LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitors are becoming hot items as prices drop and technology improves. If you haven’t made the leap from your old CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen yet, or you plan on upgrading your monitor anytime soon, this is for you.
Obviously, one needs to compare features when shopping around for a product. Here, I will list the terms that you should be familiar with, and how they will affect your decision.
Aspect Ratio
This is the ratio of width to height. A standard, non-widescreen monitor will have an aspect ratio of 4:3, while the wider displays will have 16:9 or similar. A wide format will actually allow you to see more laterally than you would otherwise, hence the draw to have a wide monitor for movies and games. 16:9 is actually the standard format for hi-def video, so if you plan on watching full screen movies, you will experience less image distortion with this than you will with the others.
This is important depending on what you want out of a monitor. For games and movies, it is recommended you go with a widescreen display. For an email and word computer, you might as well save the coin and stick with 4:3. Of course, as with everything, it is also a matter of preference.
Resolution
This is the size of the viewing area, expressed in pixels. LCD monitors actually have what is called a native resolution, which is the best possible resolution for that particular screen. When set to native, the monitor will display icons and text without stretching, and will give you the best view. A typical native resolution for a 17” monitor would be shown as “1280×1024”. With certain monitor sizes and aspect ratios, you can expect certain native resolutions. Setting a higher resolution can actually have a similar affect that widescreen formats do; you will see your viewing area increase, and things may appear smaller.
High native resolutions will come hand in hand with a really nice viewing experience and smoother picture. It is difficult to pick a monitor based on this simply because monitors that are similar in size will likely support similar resolutions.
Contrast Ratio
This is a ratio that depicts the difference between absolute light and absolute dark so far as the monitor is concerned. That is to say that if the number is very high (say 4000:1), the dark scenes will be very dark, and the bright scenes will be very bright. How a monitor can achieve its contrast ratio is actually fairly complicated, so you might want to search up the term to better understand it. Just know that a high number is a good number.
Most media will benefit from a high ratio because of how rich the colors become. A game like F.E.A.R., which tends to have incredibly dark environments, becomes much more immersive because black is actually black and very difficult to see through. Photos and movies will also improve visually.
Brightness
I suppose the title sort of gives away the definition. This will be given in candela per square meter. Since most of us cannot translate what 300 candela per square meter actually looks like, just know that if the number is higher, the monitor can display its image brighter.
Remember that you can adjust brightness, so having a high value here isn’t a bad thing if you don’t like really bright light in your face. It is advisable to take a display with a higher possible brightness over one with a lower value because of this.
Response Time
This is a time given in milliseconds that tells you how long it takes for a pixel to change color. Most response times now settle somewhere between 12 and 5ms, with more expensive monitors offering times like 2ms. The faster the time, the more responsive the monitor will seem. Some people don’t really care about this value (after all, what is 12ms of time?) but anybody who cares about their media will tell you that this number directly affects the crispness of the display. A fast action sequence can be difficult to watch because every moving object seems to have a brief trail behind it. Anyone who has had experience with early laptops that had some of the first consumer LCDs will know the pains of this problem. Luckily, LCD technology has come a long way since then.
Basically, faster is better, especially if you do any gaming or watch any movies on your PC.
Viewing Angle
This is the angle at which you can see the detail and color on the screen with a reasonable amount of clarity. This measurement isn’t exactly standardized, though viewing angles in general have improved dramatically over the last few years.
This is a valuable bit of information if you plan on watching movies with a few people. Chances are that your dinner guests won’t all be sitting directly in front of the screen, so having a display that is forgiving in this area will prove useful. The best way to find out what is suitable is to go to a store and see it for yourself.
Viewing Area
This refers to your basic monitor size, which on an LCD is measured in inches diagonally across the screen. This can range anywhere from 17” all the way up into the 50s for LCD TVs.
Prices are always fluctuating, so the only comment I’ll make about this is that you will see an exponential increase in price happen across the board, which is directly related to the size of the screen. You will typically see this effect once you pass up the 22” displays and work your way up.
Conclusion
There are a few more details that you can look into for a new LCD monitor, but these are the core features that need to be evaluated in order for you to make a more informed decision. The best thing you can do for yourself is to go and have look at the monitors in person, because image quality cannot really be measured and dictated to the degree that we will perceive it outside of viewing it. Happy shopping!
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Rich Menga, a native New Englander residing in Tampa Bay Florida, 
2/13/2008 8:13 pm
Good job Justin! Thanks for the info.
