I have my little ole dual setup with my 19" CRT (a Dell branded Trinitron) and a Dell 2005FPW and I use the LCD for most everything. Side-by-side, the CRT, even after optimizing it as much as I can, looks dull beside the LCD. The benefit of having a dual display allows me to switch anything from one to the other and see just what sort of difference it makes. I’ve yet to see anything that looks or runs better on the CRT than the LCD, overall, and I doubt I ever will.
Are game developers, for instance, still sitting there with their CRTs testing out how something looks or are they on their big honking widescreen LCDs and optimizing for that?
CRTs might have higher image quality and better color accuracy or whatever, but who cares. LCDs stop you from getting headaches looking at a screen all day long. They have much lower eye strain than crts and that’s all I really care about.
OK, I have an LCD and like it fine but… why do they lead to lower eyestrain? (I didn’t have eyestrain before, so I haven’t noticed much difference on that score.)
Are there any LCDs with really good black yet? I went to a Benq 19" FP931 LCD last year, and it’s great with everything but deep shadows, which are either a fairly ugly gray or totally black. This isn’t noticeable on most games, although I can’t play anything like Thief or Splinter Cell without really having problems seeing what’s going on.
Anyone had good experiences with LCD monitors and sneakers? Is my LCD just crap? I absolutely love this monitor for its sharpness and how easy it is on the eyes, but I’ve contemplated going back to a CRT just to be able to play Thief again.
I’ve got a 21" CRT that I run at 1600. It’s nice for the games I just can’t run that high, like FEAR. I also have a 21" LCD at work. I can’t fairly compare the two. At work I’m looking at words and numbers, and at home I’m just playing games.
I run mine at 100, but it’s actually there whether you see it or not. Over long periods of time, it can fatigue your eyes. Of course, that’s easily solved by taking short breaks every once in a while. Which you should do even if you are using an LCD.
I use the same one and couldn’t be happier. However, the thought of word processing on it makes me cringe after using an LCD for so long. Personally, I think a combo system is best if you can afford it: CRT for gaming, media, and design; LCD for everything else.
I asked about this is some other thread, but this is a much more relevant place: LCD gamers, how do games look in non-native resolutions on the more recent models (Dell, etc.)? How about with older games with fixed 800x600 or lower resolutions? That and color accuracy are my main problems with LCDs for gaming, and I’m curious if interpolation has gotten better since I bought my Samsung 191T a few years back.
It’s getting harder and harder to find quality CRTs. Sony used to make a great CRT that all the print people would swear by. Try finding a CRT on Sony’s website now. Ditto for La Cie. Mitsubishi still makes some great CRTs with huge color gamuts and good resolutions, but they’re in a shrinking field. If I were in the market for a CRT I’d look at them. All the pro monitors (meant to be used with color-corrected work and have the big color ranges, etc) are moving over to the LCD side as the technology issues have finally gotten sorted out (although they are still quite a bit more expensive). I think that, in order to get a quality CRT, you will increasingly have to buy them used. They’re just not being produced very much anymore.
I just got finished playing ultima7 on my 2001fp at 320x240 or some weird resolution like that, and it looked fine. I played doom3 at 1024x768 way back when and it looked fine too. Really the scaling isn’t bad at all. I wouldn’t run my desktop at a non-native resolution, but games look great.
Blacks are just very dark gray, which isn’t ideal. The color correction stuff only matters if you’re a graphics professional, it’s not noticeable without swatches and color matching software.
I’m not trying to single you out stusser, but this is why it’s hard for me to get behind an LCD. I hear the scaling isn’t bad, which means that however trivial, it’s an issue that does not exist on the CRT. I hear blacks are just dark gray, same thing. I recognize that LCDs are close to as awesome as a CRT, but I’m reading that they’re not. And they’re more expensive in the price:screen size area.
