Screen Wars

[D-Bone]

Which do you prefer for gaming? Let the war begin!

[Malice]

I have to admit, I'm basing my vote for CRT on the fact that I have seen some really bad, ghosting effects on LCD's a long time ago. I would imagine that they are much better now but I honestly haven't looked into it. I know Ghosty seems to like his.

[Ghost]

The problem with LCD's has always been the response time of the pixels. The one I have has about a 25ms pixel response time. I believe that is slightly longer than the average persistence of the phospers used on most CRTs. I really don't notice much of a problem with mine, but if compared side by side it would probably be noticeable. The really good LCDs that are coming out have extremely low pixel refresh rates. The SyncMaster 172X flat panel is what I'd probably look at for my next display. It has a 12ms pixel response time. Here's a review geared toward gaming:

http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/monitors/Samsung_172x_1.html

[Malice]

Wow, that looks like a pretty nice LCD. How big of a deal is it to use DVI, what does it get you? I wonder why they decided not to put a DVI connector on that one?

[D-Bone]

It looks like there actually IS a DVI connector on there, they just didn't include a DVI cable.

My question is how much does the native resolution affect image quality? I would imagine you don't play every single game in the LCD's native resolution...

[Cheesus]

Can't beat a 120Hz refresh rate @ 1024x768 or 100Hz @ 1280x1024.

[Dante]

Can't beat a 120Hz refresh rate @ 1024x768 or 100Hz @ 1280x1024.

EXACTLY!!

[Ghost]

DVI is pretty cool. I don't really notice much of an image difference versus the standard VGA cable. The major thing is it automatically resizes the display. You can only change the brightness, contrast, and color temp. settings in DVI mode. It always has the screen scaled perfectly. DVI is also digital all the way to the display so there is no signal degradation due to the analog to digital conversion.

As far as native resolution goes, it's optimal to play at the native resolution when you can. If the game supports it I'll almost always play at 1280x1024 on mine. Using different resolutions the LCD has to stretch the image to make it size correctly. About the only time you really can notice the stretch is when there is a lot of text in a small font. Normally this never happens in games. Just make sure you browse the web at native resolution.

[Ghost]

Here's another cool LCD I found out there:

http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vp201b.htm

20" screen, 16ms pixel refresh, DVI - VGA and HDTV Component Inputs, about the same brightness and contrast as most LCDs, native resolution 1600x1200. Price about $1300.

Another nice one is from Sony:

SDM-HX73/B (Sorry but Sony's links are about 3 pages long. You should be able to just Google it)

!7" screen, 16ms pixel refresh, DVI + 2 VGAs, native resolution 1280x1024, brightness is about twice that of other LCDs. Price about $619.

[Dante]

sweeeet. The 20" would be too big for my tastes, but that 17" is niiiice.