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2/13/2008 9:16 pm
Some good info.
But.. LCD computer monitors are almost exclusively 16:10. Not a big difference from 16:9 but when watch true widescreen movies there will be the bars on top and bottom.
Also, there is no industry wide standard for response times. But there should be.
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2/14/2008 3:09 am
Glad you enjoyed it David!
I wouldn’t say that LCD monitors are exclusively 16:10. However, when it comes to widescreen formats, then yes, that particular ratio seems to be the predominant one.
As for response times, there are a couple of different methods of measurement I have come across. One is how much time it takes to simply change from white to black, while another is the time to change from white to black to white again. Either way, we are still talking mere milliseconds. Our eyes can pick up the delay in something like 12ms, or MAYBE even 8. Once you get past there, you are just getting picky.
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2/14/2008 12:51 pm
I don’t know of very many computer monitors that are 16:9 except ones that have a TV tuner built in and those are far and few between.
According to this article humans can sense a about 4.5ms of change but the test were using USAF Pilots.
http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html
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2/15/2008 12:24 am
Many laptop LCDs are 16×9, not 16×10. Mine, for instance.
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2/15/2008 12:30 am
With LCD monitors you need to think about colour, is it a true 24 bit colour or actually an 18 bit dithering colour? Most 22 inch panels are 18 bit whereas good panels are 24. The remaining 8 as part of the ‘32 bit colour’ business are mostly there for architecture reasons and don’t reflect actual colours.
Backlight uniformity is a royal pain to measure but can be a serious problem, esspecially in large, expensive displays. The 30 inch dells had a serious problem where one side one was quite a bit brighter than the other. I think that’s been fixed but I’m not sure. Either way it’s an actually panel problem (presumably LG philips) not a software problem.
The other thing you’re missing is connectors. The standard display is now DisplayPort which is replacing DVI hopefully en masse by the end of the year. DisplayPort is only really intended for monitors, but people who use their monitors for TV will want HDMI inputs(and typically more than one).
Response time generally determined by the type of panel moreso than the quality of the display. TN panels have 2ms response time typically but don’t do proper colour reproduction. 60 fps corresponds to a 16.67 ms cycle between frames, ideally you want then less than 16.67, but there’s not a great deal of difference between say 7, 5 and 2, except that the 2 is on a crappy panel, whereas the 5 or 7 probably isn’t.
Contrast ratio requires you distinguish between dynamic and static, lots of monitors (notably by say samsung) are advertised with dynamic contrast which is a different metric than the static contrast ratio. A typical dynamic contrast ratio would be 3k or 4k:1 whereas static would be 1k:1 or 700:1 ish.
Lastly I would say choosing a monitor, esspecially the number of pixels very much depends on what graphics hardware you can afford (on a much more frequent basis than your monitor). 1900×1200 displays (24 inches and larger) have 30% more pixels than a 1680×1050 22 or 20 inch display, and take correspondingly 30% more GPU power to keep framerates. Sure you can plug in a 700 dollar 24 inch panel to your 1000 dollar dell but you’ll regret that quickly. Gamers esspecially need to think about what ‘tier’ of hardware they want to live in. Only people with the extremely expensive SLI series hardware can support a 24 inch or larger panel for any modern game with playable framerates for example. So if you want to be ‘mid range’ buy a mid range monitor.
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2/15/2008 4:53 am
A good rundown on basics. However, I cannot void the feeling alot of fundamentals was left out.
First of all, the difference in LCD TV AR 16/9 and computer LCD AR 16/10 is quite substantial, and plays an important role when trying to hook up a game console via component into a computer LCD with no 1:1 native image processing and interpolation. The 16/9 image will get stretched, or better yet cease to function completely, as it is case with my LP3065 with 2560x native rez and no image processing functionality included in the monitor.
Tho it should also be noted, that even with 30″ monitors, the native resolution, as opposed to prevailing regard on the subject, doesn’t bound the user down to just that, when used with pc. Especially nvidia cards have quite extensive scaling options, and thus even if my hardware may not be funky enough to run most modern games in my native resolution, the fine pixel gradient pitch (0.25 in this case) fares relatively well on pixel doubling, and is able to display lower resolutions with almost no visible detail loss. It looks amazing!! Also, while maintaining the OAR of the screen, 1280×800, 1680×1050 and 1920×1200 resolutions DO NOT cause stretching on any respect.
