Contrast ratio on TFT screens is sooo important!

I just got a new screen and everything looks 10 times as good (wow), mainly because the contrast ratio on this one is 600:1! All the 3d and 2d graphics look so much more alive, but white looks too bright. I guess its because the screen is so powerful. Now i can spot stuff (in fps games) more easily, and all artwork looks like it has stronger colour.

I never thought that contrast ratio on these new screens would make SUCH a difference, i mean it's great stuff. If only the angles could match those of CRT (and be normal price) i would be in heaven.

Marry chirst & mass

meh. I'm not giving up my CRT anytime soon. :)

I nearly bought a flat CRT but they're just so big! How can you stand them?!?! They look like ancient technology by now. I play Battlefield 2 by putting the screen infront of my keyboard so it's at perfect distance from my eyes. Impossible with a CRT.

If i had a big desk and used it for office stuff, CRT is ok.

Maybe you're just one of those stubborn old people who won't change their ways no matter what :P (joken)

I can't really afford to get rid of my CRT. It's a nice screen, it works perfectly and gives me a good picture.

A TFT would have to go a long way to improve upon what I've got. TBH, the only screen that would interest me is the 24" widescreen 1920x1200 Dell. Even then, it's only a 16ms screen. Acceptable, but still a compromise.

2 reasons I want it. Code editing in portrait mode and watching my HDTV films.

1 reason I don't, it's £600.

this is my monitor: http://www.viewsonic.com/products/desktopdisplays/crtmonitors/graphicseries/g810/index.htm

unless it breaks, I don't think I'll want another.

I was perfectly happy with my CRT until a computer upgrade (or more specificly an OS upgrade to WinXP) meant the permanent loss of a suitable driver. I bought myself a very nice 17" Acer TFT screen and I get a much better picture than I used to get of my 20" trinitron screen.

You could be right. :) However, I still don't like TFTs because they're still not as vibrant and bright as CRTs. I guess it won't be too long before they catch up, though.

TFT's are cheaper than the equivalent CRT used to be.

Sorry, John. I've read that several times and still can't make head-nor-tail of what you mean. It must be the beer. :)

Contrast Ratio is also really important on PLasma TVs!

when TFTs catch up and are good enough for games I'll get one but not yet. I have a 19" CRT on a BIG desk and it is great.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/31470/iiyama-vision-master-pro-454.html

My moonitor ^^^

Sadly, no longer available to buy. Iiyama have almost ditched their CRT's completely.

I still have a CRT. I've stuck with it, because it was only in the last few months that ANY LCD's came out which had a low enough pixel refresh that FPS games wouldn't blur before they hit 60fps. Also color is much more accurate on a CRT, and the CRT still has I think, a higher contrast ratio. More importantly, a CRT isn't forced to run in any one resolution. An LCD is, unless you don't mind a jagged blurry image from the rescaling. I'm running at 1600x1200 right now. I suspect you're stuck at maybe 1280x1024 which isn't even a square pixel resolution. I can edit an 800x600 image for my 2D blitzplus game in photoshop, and then scale it to 200% and turn off the windows and see exactly how it will look in the game. :-)

Of course, I've become nearsighted because I'm less than 2 feet away from the screen, which I cannot move back further on this small desk. But you can't have everything. :-)

(And yes, I'm serious about that!)

vinylpusher: I bought a 17" Visionmaster about 12 years ago, it lasted a good 11 years. Think it was around £400 trade then.

He means... That a 19" LCD is now cheaper than a 19" CRT used to be... in like... 1985... Or 1970... Which is one of the worst arguments ever made. :)

I remember one of my CRTs started smoking slightly. I wonder what did that...

man, you can sometimes get the 24" from dell for $700 . They have online vouchers every 3 months or so, with 35% off and a further 10% with another voucher thats stackable. So the price drops from about $1200 to $699 + Tax.

Last one was in october, likely to happen again in January.

