I finally took the plunge...

And got myself an LCD monitor!

I've been a diehard CRT fan up until now. I haven't been happy with LCD technology at all.

I wasn't happy with the antiglare coatings. I wasn't happy with the screen door effect. I wasn't happy with the color reproduction. I wasn't happy with 6-bit dithered displays. And I wasn't happy with the poor refresh rates of the 8-bit ones.

But my LCD HDTV looked so very bright, and sharp, and I really wanted to do my eyes a favor by moving the screen back another foot, while also gaining the ability to read small text when running at high resolutions, without squinting.

So a couple days ago I did a ton of research on LCD displays, made a sales clerk pull down two screens from his display and hook them up to the desktops, and then drove for an hour over to the seacoast to pick up the display at the only store that had it in stock. In the end, I ended up getting this 24" LG, on sale for $499:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8267724&st=lg+lcd&lp=3&type=product&cp=1&id=1170290207389

After bringing it home I was amazed at the bright colors and by how sharp it was. And I was dissapointed in the poor black level compared to my CRT. The screen was gray when it should be black, due to backlight bleeding which you get with all LCD displays.

So back to the store I went, and I checked out the display models again, setting them to an input with no signal so I could see how much light is actually coming out, because I'd heard the Samsung had record low black levels. But my testing showed that there wasn't much difference, and the Samsung might actually have had a higer black level than the LG which I couldn't find specs on. (A Gateway they had there was the brightest of all.)

Part of the reason I got the LG over the Samsung was because the LG as far as I can tell, has a true 8-bit display, while with the Samsung you could see the dithering in action if you looked close at the onscreen menu. Of course there was a tradeoff for this. The Samsung has the lower refresh time. My testing has showed that the LG's refresh is suitable, though perhaps not ideal for FPS's, but is awful for 2D games with fast moving objects like my Space Beetles game. Since the LG's refresh is actually one of the better ones out there, I think I'll have to take this into consideration in the design of my game, since many casual gamers will have cheaper LCD's with even worse refresh rates.

One other issue with the LG was that I couldn't configure the display where I was totally happy with it. Either dark stuff was too dark, or bright stuff was crushed a bit, reducing the contrast on things like the start bar a little, and making the classic Blitz forum color scheme really hard to read because of the blue background being much brighter than it should be.

Of course, I was being picky, and this might not bother some folks. But it bugged me, so I got myself a Huey monitor calibration tool for $80, and after using that I could see that a blue tint had been removed and I could see both dark and light stuff was now rendered properly. Or as proper as dark stuff could be on an LCD with all that backlight bleeding. But it looks pretty good now. As good as I could expect from LCD technology's current state, without perhaps spending a few thousand on a professional display which may or may not have darker blacks and may not have a good refresh rate, being designed for photo editing, not gaming.

So all in all I'm happy with my purchases, the LCD and the calibration tool, and I couldn't possibly go back to the dim blurry (relative to LCD) Samsung that I was using, even though it had black blacks and didn't have this awful effect where if you move your head around a bit when the screen is dark the shade changes a little. (Not a flaw of the LG, a flaw with all LCD's)

Which reminds me. The LG has a really wide view angle, both up and down, and left to right. That Samsung that some folks raved about the top would look darker than the bottom or vice versa no matter where you positioned your head unless you have the monitor really far away. That would have driven me absolutely nuts. That problem is almost nonexistent with this LG. Of course there's the refresh rate issue... But no dithering and a wide view angle is way more important to me than a little blurring in my FPS's. I am dissapointed that my space shooter becomes almost unplayable though in fullscreen. Looks fine windowed though. Perhaps I should make it windowed only, since it's geared towards casual gamers anyway.

Thanks for the detailed post. I'm in the same boat, still have a CRT, thinking about TFT as I really don't play any FPS games these days.

So why does space beetles look so bad in full screen? Do all the sprites blur as they move or jerk or something else?

I've got a Samsung SyncMaster 205BW 20" Wide LCD... Not full HD res, but it's 1680 x 1050 and only costs about £160. Refresh rate is good and picture quality is superb through DVI.

In hindsight I should have got the 22" version, same res, but that extra height just makes it 'feel' nicer.

Actually this is a key thing, if you've got an LCD you have to go through DVI, analogue input just looks dreadful.

Grey:
It's blurring like crazy because the LCD pixels take too long to change from one color to the next.

