD panels (all panel types) have some inferior qualities compared to them. Anyway, cheap TN panels are good enough for their price for my way of use. Professional photoeditors have a good reason to think otherwise.