Work for our company, and you can still half that!

So many of you still use your CRTs? Even with little space? wtf? I thought everyone used TFTs. I play my games perfectly even with the old TFT, especially with the new one. I never noticed blurring on the old one which was one of the earlier cheaper generations (syncmaster 173v).

I haven't seen the newer CRTs but i've never seen a more lively picture on a CRT compared to this new TFT.

And whats the point of having a 24" screen anyway? Waste of electricity and you'll go blind by staring at the huge thing. Tho it is true i wouldnt have to get near to the screen to see the detail i'd still feel uncofortable. Get a projector and point it at a wall instead, if you want big. Thats what i'll do soon, for playing BF2 with sound turned up. :)))

I can't believe how many people think TFTs are just as good as CRTs for games, well they might be OK for puzzle games but FPS games, forget it. Just go to TomsHardware.com and read the facts about latency. Remember to render a 60Hz *every* pixel (no matter what shade) must be able to update at under 16.666 ms.

"And whats the point of having a 24" screen anyway? Waste of electricity and you'll go blind by staring at the huge thing."

A bigger screen allows you to move the screen further away while still running at a high resolution. This might help avoid becoming nearsighted because you're focusing at a greater distance. I could double the distance between me and my screen if I had a bigger screen (I have 19") that was also thin.

the 24" is wide screen and for artists is a lot better for landscape orientation, and double page spreads. It's also more room for multitasking if you use a lot of apps simultaniously.

I still use a CRT since so far I havent been able to afford a decent TFT. Even a good 19" will cost close to $1000 for a really good screen.

still $700 quid is only 450 pounds. Not bad really :)

There was a time when I would of agreed and stuck with my old CRT.....but time has changed and I went and bought a nice 19" View Sonic VX924 TFT monitor for $300 (on sale + $50 isntante rebate) just because I wanted a flat screen.

At 5 ms and 75 mhz refresh rate running 2 6800 GT SLI....theres not a single FPS that I cant play now (running FEAR is awesome). Infact, the visuals are tons sharper with this monitor minuse the glare from the CRT.

Out of curiosity, does TFT have the "native" resolution crap that LCD monitors do? My bros been wanting a flat-screen monitor for a bit now since his 19" CRT is currently hogging up his whole desk, but I already advised him that unless he has $300+ to spend on a GOOD flat monitor, he'll have to live with color-bleeding & motion-blurs on the cheaper models...., oh, and the native resolution thing.
(the whole native rez. thing wouldnt be good for him since he plays some of the more recent games on his old GF4800 vid card, and that aint powerful enough to play the majority of them @ 1024x768/1280x1024 with decent FPS)

As for the contrast ratio, cant agree more, it's the reason why the PSP screen is so beautiful to look at, until the ghosting & color-bleeding kick in.

TFT means Thin Film Transistor. It is just a specific type of LCD screen, so yes, it has the same native resolution issues.

If you think about it actually, even a CRT has a "native resolution", because there are a fixed number of RGB phosphors on the screen, and a fixed number of holes in the shadow mask.

So really, if you get an LCD with high enough native resolution, then you're gonna get to a point where you'll get the same qwuality as a CRT in non-native resolutions. But I bet by that point it will become painfully obvious how blurry crt's really are at high resolutions. :-)

Btw, there's a new technology coming to retail in the next year which will allow CRT like pictures on screens as thin as an LCD, and cheaper than an LCD, and with the same low latency as a CRT.

A CRT has a single electron gun at the back of the screen, and magnets steer the electron beam to scan across and down the screen to illuminate the phosphors. This gun is why the CRT is so big. It's been a physical limiations that they can't put it closer to the back of the screen I guess because the angle would be too great to reach the sides and get a proper image.

Well this new technology does away with a single electron beam and instead makes one tiny electron beam per pixel using carbon nanotubes as tiny electron guns.

