Bloodwinter Clan

Was looking at hte 17 and 18.1 NEC's on Buy.com..

Thoughts?

I wouldn't buy a flat panel... They generally have poor quality for gaming due to ghosting, because it takes longer for pixel decay.

But an interesting article you should read before you buy one anyway:

http://www.tomshardware.com/display/20030319/index.html

Yeah, I have 2 flat panels for my second machines. I wouldn't recomend it for gaming. Read that article, and there is a LOT of stuff to educate yourself about if you insist on a flat panel, and you will be buying the most expensive one or you WONT be happy.

A few things to keep in mind, bad pixels. Find out what the manufacturer accepts as the number of bad pixels before it is considered a bad screen. Many go up to 8, which means you will have 8 red, blue or green dots on your screen, always and forever. Of the 2 I have, one has only 1, another has 3. They annoy the crap out of me.

Flat panels tend to be darker, you are limited in the view angle, especialy when it is a verticle difference between your eye level and the screen. They "ghost" alot due to poor "refresh rate" (altho it is really something else). Ghosting means you will see a trailing image behind motion.

When I looked at it about 2 years ago, there was no way I was going to get one. They have gotten better, but a normal CRT monitor will always outperform a flatscreen for games.

My suggestion, find a computer show near by, go and get a referbished monitor. They all come with manufacturer warenties anymore, and I got an $1100 22inch pure flat screen CRT for 300 bucks. Love that thing. I've now bought 3 referbs and never really had an issue with any of them. Saphyre still uses a 17 inch I got around 5 years ago (paid 175 for a trinitron tube monitor when they were going for 600)

agreed Candide.

check it

Well, I currently have a 19" Trinitron and it BLOWS ass.
It shuts off automatically and it doesn't turn on, when I turn it off, I have to wait 3-4 hours to make it come back on. Like some sort of fucking power save.

I currently have a 17" Flat Panel and was testing it with the ATI 9800 Pro last night and its pretty uber, but will only go 800x600 in some games, and 1024x768 in others.
I didn't see any ghosts or bad pixels as you talked about.

I also need the space as I will have 2 comps on the desk, not just 1.

I bid on a 23" Flat Panel atm, and will look at some in stores today, thanks.

most flat panels are only designed to run at one resolution as well. so when you run some things at 800x600 some at 1024x768, and desktop at 1600x1200, each will look different, and most will usually look downright awful.

yea, i hear all about that ghosting and crap, but honestly speaking, the effect is pretty much non-existent on good lcds and you have to be pretty anal to markedly say it affects your gaming.

you should get my monitor. its amazing.

dell 2000fp. its a 20" lcd. i used one of those 20% coupons stacked with some other shit to get it for $1100. Although, I did buy it a year ago. I think now you can get it for around $600-750 depending on the coupons you can find. ars technica even recommends it for their "god-box!" hehe

http://www.cadonline.com/reviews/hardware/0402lcd/dell.htm

http://www.cadonline.com/reviews/2002allstr/2002allstr.htm

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=994560&STARTPAGE=1 (a few comments on it)

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=1029893&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE= (person just bought it and agrees no ghosting)

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1041300 (another long thread with more people saying how much they love it, with voting enabled.. hehe)

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/jhh25/stuff/lcd.htm (great page for lcd discussion) - aggregation of hundreds of comments about lots and lots of LCDs.

btw, if you read a comment about ghosting on the 2000fp, read more into it. 1) most of them are idiots running analog where of course the response time is they're just looking for some stupid reason to whine and bitch and 2) what some of them describe isn't even ghosting. idiots. hehe


I've owned 4 lcds and 3 trinitron monitors.

1) Sony 200ES - 17" Trinitron. I used this in college, and I had some issues with it going dark, then slowly brightening up after a couple years.
2) NEC 1500M - 15" LCD. My first LCD (cost about $1200 before discounts), it kicked major ass. No ghosting, 1024x768 native res, good 300:1 contrast (hey it was awesome at the time).
3) Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 920 - 19" Trinitron/Diamondtron. This is what I have in my office. Its alright, but I'm spoiled at home with my 2000FP.
4) Dell 1800FP - 18" LCD. This is the monitor I have at my office at my weekend job. Its a beautiful monitor... but it doesn't beat having 1600x1200 native (only 1280x1024 native).
5) Sony 420GS - 19" Trinitron. My old monitor at the office which was replaced with the Dell 1800 FP. I really liked this monitor when I first got it 4 years ago. Now, its pretty unimpressive.
6) Dell 1502FP - 15" LCD. These guys are alright. I bought 7 of them last month for everyone at the office (my weekend job managing IT at a small company). Around $200 each, it was about the same price as decent 19" trinitrons with like 10% of the floorspace. Plus, LCDs reduce eyestrain by basically reducing flicker to zero.
7) Dell 2000FP - 20" LCD. Its fucking amazing. I have a VCR wired into it, so I can have picture-in-picture tv going at the same time as my video. It can have 4 different video inputs, and picture-in-picture swap between 2 of them. composite, s-video, dvi and analog in.

to comment on what other people have said, yes, lcds typically have a "native" resolution, i.e. they have a fixed number of pixels, and when you scale to an uneven resolution, its hard to convert 3 dots into 2 dots effectively (lets say the 2 dots are red, and blue... how do you draw that color information into 3 pixels? some crappy lcds will draw that as 2 red pixels 1 blue pixel, the better ones will draw it as 1 red pixel 1 purple pixel 1 blue pixel) For the most part, the better lcd screens, like this one, have internal anti-aliasing/smoothing to correct many of those issues.

