LCD image quality vs. newer FD CRT's

[beggohbe]

i'm about ready to ante up for a new (bigger monitor) but have realized that a really good 19" is just about the same price as a 15" LCD. yes, there's a size discrepancy there... but i was wondering about the image quality. do the expensive 19" monitors (like Sony's FD Trinitron... Mitsubishi FD Diamondtron) look a whole lot better than these cheap LCDs... or is it the other way around? thanks for the help.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Depends greatly. LCD's have come a long way and are now sporting amazing viewing angles and their color reproduction is amazing. Bear in mind though that a 19 inch flat CRT (18 inch VIS) will still look better than most 15 inch LCD's due to one thing: resolution. Most 15 inch LCD's max out at 1024x768 resolution, while a 19 inch CRT should max out around 1600x1200 resolution. The main attraction to LCD's is space and their digital interface. By being natively digital there is no signal loss (CRT's must have an analog signal, the monitor port is actually analog and the video card has to encode the digital signal for the monitor). However, the difference between a digital LCD and an analog CRT is very small, at least the ones I have seen. One final thing, LCD's ONLY look their best at their native resolution. Unlike a CRT, and LCD has a finite number of pixels of finite size (a 1024x768 LCD has exactly 786432 pixels or 1024 pixels wide by 768 tall). This means that at anything other than the native resolution, images must be scaled, often distorting them. Because of this a 1024x768 LCD looks awful at 800x600 or 640x480, this is experience talking here. CRT's, on the other hand, can dynamically alter individual pixel sizes, resulting in a wide range of acceptable resolutions. I would say buy the 19 inch flat CRT unless space is a major concern.