jeaun.com

LCD monitors can be great. you have to figure out which ones are the good ones though. I've never heard of one breaking by tilt... Mine is turned 90 degrees as I type this.

I personally am advising people to hold off on LCD purchases right now as I think they will be 1/4 less the price next year. All the big manufacturing places are moving to LCD (and other format flat screen technologies) so CRT's prices are nose diving and LCD are following but not at the same pace. In other words I do not think we have hit the sweet spot on price vs application/mass production yet.

New CRT's are nowhere near as heavy as older ones so the weight and desk support issue of a 19 inch monitor is not as much of a concern. The real issue is loss of desk space and actual bulkiness of moving the larger monitor around when compared to LCD.

Now that said, LCD's are just cooler. I am assuming you are not a gamer or video editing fan so go here for sub $400 19 inch LCD's that should fit your needs.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=170

Along these lines, do LCDs still exhibit significant ghosting when used for gaming? I know they used to, but I haven't looked into monitors myself for ~4 or 5 years.

I've got a 19 inch Samsung LCD monitor that I've had for about a year and a half. I love it to death. I game like a crazy mofo and there is a little ghosting, but I've gotten used to it and don't even notice it now. It tilts, but I rarely use that feature.
I paid $800 for mine at the time. I still consider it a good investment.

The reason I brought up gaming is exactly what you question e lo. Ghosting is a problem on the majority of LCD's when gaming. (take Col's as a case in point. It is an awesome monitor and I have seen it in use and I would not mind using it for gaming at all but the hard core gamers would whine a little because it does display some ghosting and he laid out some serious cash for it.)

The good news is LCD's have gotten better on response time over time and now the better ones are suitable for gaming with a quality close enough to CRT to be more worth the benefits. So what you need to look for is response time, which is measured in milliseconds for LCD's. I hear anything under 22 is good enough for gaming though the hardcore say it has to be under 20... preferably on the mid-lower end of the teens.

I seem to remember some beef about native resolution on LCD's in relation to gaming also but I did not investigate that at the time and cannot comment but it may be something you want to look into.

If you are doing webdesign/photo/video etc, I would still go with a CRT. For writing & surfing the web, LCD rules the yule.

That's a good point. When I was working on the styles for nounatron (which I never really finished...), I discovered that certain colors that looked beautiful on a bright, happy LCD looked like crap on a CRT.

In the lowest common denominator web-design game, CRT is probably better. Although, you could probably adjust the LCD brightness to simulate a CRT,...

On the other hand, maybe CRT colors are more true?

The truth is, I don't know anything. I just felt it was necessary to put in my dos centivos.

well in my quest to be more like colin, i got a 19 inch samsung. after flirting with the circuit city guy, knowing my shit about price matching and getting a couple rebates, it'll be about 550, which is the most i could afford in investing right now. there are some ghost image issues i'm dealing with with fonts as my whole reasoning was to make stuff more readable, but i've been fucking around with it for an hour and it's gotten better. the size difference between this and that old thing is just amazing. i can't game anymore as i got rid of my civ in an attempt to stop procrastinating as much. but now i work 9 hours a day and already my eyes feel a little better looking at this thing. it's so beautiful. i think i'm going to name it.

After me, of course, since its purchase was based on my opinion and my opinion alone?

Now that's sweet...

actually i didn't see it until after i bought it but i figured the lie could make your day. i did research last night and the samsung 912n had a very good rating as far as customer satisfaction and whatnot. it took me about an hour to configure and fuck around with it and now it looks perfect... but it was hilarious when i first plugged it in and it was set on the 800 x 600 because my old monitor was so damn small.

this might be the most beautiful electronic thing i've ever owned. i want to hug it. and i like the black casing over the hp 19 incher (what i was thinking about also) because after awhile you just don't notice it...

now i want to reinstall the civ, but that's not good. bad lizz bad. now i have to get back to work. my sweet new job has me working from 5 to 2 a.m.

I love the smell of new electronics in the morning.

The only after the fact advice I would have given you was to order it online to avoid the taxes if you can find someplace with cheap enough shipping to make it worth it. (unless of course you were getting like 0% interest through bestbuy or something like that)

As far as the color's and CRT vs LCD question. I could talk about it for at least a day but it boils down to every color output device has a "space" of color it can show you or in otherwords your printer can only print a warm orange while you monitor can display a vivd orange. The trick is to make the monitor show you what you would see when you print it so that they match and you are not dissapointed. PhotoShop attempts to compensate for this with assignable profiles. So when I am editing an image I assign a predetermined profile to it that attempts as best as possible to match our press output here so it will desaturate colors and darken the image so when I open the paper and look at the printed piece it should look similar to what I saw on my screen even though my screen is capable of producing a wider range of color than a newspaper press.

I am going off on a tangent here... CRT vs LCD... back on

LCD can display very bright and vivd colors but they are not always accurate colors. (They might look good but they are not "right" as in that picture of the orange and banana does not look like the real orange and banana did.) They sell densomiters and calibrators that you can take readings of your printed output and your screen and with supplied utilities you can match the 2 up pretty damn closely. The calibrator will also allow you to tone down your LCD to look more like a CRT, but to me if you are not trying to color match printed output you should have just bought a CRT ;~)

Do not use screen calibrators with suction cups on LCD's. You can separate the membranes and fubar your monitor when taking the calibrator off. These things are actually pretty cheap (as in real good ones are like 150-200 bucks and cheaper ones are easily found.

Awesome! I had no idea that you knew about that kind of thing.

This is me making a note about who to ask about color questions...

If it is in relation to color management or printing something better, chances are I can help , find out, or at the very least point you in the right direction. Consider me a resource ;~)

I don't trust video on LCDs at all. In my experience, the only path to true color/luminance perfection is through the holy trinity of the waveform, the vectroscope and the big fat CRT.

Really, I would go as to say that the LCD won't let me be, or let me be with my CRT.

*blows brains out*

wow, i'd love to be able to edit that.

You can edit it. Just log in, go to the page for this entry, find your comment, and change it.

Here's a given: I'm kinda simple. That being said, I still can't figure out how to edit comments in a thread I didn start...

I'm not sure everyone has permission to edit comments. I know you gave me permission to, since we live together and share secrets.