To the CRT Crew!

Layzan · 12 May 2006 at 12:05

Hello forum friends.

This is for all you CRT elites, few you may be….

Check this out, it’s the:

Samsung SyncMaster 1100 MB – Display – CRT – 21” – 2048 x 1536 / 80 Hz – 0.2 mm – VGA (HD-15)

It’s a CRT monitor, which to many means eye strain which is something I have not encountered with this monitor at all. I do imagine its not doing you any good unlike the LCD family which don’t affect your eyes, but for those that are interested as far as my experiences this is the daddy of monitor’s verses budget.

I have a:
AMD Athlon FX-57 Processor
x2 1GB Corsair XMS Pro RAM (total 2 GB)
x2 GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB (SLI)
Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe nForce4 Sli x16 Motherboard
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2

This monitor complements the system specs in everyway I can imagine a monitor should bar space and weight but this does not faze me.

I’ll say again, it’s a big mother so not for those with limited space and defiantly not one for those with weak tables! but by god the picture quality is something else!!!

Here is a way to see the specs: http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/monitors/crt/ks21cnibhedc.asp?page=Specifications

This puppy will set you back around £300 including VAT but just check out those specs and you picture how much something of this level would cost you in the LCD world….

I play BF2, Oblivion, FF11, all three games look incredible!

So for all you CRT crew, just something for you to consider….

Cheers.

pcknight · 12 May 2006 at 12:46

Too much for 'old' technology!

AMDPower · 12 May 2006 at 12:50

I play BF2, Oblivion, FF11, all three games look incredible!

i am assuming that you have this model personally.

so have a few questions for you

1) if you were to put an all white background on, is there any slight grayish patches toward the end corners of the screen? And on a normal screen do you get slight blurring toward the edge?

2) is TEXT crisp on this monitor?

3) on the edge of the picture screen, is the alignment straight or is there a slightly unaligned look to it?

thanks

Layzan · 12 May 2006 at 15:06

monkeybutt said:
Too much for 'old' technology!

I don't believe the monitor is that old at all, it's only recently started to arrive on online stores mate....

I chose this monitor over a top line LCD and had to wait for one from one of the first vendors to get hold of them.

The first line up sold like hot cakes. I had to wait over a month to pick up one from the next. This was a couple of months ago.

I could not find them anywhere else, they where all waiting for them from Samsung.

Besides, I’d rather not part with silly money to obtain the latest product as we all know that as soon as the next best thing comes out the prices drop significantly. Not to mention if that new tech as such can’t or just about or even perhaps beats the old for large sums of cash that is…

AMDPower said:
i am assuming that you have this model personally.

so have a few questions for you

1) if you were to put an all white background on, is there any slight grayish patches toward the end corners of the screen? And on a normal screen do you get slight blurring toward the edge?

2) is TEXT crisp on this monitor?

3) on the edge of the picture screen, is the alignment straight or is there a slightly unaligned look to it?

thanks

1)No greyish patches fella, the monitor also has an option called Magic bright which allows you to set how bright the white is. There are three settings of brightness I have mine set on the middle option. There is no blurring and no aperture grill lines either just for the record!

2)The TEXT is RAZOR SHARP…

3)The alignment can be set so it’s (almost) perfectly straight, (I’m very hot on this aspect) hence why I sent back an Iiyama VM pro 506 as it was not able to give me almost perfectly straight edges. What helps is the zoom option which allows you to zoom back and forth making it easy to set the display.

I love the way you can set your games to Max resolution and then return to a lesser one for your desktop and such.

hp7909 · 12 May 2006 at 15:15

Any pics?

I'm also still in the CRT-age and don't see myself moving to TFT anytime soon. Got a 19-inch Gateway pushing 1280x1024 @ 85Hz consuming 79w

AMDPower · 12 May 2006 at 15:35

2)The TEXT is RAZOR SHARP…

one last question, is the text just as sharp near the corners(specially top left and top right) of the screen as it would be right in the middle. could you be as accurate as possible, because depending on what you say i might just order one. I know that nearly all sony crt monitor had a very slight and i mean slight grayish patches in the top right nd left corners, the effect is rather like getting a white piece of paper and scraping some pencil lead on it and smudging it ever so slightly, and now imagine that in the corners. is it like that, or is it pure white?

also do you have your screen stretched right to the edges or do you have some borders between your windows area and the inner edge of the screen?

also are these newly made screens or are they made several years back, if you hold down your menu button for a few seconds, it should, tell you when the monitor was produced.

anyhow, personally the future is LCD but the only sticking point is the PRICE, they are too expensive. Although 24" lcd is great its just too expensive and in the 19-20" lcd range, crt monitors for me are much better value for money.

but the only reason have not gone to LCD yet (on a sony GDM-F520 still) is because been waiting for a good 30" lcd, the dell is not bad but not there 100%, next revision should be great.

so sometime toward the end of the year i will go with LCD, but might just pick this samsung for the hell of it, if only the TEXT is RAZOR sharp all over the screen. samsung make great screen but a true disappointment for me is that their upcoming 30"lcd will have not HDCP support.

Layzan · 12 May 2006 at 16:36

Tell you what I'll do, I'm at work at the mo but I’ll look into as soon as I can and get back here around Sat as I'm in London tonight and will probably be too wrecked to write let alone anything significant.....