An LCD doesn't make pixels glow like a CRT, it has a transistor at each pixel and makes crystals opaque or transparent, showing through a backlight on the display, and light will sometimes bleed at the edges of the screen, and around pixels, which is why you have a hard time getting high contrast ratios. (Meaning how black black is, vs how white white is)

This new technology doesn't have that problem. It should look just like a CRT display. In fact, I suspect it will look quite a bit better than a CRT display, because CRT's rarely have a perfectly square image, that's why you've got "pin balance" and "rotation" and "skew" and all those other adjustments you can make to try to fix the picture up. With one electron gun per pixel, ALL that crap should go away comeplely. So it combines the best of CRT and LCD.

I wish I could rememebr the name of the technology. I think I heard it was coming out next August.

Swift is talking about SED:



http://www.behardware.com/articles/593-1/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-sed.html



Sure looks like a winner to me!

Well let's see, when I drag a window with text from one monitor to the other (TFT and CRT) and the difference in sharpness/contrast/quality is vast. Trying to read stuff on my CRT now is much harder.

"Trying to read stuff on my CRT now is much harder."

Try running the CRT in a higher resolution than the LCD.

When you run a CRT in 800x600 mode, it doesn't "fill" every phosphor. It like skips rows, so you get a lined display. Some 3D cards like Geforce models have "pixel doubling" for such low res modes. This is like displaying an 800x600 image at 200% in 1600x1200 mode. The resulting picture is much sharper. So really, it might not be that the CRT is blurrier, just that the video card isn't taking full advantage of it. Anyway, practically it might be blurrier at the same res, but you can probably get a much higher res on the CRT than the LCD, and high res is what matters unless you're not a gamer, or an artist. :-)

LCD/TFT dont have that flickering issue CRT have (noticable at higher resolutions with low hertz, like 60hz), cant see why they wouldn't be alot easier on the eyes in terms of reading.

Nice to hear about SED, just hope there's alot of competition between manufacturers when they come out to drive the price down to something I can afford.

Neuro, your TFT does sound good, I read ana article on it.

the older generations of LCD screens were pretty mediocre, but the current crop is pretty amazing.

I use a dual screen setup, a 17" Trinitron Flatscreen CRT and a no-name 17" LCD. Suffice it to say that I pretty much use the LCD exclusively, and only turn on the CRT if I need the extra screen space.

My only complaint about the LCD is that they tend to be ungodly bright -- I had to resort to adjusting the gamma settings of my video adapter to make it comfortable. However, after doing so it does look amazing, a whole lot better than any of my CRT's ever did, from 2D stuff to video to games.

Bollocks. My 8ms Acer TFT screen is at least a year old. 8ms = 125 fps.

I think the word you're looking for is 4:3 aspect ratio. On a 5:4 aspect ratio screen, a 1280 x 1024 resolution does indeed have square pixels.

Not to mention that the combination of Graphics card + Digital Visual Interface + Digital Flat Panel TFT gives an accurate 1:1 image of what the graphics card wants you to see rather than one that's been converted to analoge with all the data loss associated with DACs.

FD: Is that 8ms the lowest or the "average". Most of the screens quoting those times have an upperlimit of 20+ms for certain pixels thus 50FPS on some and 100FPS on others = blur on certain colours.

"I think the word you're looking for is 4:3 aspect ratio."

No, I meant square pixels.

"On a 5:4 aspect ratio screen, a 1280 x 1024 resolution does indeed have square pixels."

Does such a beast even exist? I have never seen a PC with a monitor that has anything other than 4:3 or 16:9.

Even if such a display does exist, and the pixels are in fact, square, every 3D game you play is sure to assume that the screen is either 4:3 or 16:9 and so what is displayed in that case is likely to be out of whack, even though the 2D apps would display as desired.

So for all practical purpouses, 1280x1024 sucks.

Oh, and as an aide, I recently had a guy in a computer shop insist to that it's square pixel even on a regular monitor. :-) He refused to listen to reason even when I explained that it can't be square pixel because 640x480 is square, and if you double that, you get 1280x960.