It also doesn't help that I've lost the deep blacks of space, and that it's an 800x600 game on a positively enormous 24" screen. I might lighten up the blue nebula in the background a bit so it looks better on the LCD and in bright lighting conditions.

The low res though isn't as easy to fix. I guess I could look into using some functions I think someone mentioned putting in the code archives which would allow the game to run at whatever res the desktop is at. That might improve things a bit.

Of course that wouldn't help the blurring issue. Now, running in a window at a smaller size would help... but only on big high res monitors like mine. But casual gamers don't have big monitors, and running in a window would be almost full screen on a small monitor.

I that you might not notice the blurring as much on a smaller monitor though. So you could run windowed or fullscreen on those and maybe get away with it. I'm not sure that someone with a big monitor would be happy with a little window though. But if it's playing in a small window vs playing fullscreen where it's unplayably blurry...


Rob:
One thing I noticed when testing the Samsung was how strongly it sharpened the image. If you check your sharpness on the menu I think it's set to 16. If you turn that down to 15 I think it was, then it looks like the LG. Still sharp but not so sharp that 3D objects without antialaliasing get white halos around them. You can see this effect in the preview window on an Nvidia card's config menu. Of course text when browing won't be as sharp, but I think a little less sharp is probably easier on the eyes.

Thanks for the heads up on the Huey calibration tool, my wife was looking for something like that, she askes if it only works with Adobe (Pantone) Color ranges?

sswift: Thanks for the explanation. Hmm, doesn't sound good. I assume you are using DVI yes? Have you compared it with VGA?

Yes, DVI, no, I haven't bothered comparing it. It wouldn't have any affect on the backlight brightness.

Knotz:
I have no idea. It says it's made by pantone. So I suspect that is what it works with. I can't really reccomend it over any other correction device as I haven't tried them. I know there's something called the Spyder which is also roughly the same price. The huey though does something I don't think the spyder does, and that is that you can leave it on your desk and it will adjust the monitor when your room light level changes. That would probably drive me nuts, (You can adjust how often it changes, and I think it only chnages when the light level actually exceeds some diffeence threshhold) but it's a feature some might find useful.

Dang Shawn, sounds absolutely dreadful. I'm betting there's better LCDs out there. I have an HP LCD on my 2nd computer and I don't notice any of the issues you mention. I don't even notice any blurring on high speed objects.

I got a samsung and love it. Had to test 3 of them as one had a blue tint, and another had uneven backlighting at the bottom. The one I ended up with seems about perfect.

I didn't have to adjust the sharpness. no Halos here. I'm very pleased with this monitor, 1600x1200 looks great, and you can still get 1600x900 widescreen.

I was amazed how much better it was over my CRT, putting them side by side the CRT looks washed out, blurred, and doesn't have good contrast.

Out of the box the samsung is way too bright. Theres a button to change between preset settings and for everyday use I have mine set to brightness 60 contrast 80. That gives good black levels in the shadows and blacks definately are black. No dithering here that I can see and CRT seems rubbish in comparrison.

And no ghosting or blurriness when the screen pans quickly.

Samsung SyncMaster 730b here, great refresh rate (8ms, only ghosting is noticable with white on black, and even then, it's easily ignored), 17", 5:4 aspect (quite like that, middle-mans solution between true wide-screen, and a 4:3 even though most games don't properly support it), 1280x1024 native rez, which is more than enough for my needs.
(god forbid what 1600x1200 would do to my eyes on a monitor this size)

Actually has some decent black levels, obviously not as good as a CRT, but damn good from what I've experienced, but perhaps you have a better eye for these things considering you've done a fair amount of digital media works Sswift.

Backlight-bleed here also, which I can ignore, as the benefits of this monitor far outweigh my previous 15" monitor, which served me well for years prior to this. But god, thanks to this stupid LCD/TFT, I can't stand CRTs anymore, especially on my college campus here where they're all set to 60hz by default (wtf) in the older labs...

I guess one of the main things I like about LCDs is the whole native resolution thing. I mean, sure, it sucks on games that don't directly support it, but the whole 1:1 pixel-aspect ratio is miles better than what I could ever achieve on a CRT, mainly due to my lack of software or tools to properly calibrate one.

i have a dell tft, there is no tearing from "slow" pixels.. colours are great, black is nearly black. much better displayquality than all my previous crt's. i will never ever change back to crts since they hurt my eyes... i often got red eyes from staring at crts, now i can look 8 hrs+ into the lcd and my eyes are still perfect. i love lcds!!!

