Competitive Gamers - how long for a crt quality lcd or near enough?

bobert50 · 5 Mar 2007 at 14:45

Just curious really how far lcd's have come along. I tend to play first person shooters very competitively and (on and off) for prize money, especially the quakes. Naturally i'm a big crt fan! but more and more lately i've found myself wanting to switch. I've held out big hopes for a long time on these 100hz screens but still not much sign of them. Is anyone else in a similar situation on first person shooters and has a very good lcd which doesn't cause any noticable disadvantage? My only experience in lcd's is with a v7 19" widescreen and a 20.1" acer. Neither of them really geared towards ms or motion especially! and i understand some now are much better

(it seems the general opinion now is that on all other types of games lcd's are extremely capable and display better colors etc etc!)

I'm especially wanting to hear from the really fussy people like myself who play v competitively and for years have been sat on a crt with 800x600 @ 150hz on their 21" stoneage monitor

Mud · 5 Mar 2007 at 15:33

If you're playing for money, stick with CRT. Rather than go through the rigmarole of qualitatively (and subjectively) describing TFTs (in some generalised manner), I'll just say that the skill level in competitive gaming is so high, and players so evenly matched, that you need every advantage.

bobert50 · 5 Mar 2007 at 15:36

yea similar to my thoughts. What i probably need is a bigger desk so i can fit a 21" crt and a dell 27" on the same desk and get the best of both worlds

Perfect_Chaos · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:09

Wait for SED.. response time is virtually non existent, <1Ms, apparently from an article i read anyway.

Might be good to get a decent LCD until then, could be until towards the end of this year before we even see SED monitors.

fish99 · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:39

Last I heard it was the end of this year until we'd even see SED TVs let alone monitors. Last thing I heard the smallest SEDs being planned were something like 37 inch. It could be a couple of years after SED has launched (assuming it does launch and assuming it's successful) until we see SED monitors.

LaRZ · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:26

For me only the NEC 20wgx2 widescreen monitor comes close to a CRT, but its much better uniformity and geometrically perfect, Black levels are just short of a good CRT with Advanced DV on. wide viewing angles, means we can all play PEZ6 on it.

Because I like these S-ips panels I bought a Dell2007 fpw too, because the anti glare hard coating surface is so much better to stare out for hours, and I would never work on a CRT again.

fish99 · 6 Mar 2007 at 15:07

bobert50 said:
(it seems the general opinion now is that on all other types of games lcd's are extremely capable and display better colors etc etc!)

Just wanted to add one thing - I personally don't find colours better on LCD. There's no doubt they are brighter, and on getting their first LCD this is what people notice most and rave about, but technically speaking the contrast ratio is lower on LCD (I'm starting to really notice this now) and the colour gamut is somewhat limited. Apparently there's a percentage of colours LCD just can't do because of the wavelength of the backlight (or something like that), and there's also the issue of the bottom few percent of colours (near black colours) which are completely absent or compressed into a tiny range (the problem commonly referred to as poor black depth).

The_Judge · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:09

If you're playing quake at the highest level, stick with a crt, i was totally owned after going from crt to lcd. Most other games r fine, but Quake the difference was huge, ever tiny tiny bit of lag counts as you'll well know.

neologan · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:47

someone in your position really needs to go and test a few of the good panels and decide for yourself.

personally, i'm going to grab a Samsung 206BW and be done with it, i bet it's nothing compared to a crt for gaming, but my crt is failing and i need a replacement soon.