"Not to mention that the combination of Graphics card + Digital Visual Interface + Digital Flat Panel TFT gives an accurate 1:1 image of what the graphics card wants you to see rather than one that's been converted to analoge with all the data loss associated with DACs."


Even though the signal is digital, the color reproduction of an LCD is less accurate than that of a CRT, and you will get banding on an LCD particularly when it tries to deal with the darker end of the spectrum, and at the top end of the spectrum, the brightest colors, ie, close to white, you also won't be able to see details that you could see clearly on a CRT.

Native rez? Yes it's still here. I just tried switching to res 12x (1280x960) and you can actually see the lack of clarity and a sort of misalignment. The angle view differences are even more apparent somehow. But thats ok cos i use res 10x and i'm just fine. Has a great refresh rate too. At lower resolutions, its obviously excelent.

I paid for this 17" screen (samsung 740n) 300 euros. That seems a bit less than UK, about same as US? It updates at 8ms (125 fps)!!! Whichs is great, and i believe pretty average nowdays. Here are some specs of it:
http://shopping.yahoo.com.au/b/a/ps_15363171/114401.html

About the 24", youre right about the distance and larger area, but also two smaller screens can be just as good.

@sswift, that SED technology sounds amazing. I heard about it even before, i was hoping i'd find some on the market now. Wow.

Yeah. It's annoying how games just assume you have a standard monitor. However your drivers should be able to determine whether resolutions get scaled, scaled proportionally, or not at all. Thus I can play 4:3 games on it with black borders in the top and bottom (kinda how you view widescreen/cinemascope movies on a 4:3 TV).

Not really. At any rate, not anymore than 1920x1200, or any other aspect ratio that isn't 4:3 or 16:9.

No it isn't. That's why contrast ratio is so important. My TFT screen is much more vibrant than my old CRT. Black is actually black etc. I used to run them side-by-side, but the washed out colors on the CRT just looked awful by comparison.

Not all CRTs are good quality, FlameDuck. Maybe yours was just crap.

It was a 20" Sun/Sony Trinitron screen. I don't know if that's "crap" but it's the best CRT screen I've ever had. Most expensive too.

No it isn't!

*wibble*

...sorry, I seem to be going down with a touch of Flameduckitus! :)

big10p: No you're not.

That pic should be the end boss in a video game. :-)


Flameduck:
"It was a 20" Sun/Sony Trinitron screen. I don't know if that's "crap" but it's the best CRT screen I've ever had. Most expensive too.

But how old was it? And when was the last time you degaussed it? I have a brand new Syncmaster, which while not having as high a quality picture as a trinitron tube could produce has an annoying tendancy for the right side of the screen near the controls to become magnetized. This causes all colors over there to become grayish as the electron gun misses the intended phosphors by a little bit and iluminates all three when it shouldn't. I have to degauss the thing once every day or so. It's only really noticeable when viewing a blue background, thankfully.

I'm getting off topic here though. My point is, older screens lose color accuraccy because the parts age and the electron gun becomes less arrcurate, or the circuitry which drives it gets old and starts losing it's accuracy.

I had a screen that in it's native mode gave everything a pink tint. Even correcting the image with color correcting programs didn't really fix the problem, only hide it. You don't get something for nothing and adjusting the gamma like that in software isn't going to get you more gamut in hardware. So like a low contrast LCD it was squeezing the color into a smaller space and it looked bad as a result.

And guess what? That monitor had a trinitron tube! And it was probably super expensive, because it could do 1280x960 at a time when 800x600 was a luxury. :-) I got it for free from my dad's work when they let him go after Digital merged with Compaq years ago.

BTW if anyone interested I was reading an article about TFT yields and that prices were expected to drop 30 - 40% in the first quarter of next year as yields are much higher than previously keeping the costs down.