What features should be highest priority with an LCD?

beansbaxter

Senior member
Sep 28, 2001
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I'm looking at 17" and 19" LCD's with native resolutions of 1280x1024, and the price points are the same but either you get 8ms with a 500:1 or there are 25ms with a 1000:1.

Or is there something else I should look at/for?

 

I would look at DVI input as a main feature. I'd rather have a digital signal natively displayed on my monitor rather than an analog signal converted to a digital one.
 

Concillian

Diamond Member
May 26, 2004
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depends on what you're doing with it.

My parents monitor just crapped out (a 15 year old (!) 14", but it was a very nice trinitron that cost over $700 at the time). Helping them out, response time was not the priority compared to contrast ratio and colors.

If you're not gaming or playing movies a lot, you can generally live with a higher response time. And if you play games, but not REALLY fast games (like UT2004) then you can generally live with a medium-ish response time (16ms or so)

Remember to normalize contrast ratio when reading specs... like a 600:1 contrast ratio on a monitor that specs 200 nits brightness is better than a monitor that has a 700:1 contrast ratio that specs 250 nits brightness (because we generally don't set things up for max brightness and the black is not going to change). Scale the contrast ratio they give in the specs to the brightness and normalize to a number people would actually use (100 to 150 nits is about the max normal people would use).

in the two examples I gave those ratios at 100 nits would be 300:1 (600 * 100 / 200) and 280:1 (700 * 100 / 250)