"edek" said in news:
[email protected]:
Good offer seems like this one because this monitor is 17 tft & has
contrast ratio of 350:1 & refresh rate of 14ms - which is fantastic
for games. And on top its not more than £300!
Can you beat that? Dont think so!
I've only gone by what I see when at the store. Not by what the specs list
in the advertising for an LCD screen. 14 ms is a measure of what? How fast
every pixel independently gets refreshed? Or how fast the entire screen
gets refreshed (and then at what resolution)? 1 / 0.014 ms would be about
72 Hz. Since some of the benchmarks I've ran against my video card go up
past 120 frames/sec, wouldn't 72 Hz be way too slow and make the game look
jerky (i.e., you miss seeing some of the frames, like running a track race
while blinking slowly)?
I would think the deciding factor to go with an LCD screen for a
game-playing computer was because you want to move it around instead of use
it for a stationary desktop. Or you are in extremely cramped quarters and
don't have the space for the big CRT tube and its neck extending way back,
especially as you go larger sized for the screen.
17 inches? Haven't used a monitor that small in over 6 years. Give me 21
or 25 inches for a good sized monitor for gaming, or just about anything I
want to do on the computer. 14 ms for the LCD monitor sounds great until
you realize its only a 17-inch monitor.
Using
www.newegg.com for example prices:
17" LCD costs from $348 to $540 USD
17" CRT costs from $95 to $165 USD
19" LCD costs $500 to $825 USD
19" CRT costs $150 to $300 USD
21" LCD costs $1200 to $2000 USD
21" CRT costs $360 to $1800 USD
23" LCD costs $2300 USD
24" CRT costs $2000 USD
Yep, I can "beat that" price with any CRT monitor of that same size and even
bigger! I currently have a 21-inch CRT monitor. If I bought another today,
it would cost under $440. I can't come anywhere near that price with
21-inch LCD monitors which start at $1200. I wouldn't want to ever go back
to one under 21 inches. Even at 21 inches, I certainly wouldn't want to
blow over a grand just to get a skinny LCD monitor. For the same size, LCDs
are *NOT* cost effective! So why do you really want an LCD monitor? For
the £300 ($550 USD) of the 17" LCD monitor, I can buy a damn nice 21" CRT
monitor. Bigger is definitely better! Plus I don't get ghosting, wake, or
shadows when playing very fast games that show up on an LCD monitor. There
has to be some undisclosed reason why you want to spend more money to get a
smaller sized monitor.
Then there is the problem of dead pixels. You do know that the manufacturer
will release LCD panels with a percentage of the pixels dead? You see
specks on your screen. Hopefully they are only specks as a lone dead pixel
and two or more of the dead ones are not adjacent to each other. In the
past, I probably haven't been specifically looking for unlit pixels on my
CRT monitors at home and at work (where we have a $7M alpha test lab) but my
recollection is that I haven't seen dead pixels on any of the CRT monitors
that I've used. You don't see the manufacturers listing their maximum dead
pixel threshold at which they will trash an LCD monitor so it doesn't get
released. You won't find out what *they* claim is an acceptable percentage
of dead pixels until you call for warranty replacement.
Tom's Hardware (
www.tomshardware.com) often has reviews of devices, like
http://www.tomshardware.com/display/20031105/index.html (note the section
discussing how LCD makers are lying to you about their refresh rate) and
http://www.tomshardware.com/display/20030626/index.html for 17" LCD
monitors.
Have you actually been able to sit down in front of this monitor to see what
it really looks like when running applications and playing FAST moving
games?