I play counter-strike at 1024x768 no problem, and it looks great. And I'm honestly and consistently posting bad-ass scores on my server still.

http://cs.myice.net

if you play counter-strike and wanna check us out.

daoc I play at 1280x1024 no problem.. sometimes I play in windowed mode when i need to open 2 windows at once.

back in the day, when i was pulling mad bots on guin (pink can vouch), with daox, I was running 3 windows, all at 800x600 each, with a 800x600 web browser open to camelot herald to lookup potential victims which i'd alt-tab with mirc to talk trash real-time

merc with speed bot and buff/resist bot in tow. hehe.

anyways in conclusion, 2000fp is the god monitor.
1800fp is also good if you want something smaller.

As I said, to get a good LCD for gaming you are gonna pay top dollar for it. I have a big ass desk with plenty of room, so it doesn't make sense to me when the CRT is gonna look better in game, or at worst look as good. You can get a top of the line CRT for 1/4 to 1/3 a similar sized LCD (bearing in mind that a 17"CRT=15"LCD).

The ghosting doesn't bother me much, but the dang bad pixels do. And for Saphyre, it sits about a foot above her head, so it is always dark for her.

Unless space is a big issue, I can't see much justifying the additional cost. Guess thats my biggest point.

It's like a plasma TV, the way our living room is setup, getting a new wide screen HDTV would stick out too much, so I'm thinking about a Plasma. The money itself isn't an issue, just no point in needlessly spending it

Dell FP2000 is the best 20" monitor by a mile. However, they have an ass warranty with it. Basically if you get a dead pixel, you are stuck. You'd have to get 1/4 of your screen worth of dead pixels before they'll swap you for a working one. Native resolution 1600x1200.

The new Hitachi 17" CML174SXW (yes, a mouthful) is currently the best 17" monitor in terms of response time (time for pixels to turn on and off). Most LCD monitors are in the 25-45ms range, but the CML17sakdjskdf is at 16ms. Native resolution 1280x1024.

Good standby LCD monitors would be anything made by Samsung.

I'm running dual monitors atm. Got a 17" CRT (Viewsonic PF775) and a 15" LCD (Samsung 151S). I've seen daoc on both my laptop and on a 15" Viewsonic P150 as well. I'd have to say that staring at the LCD is alot easier on the eyes.

I was considering buying a Samsung 210T (21" LCD) earlier this summer, but then the war started and prices got out of hand.

Alright Kill, I agree so does the ATI 9800 Pro have the Digital DVI to connect in for digital to digital?

Also is there any coupons you can give me ?

Anything else I should know?

Bascially I speced out the 18-19 I was looking at and most were
.29 or so dp and $700-900, for a little more and a bigger and better monitor with godlike dp I'll spend the money.

D

d, 9800 pro has both analog and dvi. one of its more popular features is the ability to actually output on both at the same time (so you can have 2 monitors on 1 computer with 1 really wide desktop.. hehe).

coupons come and go every week.

http://www.gotapex.com/deals.php
Check that page after lunch and before you goto bed every night until you see a 15% or 20% off deal at dell. They'll put it in bold most likely. . Like right now, the promotion is 20% off everything except dell products, (usually its the other way around).


Sometimes they e-mail past customers one-time use coupons. If I get one, I'll let you use it. I think I've spent my quota for the year already

(bought another 200gb hard drive-600gb total!, mx700 wireless mouse)

if you decide you wanna just get a non-dell monitor using their 20% off sale right now, go ahead, but read up here: http://people.cornell.edu/pages/jhh25/stuff/lcd.htm to see what people who own it have to say

also search google for lcd reviews and stuff


http://www.techbargains.com and http://www.bensbargains.net are decent too. These webpages usually search forums and aggregate the best deals and post them on their front page.

if you're really bored (me in college), you can discuss deals and sometimes get deals before they go berserk and posted on the front of every deal site by checking here http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=40 and here
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.cfm?catid=18
periodically.

Kill, I bought the monitor today

I got my monitor today..

All I have to say is playing PS in 1600x1200 on a ATI 9800 Pro withthe NBA basketball game in PIP in my lower left hand corner.

20.1 LCD = God.

Thanks Killetas