Chroma:
It's not dreadful, as I said, it was the best LCD I could find. Most people would be delighted with it. I didn't post my review to try to dissuade people from buying the monitor. If I thought I could get something better I'd bring it back right now.

You probably don't notice any issues either because you've grown used to them and don't remember what CRT's are like, or you just don't know what to look for. Lie Evak there says there's no sharpening issues. On the Samsung there most certainly are and you should be able to see just how much it is sharpening if you turn sharpness down to 0 in the menu. I went to like six different computer stores, so it wasn't like it was some issue with one Samsung I saw. :-)

Or, you don't notice blurring because you have an LCD with a good refresh rate. The Samsung, with all its other problems, has a great refresh rate. But different panels use different technology, and that is an older technology which has the best refresh rates, but only 6-bit color (262,000 colors) that they dither to appaear 8-bit (16 million colors), and has terrible viewing angle dependency.

Most people are blind to these issues it seems, and don't care about color accuracy. Most LCD's out of the box have terrible color accuracy, with a severe tint on grayscale gradients. The guy at the store loved the Samsung's Magicolor. I hated it. It looked pretty, but made the colors totally inaccurate and blew out stuff that was already bright.

He also did not know that there was any such thing as better black levels. Which isn't surprising if his only experience is working with computers in rooms lit as brightly as a Best Buy. I couldn't see the backlight in there either! I work in a room which is pitch black at night, and I have shades over the windows during the day which keep out most of the glare. So even during the day I can still see the backlight glowing whereever the screen is black, as long as there's not some big white section next to it messing with my eyes. I can't see the issue when I'm using a web browser for example. But when playing Bioshock I can see it easily.

I also noticed one other issue when playing Bioshock last night. I started getting motion sickness! This was due I think to the monitor being so big. So I moved back from the screen a bit and it was better. But I generally sit hunched over my desk so I have to remember to sit back. I've never gotten motion sickness from a game before, though I get sick in cars if I read.

T3k:
From all the reviews I read, Dells are amonng the best in color reproduction and refresh rate. I don't know about black levels but I assume they're pretty good there too. I didn't get a Dell though because you can't buy them in the store and that means if you get dead pixels it's hard to return it. Also if it turns out I hate it it's hard to return it. So no Dell for me even though they might be among the best. Actually all the best brands are ones which are only available online it seems. So there might be a number of better choices than the LG, but with no way to compare them side by side you have to take some reviewer's word, and given the rave reviews of the Samsung on most sites when looking at it myself I could tell immediately that it wasn't "all that", I don't think I'd fel safe just going on the word of a reviewer to buy an LCD online.

I use my Samsung TV (with vga/hdmi input) as a monitor. I too was a diehard CRT fan, but I have to say I have been converted. I never see any ghosting or problems with refresh.

I use a cheapo Acer 19" that I'm very happy with. did take me forever to set up 'just right' though, out of the box pretty much any monitor looks way too bright to me.

I've got a Samsung TV too. And my monitor was a Samsung. So I really wanted to like the Samsung LCD but I just couldn't stand the horrible viewing angle issues. I might have gone with it if not for that.

My Samsung LCD TV has no such view angle issues though, and had the deepest blacks and best colors I could find on a TV at the time in that size.

Checking my TV against my monitor though with the same image on both, I'm surprised that the dark colors look better on the TV and the backlight seems a teeny bit darker, or at least more blue making it seem darker. Maybe I'll go back to Compusa where they have the monitors actually hooked up to PC's in a much dimmer light situation, and make sure I made the right choice, and that the viewing angles on all the Samsungs really do suck.

Interestingly enough, if i use a crt now for more than a working day, i get really bad headaches. I think it must be the pulse of the refresh rate (if you look at a 45' angle to your monitor and focus on a distant point, you can see what i mean) the slower it is the worse i feel. Its wierd because ive always been around computers and have owned some of the worst monitors known to man, (not to mention TVs in the miggy/speccy days!).

CRTs are evil on the eyes, evil on space, evil on the environment and evil to move!

LCD all the way for me.

