Buck said:
Which is best: LCD, TFT, or Active Matrix...and why?
Obviously, there are price differences, and I'm looking at Samsung brands right now.
Active matrix are a type of (modern) liquid crystal displays. It's a term mainly used for laptop's screens and since most modern LCD screen use that technology, manufacturers bother less and less to write it in their spec. sheet. Prior to active matrix LCDs, there were DSTN LCDs, who were cheaper to manufacture but had a lesser image quality. I admit I forgot most details about that old technology a while ago. I found that
page if you want to learn more about it.
For most people, LCDs would be best type of monitors. I'm not talking about the low-end LCD, I'm talking about the latest generation with sub-30ms response times, >350:1 contrast ratio and >200cd/m² brightness. Things like the
Samsung 152T/172T for instance. These monitors are perfect (almost) for people doing at lot of browsing/office work/programming - ie, for people spending most of their time reading text on their screen (vast majority of users). The higher-end LCD have also became better at displaying fast graphics like what you can find in 3D FPS and racing games. Although most still show signs of ghosting, they can be considered as usable for these tasks too. My favorite brands are Samsung, Eizo and Nec. While Viewsonic's LCDs look good on paper, they use another technology (MVA) that still isn't mature enough to dethrone the conventional TFT.
One thing modern LCD still have improvements to work on is accurate color reproduction. While the colors are very bright and gorgeous when you are looking directly at the screen from a centered position, the same cannot be said when you look at the screen from an angle. The amount of color variance differs from one LCD to another, but none matches CRTs on this regard. That's why Photoshop freaks flee LCDs as plea.
But since few people spends more time on gaming and Photoshoping than on reading text, LCDs have the edge on a pure picture quality basis IMO. Their prices are still prohibitive though and they are hard to fit inside the budget of mainstream systems.
There are of course a lot of upcoming technologies that have a lot of potential (like FED and OLED), but they are not used commonly enough to worth talking about them.
