Anyone know much about 17-18" LCDs?

[yhlee]

Now that I have a compaq ipaq, next on my list is a new LCD display.

I want to get a high quality 17 or 18" display, one that sports a good reputation yet is not prohibitively expensive. Since these have gone down in price, I am looking to spend around 1500. I have seen the NEC 1830 and some of the cheaper Dells. Are there any you recommend? Should I stay away from those clearance ones (do they have bad dot pitches?)..

Oh, I should note that I have a geforce2 gts (no dvi) but I can upgrade the graphics card if necessary.

thanks

-young

 

[Gosharkss]

All LCD monitors are fixed resolution devices. LCD monitors use a matrix of cells so the pixels are in a fixed location and therefore define the native resolution of the monitor. For example a typical 18" LCD monitor with a dot pitch of 0.2805mm and a horizontal viewable area of 359mm has a native resolution of 1280 in the horizontal direction. Math is simple, 359 divided by 0.2805 equals 1279.85 or 1280 if you account for the small rounding error. Same calculation can be made in the vertical direction. 17" LCDs are alos 1280 x 1024 native resolution and have a tighter dot pitch.

What happens at resolutions other than the native resolution is that the electronics must scale the smaller image up to the maximum size of the matrix or cells. The scaling is relatively easy if you are dividing or multiplying by 2 (going from 1280 to 640 for example, the height and width of the pixels are halved) but difficult when scaling by a non-integer. When the scaling factor is not an integer its not possible to uniquely assign data to a singe pixel or cell. The mathematical rounding errors can create the fuzziness or clarity problems you see. Most LCD monitors today have complex circuitry to reduce this phenomenon however the odds are you will still see some artifacts at resolutions other than the native resolution.

I hope this helps

Jim at http://www.monitorsdirect.com

 

[Quaggoth]

Another thing to note is that LCD's get blurry in games that have a lot of moving thing on the screen at once (Like FPS games for example).