However, in 24″ monitors with larger native pixel pitch, running games below the 1920x resolution does cause perhaps a bit more substantial detail loss than on my 30″ screen. That is tried and tested on my part.
Also, regarding viewing angles and especially response times, it’s absurd that you simply chose not to talk about panel technology. Granted, most manufacturers choose not to even admit that the difference in spec is simply due to completely different tech on how the pixels and backlight function, which already is an absurdity on in it’s own right, and frivolous disregarding of the consumer!
E.g. your statement that “…more expensive monitors offering times like 2ms..” simply isn’t true. The most expensive panels on the market atm, are S-PVA, or P-MVA (for those who want to know what kind of tech the abbreviations stand for, search google) based ones, which typically offer 6ms g-g, and whopping 16ms b-w. The manufacturers however usually only tell u the lower gray-to-gray response time, which doesn’t exactly reveal the entire truth.
It is actually the cheapest TN panels that offer lower response times of 5ms and below. These panels are infamous of wide variety of issues, such as poor viewing angels, which in regard of 24 inch and above offer almost no acceptable angel to view upon, without distorting the gamma and contrast… that is unless you view the panels from an unprecedented distance.
TN panels also suffer from other issues, such as colour banding, screen-door –and halo-effect. etc. etc. and most importantly, poor colour gradient all together. I wouldn’t personally recommend using a cheap TN panel for anything other than basic office work. For gaming and especially movies they are a BIG no no!!
One more absolutely crucial issue is input lag. You can find out more about it from Wikipedia e.g. It is a much disputed issue, and some users even go out on a limb to state input lag is some kinda placebo effect or smth, and doesn’t exist. Manufacturers certainly never reveal the possible lag presented in any of their panels. But it’s there, and other users feel it easier than others. Yes, it’s FELT not SEEN. Your cursor lags behind the movement of your mouse, thus the signal transmitted from the computer is delayed on the screen. It’s most inconvenient while gaming, but seriously, it’s beyond me how ANYONE doing any serious work on their desktops… work that require precision like CAD or even Photoshop, could operate under such conditions.
I’ve been through various 24″ non-TN panels, and they ALL lag. Usually about ~33ms. You think this cannot be noticed? Think again. The lag is usually over two frames and in worst cases alot more. Many panels present a whopping >50ms of lag especially when the resolution is being interpolated. That would lead into an assumption that the lag is caused by the video processing and scaling done by the panel.
Also overdrive is being said to cause lag, which is perhaps why many TN panels actually don’t present much lag at all. This somewhat leads to conflict of interests: would you prioritise low input lag and sacrifice image quality, or vice versa? Response time however doesn’t have anything to do with input lag.
Do some research before you buy an ~800$ panel, if you want to avoid your self from unpleasant surprises…
Even the expensive -VA panels are certainly not without issues. Just try inverse ghosting…
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2/15/2008 11:40 am
Mrmojo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg
You will see that there are only 3 16:9 display standard resolution. None of which is ever, to my knowledge, used on a laptop.
Brian Srivastava and Sebu that’s some good additional info. You should collaborate with hitchface.
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2/15/2008 1:51 pm
Brian and Sebu,
Good points to follow up on for sure. I did intend to stay with the basics with this guide, simply because for some it is already a lot of information to deal with when you don’t know anything about LCD monitors. The stats I chose to focus on are the common ones you would find in a product description. Some things I intentionally left out, and stated that going to see the monitor in action is the best course of action, even after you’ve decided you liked the stats.
Nonetheless, I’m glad you guys commented. People reading the guide will see your thoughts and be able to add your input to their decision as well.
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2/19/2008 10:27 am
widescreen is no good for viewing and editing images
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2/19/2008 9:07 pm
Leonard, I edit images all the time on a widescreen. It works fine. In fact, it gives you MORE room.
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3/25/2008 2:27 am
Hi,
I’m not particularly IT literate but I have a serious problem and hope you (or someone) can help. I have a new Intel Quad CPU which came with nVidia GeForce 8500 GT. My monitor is a Samsung 206BW (widescreen). It was fine using Windows XP as I could adjust the aspect ratio. I’m an artist and need to see images in Photoshop CS3 in the correct aspect ratio (ie 4:3). I’ve upgraded to Vista and according to the nVidia and Vista web sites there is no way to adjust the aspect ratio at present. So my round images are now oval!
Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Does it mean a new graphics card? If so, what???
Many thanks
Cate
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