Is it time to ditch the CRT?

bfar said:
It's true, the old CRT's loose their shine after a year or two. It happens so slowly you don't notice. I was happy with my CRT until I saw my sister's nice new dell 19' LCD. The picture looked so alive and fresh - the way a brand new CRT should.
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It seems to help to give them a rest. My Sony 19" got plonked in the corner of the room when I moved for nine months then I used it a couple of weeks ago for testing a PC I was building for a mate. I was so impressed it went back on the desk and replaced the 17" TFT I was using. Crystal clear at 1600x1200. Mmmm. :D

Got to admit I was tempted by the special offer 24", but until the Sony breaks (8 years and counting) don't think I'll bother.
 
I have seen widescreen in action becuase all the PC's at Uni are Widescreen. My laptop is also widescreen.

My laptop is fine - 1440x960 - but the 20" machines at Uni are quite annoying becuase you maximise an IE window and... it all looks a bit cack.
 
if u are happy with a CRT stick with it, i'm still using my viewsonic 17inch from 2003 (best thing from that evesham PC), as the saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
 
Ive had a 46" 1080p HDTV and diff PC LCD's Im back to a CRT TV and a PC 22" CRT. (Gaming)

I will try again when SED arrives if the legal matter gets sorted.
 
[TW]Fox;10703600 said:
I have seen widescreen in action becuase all the PC's at Uni are Widescreen. My laptop is also widescreen.

My laptop is fine - 1440x960 - but the 20" machines at Uni are quite annoying becuase you maximise an IE window and... it all looks a bit cack.
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I'm talking about performance screens displaying fast moving objects, and on a decent card not an Intel chipset. ;)

Come to Bristol at new year :(
 
I'd be inclined to agree with hangtime as he talks a lot of sense :) but this is probably because i still do a lot of gaming on first person shooters.

If you didn't play first person shooters then maybe it is time to move on generally...seems a lot of money though.

In the last year..ive gone from...

22" CRT ---> samsung 226bw 2ms ---> dell 2407wfp ---> back to 22" CRT.

Just seems unbeatable value when you can pick up one in great condition for £40 and apart from space saving they really have no advantages and nobodies going to convince me that a top quality 22" CRT on 1600x1200 @ 100hz is going to give anyone a headache :P first place they should be heading is specsavers!.

One problem you have fox is your budget for a tft if you did choose to get a tft. You can go down 2 routes sensibly these days imo given the current prices...


approx £200 for a 22" 2ms like this

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-050-SA

or

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-062-SA

the other route is approx £400 for a dell 2407wfp but it may pay you to source a non-hc version.


As i know which forum your primarily from! The samsung tn-panel screens for £200 are like a vtec car :p lots of fun and the people who buy them choose to ignore their few weaknesses (viewing angles, slightly worse colours). If you play a fair bit of first person shooters and your going from CRT>TFT then its no contest, it has to be one of these or it'll just be so obvious the CRT's far better.

The dell 24" is like your 530i! , superior build quality which is immediately noticable over the 22" screens, far more wow factor... better / more vibrant colours...etc (only drawback being the big premium and the really dodgy response on anything very fast moving like quake).

The wildcard is the old 2007wfp which has a brilliant quality screen, but just seems like a really mini 24" dell to me for not massively less cash. Picture is great though with the 1680x1050 over 20" feeling really sharp.
 
Or there is the OcUK 24" which in car terms is a Monaro ;) Bit of an iffy badge and some aspects of build quality might be questionable but you get a lot of performance for your money.
 
OP,
I have a Vision MAster Pro 451 on it's last legs. If you do decide to to stop using your crt and are based within striking distance of the west midlands I would take it off your hands :)
 
I ended up giving my 22" CRT away, it weighed so much compared to my TFT monitor.

Then again when I got rid of my 32" Sony Wega TV I was amazed at how much that weighed against my LCD TV. The room that the Sony CRT took up was ridiculous.
 
I have a mate with a 24 in TFT, 22in CRT & 19in TFT on 3 machines, his Gaming / 3d Studio Max PC (he's a full time 3D modeler by trade) uses the 22in Mitsubishi CRT as its by far the sharper of the three, supports many resolutions and had no dead pixels! He got it from a large auction site ages ago.... - under £50 inc postage(!) :eek: his other two machines are used for browsing / mail / docs etc on his lesser #2 & #3 machines.

I'm still a Caveman & also still have CRT , a 21in which is great. I blagged it :o from another mate of mine who's recently got himself a nice looking new 24in TFT to compliment his 8800GT graphics card , Battlefield 2 now looks awful for him ! - he cannot get his new monitor to run the game @ his monitors native / optimum screen size which is a common issue so I believe resulting in a faint but very noticeable blurring issue in that & a few other games. (Many fixes tried, with no success I may add...)

The sheer size of the CRT is an issue certainly.
My PC's set up on a large kitchen table! :o the CRT balanced over the edge, it still takes up half my available "desktop" width...... :( not too much of a problem for me thankfully,I have a a large table in a large room....

Imo, for the quality & size of screen I get in return, especially viewing web pages, then the CRT still wins in my book. If & when however, my 21in dies or develops issues, I'll be off to upgrade to a TFT widescreen straight away, bowing to modernization I suppose. :o It is the future, thats beyond doubt, and games like COD 4, Crysis etc are obviously developed with such new screens in mind I'd have thought.

Until it breaks or,the reverse of the BF2 problem arises - a game supporting widescreen only for example, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" remains my view.

If I were you, I'd save the cash & in 12 months you'll be able to get better, larger screens for a similar cost. Then, by all means, I'd say yes its time to ditch the CRT.

Happy Christmas mate. :)
 
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I'm still a CRT user too but have had enough of carting this monster back and forth from uni 6 times a year so am finally splashing out on a tft. If it wasn't for the fact that I have to move my PC so often I wouldn't be buying a TFT at all.

If you have the space for it and the size of the thing really isn't an issue to you then in my opinion there would be no point changing to TFT.

I've never upgraded partly due to the unnecessary expenditure involved and partly also because TFT's could never handle the supreme resolution of 1600x1200 that I love on my CRT. I learnt recently though that 20" and 22" TFTs now give me a satisfactory resolution (for me) and arent ridiculously expensive.

My budget might not be quite as grand as yours but I'm looking at the LG L226WTQ (or the 20" version), or the Iiyama E2201W-B1 (think I got that right!). Temped by Iiyama's decent dead pixel policy (see http://www.behardware.com/articles/666-13/a-look-into-dead-pixels-2007.html) as I'm obviously a little worried about getting a dead pixel having never had one before!
 
i have just got rid of my 21" sony Trinitron for the one in my sig and i'll never turn back i'm very impressed
 
I used to. HATE. TFT monitors. A friend purchased a 15" tft which was one of the first out there really, I used to love my old samsung 19" CRT, but then after owning a few modern TFT's (my first being a philips 20" wide screen which I then had the crt as a second monitor, then I got a dell 2007 for dual wide screens, and now the OCUK 24 inch which basically is the best out of the 3).

I gave the CRT to a friend when I got the dell, and now am considering having all 3 TFT monitors running :P

I say get the OCUK monitor if you have 250 or so. Even running at 1280x720 most things look fine, and wide screen is SO SO much better for gaming than standard aspect ration.

Finally, if you buy it from OCUK you can send it back within 7 days under distance selling act if you find out you do not like the TFT monitor afterall.
 
How about.... not maximising IE window? The idea of a bigger hi res screen is to be able to use windows (that's windows of informatin, not MSWindows) more efficiently.
 
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