The Age Old Question! But Is TFT or CRT Better for Me?

harris1986

harris1986

harris1986

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4 Aug 2005
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Ok guys i appologies in advance for bringing up old wounds, but i'm getting tired of my old crappy 19" ctx monitor.

To Help you decide which would be best for me here are a few things i'm looking for :
- either 19" or 20" (i have no need for larger)
- max price of £250
- Mainly used for gaming

At the minute i'm torn between the Samsung Syncmaster 997MB which is a excellent TFT monitor that's been used at many CPL events or the Viewsonic Vx922.

Anyone care to help me? :D
 
hmm interesting thread their mud, and yes i am a hardcore FPS gamer played on the world scene in Cs 1.6 think i'l save the £100 and go with the Samsung Syncmaster 997MB then?
 
Nothing beats a good CRT, but TFT's have come a long way :)

Using TFT Central's TFT Selector...
  • Hyundai ImageQuest L90D+ 19" LCD Monitor - Silver/Black (MO-019-HY) £234.94 incl. VAT
:D
 
harris1986 said:
At the minute i'm torn between the Samsung Syncmaster 997MB which is a excellent TFT monitor that's been used at many CPL events or the Viewsonic Vx922.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing when you say TFT here you mean it has a flat screen, rather than that it's a Thin Film Transistor LCD, since the 997MB is a CRT. Anyway, I'd say what's right for you is probably the CRT, unless desk space, weight (and therefore portability) and power consumption are important.

Aperture grille tend to have better pictures than shadowmask if you can find one (assuming you don't find the 'lines' off putting - aperture grille has two faint horizontal lines on the screen).
 
most of esreality posters whined extensively when they found out CPL started to use tfts.

Definitely stick with crt, i posted in the other thread about 22inchcrt vs tft, explaining why you should no doubt stick to crt for hardcore gaming.
 
fish99 you are right i did mean crt, bit of a typo there on my behalf! yeah i know TFT's at cpl caused havok as a lot of the teams were used to running their monitors at 100hz!
 
I'm constantly torn between LCD and CRT. When there's no good games out and I'm only using the PC for browsing the web, I get fed up with my PC taking up half the room and want an LCD on a small desk (that's what I currently have setup). Then a game comes out, like Prey, and as soon as I start playing it on my LCD all the shortcomings of LCDs are immediately obvious and I want to dig my CRT out of the spare room.

Grrrrrr....

:D
 
I really hate this stigma TFT's have. Sure, they used to be total crap, but now with 2ms panels and such like, there simply is no reason not to take your head out your arse and admit that TFT's are better now.
 
Zefan said:
I really hate this stigma TFT's have. Sure, they used to be total crap, but now with 2ms panels and such like, there simply is no reason not to take your head out your arse and admit that TFT's are better now.
Click to expand...

i own both, and game high level. You are wrong.
 
Zefan said:
I really hate this stigma TFT's have. Sure, they used to be total crap, but now with 2ms panels and such like, there simply is no reason not to take your head out your arse and admit that TFT's are better now.
Click to expand...

I refer you to the panel responsiveness tests here-

http://www.behardware.com/articles/602-11/19-lcd-survey-2-3-4-6-8-ms-and-above.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/602-12/19-lcd-survey-2-3-4-6-8-ms-and-above.html

Compare the 2 ms VX922 results to the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 930SB results.

The 2 ms rating is pure fiction, nothing more than marketting. Some of the colour transtions will still be up in the 20-25 ms range for that monitor. It doesn't even do 2 ms in reality on it's fastest transition.
 
fish99 said:
I refer you to the panel responsiveness tests here-

http://www.behardware.com/articles/602-11/19-lcd-survey-2-3-4-6-8-ms-and-above.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/602-12/19-lcd-survey-2-3-4-6-8-ms-and-above.html

Compare the 2 ms VX922 results to the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 930SB results.

The 2 ms rating is pure fiction, nothing more than marketting. Some of the colour transtions will still be up in the 20-25 ms range for that monitor. It doesn't even do 2 ms in reality on it's fastest transition.
Click to expand...


you can't really rely fully on pictures taken of pixperan though. Yes, they give an indication of real use performance, but whether a TFT is suitable for gaming is very subjective. It really does depend on the games you play, what level you play them at and whether you are suceptable to TFT "issues" like ghosting and texture blurring. Many many people find TFT's are fine for gaming, even at high levels but you're never going to know until you try yourself. If you're looking for a screen for high level gaming then a CRT would certainly be a safer bet, but it might be worth you testing a TFT somewhere if you can to gauge whether it would be ok for you.

Regarding the VX922 though, the 2ms response time may well be a good dose of marketing. Somewhere AU Optronics have measured a transition across the grey to gery range at 2ms, but certainly the rest of the transitions can vary. The statement that it will reach 20 - 25ms at some transitions isn't really backed up by anything though. In fact Tom's Hardware measured the response time independently and produced this graph:

latency.jpg


As you can see, ALL transitions remain <10ms which is an impressive achievement. The overdrive application is well controlled showing even performance from code 0 - 255 and this is also demonstrated by the lack of any real overdrive artefacts in actual use. The VX922 is one of the fastest out there, and to the OP, this might be one to try out to see what you think. THG and BH both use this as their reference monitor now for gaming / responsiveness. Worth trying if you're curious as to whether the move to TFT's is ok for you.
 
Fair enough, I was wrong about some of the colour transitions being as slow as 25 ms. The average there is about 8 ms, the fastest 5 ms.

As for the photos they're the best and worst of 50 photos they take. Even on the best there is a feint ghost image and even a 2nd feinter ghost. The worst case has one strong ghost and 3 feint ghosts. What you actually see is somewhere inbetween, closer to the best image than the worst, but still clearly worse than the CRT is producing. The worst image on the CRT is as good as the best on any of the LCDs.
 
997 MB is total rubbish. I've got one in the spare room. It's one step above samsungs ultimate budget monitor just with a few crappy features added (useless highlight function). It's not a nice screen. It has a nasty cross hatch pattern if you look close-up at it. It also doesn't do a deep black if that's something you need. Geometry isn't great either. Plus the cabinet is very ugly.

I'd get something much further up the product line. Look for any diamontron or aperture grille screen, they offer the best picture quality.

Loads of used CRTs going dirt cheap on the bay btw.
 
i have had diamondtron tubes in the past, like the iiyama visionmaster pro 450 and 454. They are very good. The sony trinitron tube crts are better though. Different manufacturers use them. My current one is a Sun Microsystems X7149A (...think that is the correct model name) GDM 5000 or something like that. Best picture sharpness, colour representation i have ever seen on a crt. Handles huge refresh rates of up to 200hz.
 
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