Good Widescreen LCD's for CPU & TV?

[evilsaint]

I've been looking at a number of widescreen LCD/Plasma's, especially for my rig, now that i've experienced the wonderfulness that is gaming on one of them, but i've also been looking for a TV, preferably a wall-mount one.

The idea (obviously) came into my mind of buying one piece of equipment to use for both purposes, but I can't seem to find any that would fit the bill, considering the lack of reasonable sized WS LCD's b/w 24" and 30" that are wall mountable, yet that would take the input from my rig at a decent enough resolution so as not to cripple the performance of my videocard (x850 Pro AGP 256MB for now, x1800 PCIe 512MB soon).

Any ideas? My (eventual) budget would probably be about $1000 max, though i'd rather be around $700-800, and hence, the 24" figure. In terms of the smaller LCD/Plasma screens, how well would they work out in terms of response time and such for gaming for the computing output? And in terms of connections, what type of output cable/connection would I need from my Video Card to connect to a potential Plasma/LCD TV vs. a 'Computer' LCD?

 

[evilsaint]

BTW, i'll most likely have my TV signal running through my computer, so I guess there won't be much of an issue with connection type. Mainly, i'm just looking to understand what sort of problems I might run into trying to run higher-res output of games and such on, let's say, an 26" LCD TV that has a native resolution of, like, 1366x768, or some wacky number like that.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'll see if I can't help you some.

Motion blur doesn't seem to be too much of an issue with most LCD TVs and I think most newer Plasmas don't have too much problems either. Of course it depends on the specific model and how sensitive you are to it.

I personally wouldn't want to really go for the smaller LCD TVs and Plasmas though, because quite a few of them just aren't that good, especially for the price. The 27-30" ones are decent though. There are several brands that you'd be able to get an LCD TV in that size within your budget. It won't be Sharp AQUOS quality, but pretty good.

I have a question for you though. Your TV signal, is it HD, or is it just regular analog?

The reason I ask, is that if its the former, I would personally look into something like the 24" LCDs, as I would be happier being able to at least view full 1920x1080 content. If its the latter, and you don't plan on changing it anytime soon, then I would probably look more into a 27-30" LCD TV, as it will look, in my opinion, probably better since it won't have to scale the image quite so much.

Pretty much all LCDs, be them computer monitors or TVs have DVI inputs (among others). Some might have HDMI ports in place or with DVI, but a DVI to HDMI adapter is fairly cheap, so not a big deal there.

Dell is supposed to come out with a 27" LCD sometime later this year, although I think its supposed to be in the fall, so it might be too long to wait (and might not be worth it). The 2405FPW doesn't support HDCP, which would be a deal breaker for me, but possibly not for you. If not then you can get one for $750 fairly easily and possibly cheaper if Dell runs sales around the time they finally release the 2407. Speaking of which, it does support HDCP, but doesn't seem to be too different spec-wise, however there are some reports that the new 2x07 series monitors suffer from poor internals and is causing color banding issues. The 2007 seems to have problems with it, but since the 2407 isn't out yet here, no one can really say how it fares. It should be coming out anytime now though, so hopefully that might help (if for no other reason than to get a 2405 for cheap).

You also have several other brands to choose from in the 23-24" segment, and almost certainly several of them will begin updating them with HDCP and possibly better specs before too long.

I hope that helps somewhat.

 

[evilsaint]

That definitely did help, thanks much The part about TV signal was something that I hadn't thought about either, but I highly doubt that i'll be getting HD anytime soon (considering that I don't even have cable yet where i'm living now ).

The resolution for the TV picture shouldn't make too big a difference for me, but in terms of the smaller native resolutions on the LCD TV's (i'm thinking that 24" may very well be large enough...), how would, say, FEAR @ 1600x1200, look scaled onto a 1280x6XX or 1366x768? I understand that aside from some sort of fix, it'd most likely have black bars, which I wouldn't mind, but would it be distorted and strange looking the way a Widescreen movie looks if you stretch it to full-screen?

Basically what i'm asking is : how do more detailed resolutions look scaled onto an LCD of a less detailed native resolution?