I found some reviews of the huey vs the spyder, vs an expensive professional claibrator:

http://dpnow.com/2597.html
http://dpnow.com/2485.html

In short, the Huey is faster and better or equal to the Spyder, and like the Spyder produces results which are close to those produced by the much more expensive professional calibrator.

hey sswift. I just realized that I take the viewing angle for granted on my Monitor, It isn't that great if your not sitting in front of it. If your standing looking down on it the top half gets brighter. So long as you look at it with your eye level within the vertical level of the display area.

Horizontal angles are quite wide but vertical angles not very good. I guess this is the problem you were experiencing.

Evak:
Yeah, I couldn't remember whether it was horizontal or vertical, but yeah, it was the vertical which bugged me. From where I was looking at it in the store, it seemed like I'd be able to see brightness variation from top to bottom even if I sat with my head dead center, unless I was pretty far from the screen. That would drive me bonkers. So that's why I didn't choose that.

I just did a bunch more research on screens and from what I can tell the LG's do indeed have one of the better black levels but I wasn't able to compare the 24" specifically. I did however look at the 24" and 22" side by side in the store and I seem to recall the 22" being brighter and having a terrible horizontal and vertical view angle. I was thinking of stepping down to a 22" cause the 24" is a bit large, but none of the 22" monitors now available seemed up to snuff.

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/productlister.aspx?s=13&n=6&se=samsung

The third one down - 22" is what I went for - wow - absolutely fabulous.

Fast refresh rate 2ms
High contrast ratio 3000:1
Bright colourful and the viewing angles are just fine.

I too love my CRTs and was really hesitatnt to purchase, but I read a lot of reviews and the price was really good too considering 22" widescreen.


IPete2.

Other way around, surely? 5:4 is going in the opposite direction from widescreen. It's actually making the screen slightly taller ( relatively ) than 4:3, not slightly wider. That's why people who code and/or do a lot of stuff with text tend to prefer them over widescreen.

I think on 24 inches, 16:9 is fine. YOu can then put 2 pages side by side and it's just perfect :D

"It's blurring like crazy because the LCD pixels take too long to change from one color to the next."

Gotta love that "auto motion blur" effect. ;)

_33:
My monitor can rotate so I don't have to put two pages side by side I can just have one reeeealy long page!

Actually, rotating a widescreen LCD looks really silly. I don't know why they even offered it, it's totally unweildly. :-)


I just got back from checking out the displays again. I think I'm satisified with my purchase now. There was no display with deeper blacks that didn't have issues with the screen getting darker if you moved your head up/down or left/right, except a Westinghouse which was built more like a TV than a monitor and had questionable ability to reproduce darker shades properly. It also would turn BLUE when there was no signal because it's made by a TV manufacturer. So the LG is my best bet I guess, for now. I'l just have to upgrade again once SED technology comes out, since LCD is obviously never going to get to where I want it before SED arrives in another 2-3 years.

While I was there I also picked up my first ergonomic keyboard. Since I replaced my beige tower with a black one, and my beige monitor with a black one, and years ago my beige speakers with black ones, I figured I should replace my dirty old beige compaq keyboard and my white logitech mouse with a black keyboard and laser mouse with high DPI. So I got this Microsoft Laser Wireless 6000 keyboard and mouse. It's not too weirdly ergonomic, and the home and pageup/down keys are laid out in the normal 3x2 pattern. I hate the setup some keyboards use where they have only five keys there laid out vertically, with no insert. Also this keyboard does not have a windows key on the right side, jsut a print key, so hopefully it won't interfere with my games, and may provide an additional key I can bind. I guess I'll see shortly...

Did I mention it has a synthetic leather handrest, and chrome colored plastic surrounding some of the special function keys? Swanky!

The mouse also has a slightly ruberized side to it so it's nice and soft to hold. Microsfot knows their hardware design. Too bad they're a software company. :-)

Now I just have to replace my beige SERIAL Wacom tablet that I've had for 15 years. :-)

Aaaaaand now I suck at FPS's.

I thought LCDs stopped doing that somewhere between 5 & 10 years ago :>
Mabe its time for a new one :P

For most of the LCDs i've seen i think the switching times are fast enough. My Sony is something about 6 or so years old now and it's a slow one but it never was an issue in an FPS i was playing. It's different but not a downside in my opinion, like with the old amiga 1081 monitors. They also were fluorescing after and actually it looked great if you played something like Archon with a black area in the background.