Before you all yell at me, I just wanted to explain how things look to me, let you know why I’m still not convinced. I’m not saying I can’t be convinced, but telling me things are almost there isn’t going to do it. And no offense stusser, but it’s hard to interpret tone through a forum, so when you end your post with “CRTs are dead.” I don’t know if you mean “Look, there are still some areas where LCDs can’t hang with CRTs, but I’m afraid retail is moving ahead anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it” or “Suck it up, you’re wrong and stupid for wanting the quality of a CRT.” which is a tone I’ve gotten from several other people.
I want to point out again that my experience with LCDs is at work with the Mac 17" displays. Does anyone else have experience with them, and can you tell me if they’re typical of LCDs? They have an almost grainy look to them. I don’t think it’s the resolution issue, I’ve seen that and I’m pretty sure these are running at native res. If I’ve got a window open with lots of white space showing, everything just looks faintly colorfully grainy, not very crisp. It’s most obvious there, elsewhere it occasionally almost looks like very faint compression artifacts on the screen. I’m just not at all happy with how those Apple LCDs look and they’ve got me worried about the rest of them.
To recap other issues, I don’t care about desk size as much as I care about price difference, and I don’t get headaches from my CRT. So I guess if I get even less headaches than not getting headaches, that’s not really going to sway me much.
I’ll second that CRTs look better to me. I work on an LCD, but game on a CRT. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but the CRT looks better. Handles non-native resolutions, better colors, black is black, can be easily seen by several people at once, is less suscepticple to reflected light, has crisper motion, and higher resolution too though my video card won’t handle it. Flicker can be an issue, but if you get a nice CRT you can just turn the refresh up until you don’t notice (I like 85 Hz minimum).
Onc caveat is that I haven’t checked out the Dell FPW2005; are they so much better than other LCDs?
Wholly, the LCD I’m using doesn’t look “grainy” to me, so I suspect you can find a better LCD than you’re used to seeing. My experience is still that CRTs are better, but might be worth heading down to a retail joint and checking out their high end LCDs.
Color and black level stuff doesn’t matter much in most games (with the possible exception of games like Thief). As I said, I can totally see why LCDs are attractive to the average user. But if you do use your computer for graphics, issues with black levels and color are noticeable, and not something you need swatches and color matching software to see (though if you do have those things, you’ll discover that LCDs can also be difficult to profile). It’s quite clear with the naked eye; LCDs just aren’t capable of displaying as many colors as a CRT. The high end ones come closer, but even those pricey Apple Cinema Displays are only capable of reproducing a portion of the Adobe RGB color space.
So while I fully agree that LCDs (or similar technology) will eventually replace the CRT, we aren’t there yet. CRTs are “dead” only in the sense that you don’t need one. For other people, they are still the best available option.
With respect to monitor scaling on LCDs… I’ve heard that the dell ultrasharp series is really good for it, but if you are sensitive to things looking fuzzy or unnatural, you will hate any scaling, as I do. I only play in my native res, and if it’s not available, I just don’t play.
So you upgraded to an LCD. This upgrade cuts into the number of games that look good because many don’t support your LCD monitor’s native resolution. This annoys you so much that you just chop down the list of games you are willing to play. Yet you defend LCDs and even recommend them to others?
Are you a member of a “focus group” for some LCD manufacturer?
I got a 20.1" dell ultrasharp LCD a while back, and it’s more than satisfactory in every context (gaming, photo work, graphics, and general desktop use)
The losses: Blacks are like a kind of matt charcoal, instead of the inky lamp black provided by the CRT. Colors cannot be made as rich as with a CRT, but they are not washed out. Moroever, this complaint is usually made by the kind of people who think the saturation control in Photoshop is an image quality slider for their shitty amateur snapshots.
Response time is fine, whatever it is: I notice no ghosting at all.
The benefits are legion, however: thinner, more efficient, crisper display, and it’s lighter by far. The display also swivels, for working on tabloids and portraits or playing Galaga! My one also has a usb hub in it, which I didn’t know I was getting and has been a pleasantly accessible bonus.
