Monitors - Which Technology Is Better?

Different technologies for different jobs. What are your intentions?
For AutoCAD? For games? For Office programs? What?
 
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.
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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.
 
CougTek said:
...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...
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I second CouchTest's opinion. Actually only high-FPS games will be frustrating in LCDs. Everything else will just be better, brighter, and stabler...

I love LCD's image. I hate its price though. :cry:
 
Thanks for your help. I have to add some of these monitors to my regular line-up since people want them. I'm not a fan of them because I dislike the image quality. But I just installed another one this past weekend and see the popularity. The customer changed from a 17" CRT to a 17" Sony flat panel and it was horrible (to me). They loved it, so that is ok. I thought it was a big waste of money. :D

The funny thing that my customer pointed out is that the monitor saves lots of space, but the surge protector he has (the large flat ones that fit under CRT monitors) still takes up all of the old space. So, obviously, he's gonna get a new surge protector.

Also it was nice because he didn't buy the LCD from me, so I was able to lay in how he overpayed for that thing. :D Good thing he is also a friend!
 
LCDs seem to lag a little. Generally speaking, and avoiding the very top end ones because of the dollar factor, the latest generation LCD often seems a little sub-par to me, but by the time a given size screen has been replaced as the latest and greatest, the next size down often seems to have outstanding picture quality.

I think rule one for TFTs is you have to look at the particular model for yourself. They vary quite a lot and the specs don't help all that much.
 
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