I’m real big on performance so much so that I did not want an LCD screen as it could not match the top CRT ones unless I spent near on £1000…

I have the screen really close to the edges give or take 2-3 mil as I find that the display can move (ever so slightly) so that’s there to compensate if that happens. On that note it always shifts to centre never the other way round so once you start a game or something it sets it perfectly, it only happens now and then when turning on your computer and is hardly noticeable unless you really look for it.

There is no grey corners fella, if I saw something like that I’d send it back prontow.

I heard that the colours are not as brilliant as some of the top range vision masters however I have no complaints, my games look gorgeous and if you mess around with the colour management long enough I’m sure you’ll find a happy medium. I was happy with the factory default.

It seems in games that it really boosts the colour, this I don’t know why but on levels such as Fugee pass if you play BF2 it looks stunning!

It sounds silly but I find it almost relaxes my eyes, it is what I feel is like looking into a perfectly clear pond and seeing brightly colour goldfish…. Silly I know…

I work in IT, and see hundreds of different screen from both families within the company I work for, nothing I’ve witnessed has made me so impressed…

Layzan · 12 May 2006 at 17:04

hp7909 said:
Any pics?

I'm also still in the CRT-age and don't see myself moving to TFT anytime soon. Got a 19-inch Gateway pushing 1280x1024 @ 85Hz consuming 79w

I have mine set to 1600x1200 at 102Hz, I'd go higher if BF2 could!, Oblivion is set to that also but can go higher, need better Graphics cards as they do struggle a tad on maxed out everything and then that running on 2048x1536!!

I won't bother with TFT until I see something that impresses me like this bad boy... Wide Screen is not my cupper as big as those 30" get, wait a while and see....

Here is some more Info: http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/monitors/crt/ks21cnibhedc.asp?page=Features

Layzan · 12 May 2006 at 18:20

Phoned Samsung, they said this monitor was their most recent project. They only recently started to ship them to vendors around 4-5 months ago.

Me and my bro both found that the edges where all very sharp. It's really down to you, you might feel differently about this but I doubt it.

My brother has a decent TFT but only wishes he could run at different resolutions, not to mention really high ones without selling his whole PC to get one.

Cyanide · 12 May 2006 at 18:23

Layzan said:
I don't believe the monitor is that old at all, it's only recently started to arrive on online stores mate....

I think he was referring to the fact that CRT technology is very old and is widely accepted as outdated by LCD/TFT, not the fact that the monitor itself is old

Layzan · 13 May 2006 at 10:55

Cyanide said:
I think he was referring to the fact that CRT technology is very old and is widely accepted as outdated by LCD/TFT, not the fact that the monitor itself is old

Indeed, but that’s just it. Samsung have made new developments giving better performance without such things as an aperture grill for example, (those two thin grey lines that generate pixels often used for large CRT’s no longer apply).

I showed some of the improvements they did to how the screen works within links on previous posts.

clv101 · 13 May 2006 at 11:12

I'm still using a 21" Sony Trinitron - every six months or so I have a good look at what's going on in the flat panel world and I'm not even remotely tempted. Far too expensive with dubious image quality for photo editing and video.

My guess is that many of the flat panel fans don't have much experience with good CRTs (bad ones are awful) or value the ergonomics above technical performance.

arty · 13 May 2006 at 13:40

clv101 said:
My guess is that many of the flat panel fans don't have much experience with good CRTs (bad ones are awful) or value the ergonomics above technical performance.

To be fair, for many people the ergonomics outweigh the performance of a monitor, even if the picture quality is quite clearly inferior. When I switched in ~2001, I accepted the comparatively poor refresh rate / response time, contrast and resolution as being outweighed by the enormous convenience of having such a thin monitor while I was at uni. Even now I feel the same is true, though I'm looking into the newest monitors again now and this time picture quality is going to be absolutely my first consideration

arty

Rojin · 13 May 2006 at 15:45

I only use a tft now over my 21" crt because of space issues

Layzan · 13 May 2006 at 23:35

Im just glad space is not an issue.

Final8y · 14 May 2006 at 13:01

Layzan said:
I have mine set to 1600x1200 at 102Hz, I'd go higher if BF2 could!, Oblivion is set to that also but can go higher, need better Graphics cards as they do struggle a tad on maxed out everything and then that running on 2048x1536!!

I won't bother with TFT until I see something that impresses me like this bad boy... Wide Screen is not my cupper as big as those 30" get, wait a while and see....

Here is some more Info: http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/monitors/crt/ks21cnibhedc.asp?page=Features

That looks sweet but white is out for me so im looking into getting 2 of these http://www.viewsoniceurope.com/UK/Products/CRTProf/P227fB.htm#overview

I hope that more CRT monitors will come out using the new slim features http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/television/crt/ws32z306vbxxeu.asp?page=Features

Energize · 14 May 2006 at 17:20

If people used proper computer desks space would never be an issue. My crt monitor is about 1ft away from my keyboard.

Rojin · 14 May 2006 at 18:54

Space to have the large computer desk being part of the issue?...

Energize · 14 May 2006 at 18:59

Rojin said:
Space to have the large computer desk being part of the issue?...

Then dont use the pc in a room the size of a cardboard box.

Layzan · 14 May 2006 at 20:45

Final8y said:
That looks sweet but white is out for me so im looking into getting 2 of these http://www.viewsoniceurope.com/UK/Products/CRTProf/P227fB.htm#overview

I hope that more CRT monitors will come out using the new slim features http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/television/crt/ws32z306vbxxeu.asp?page=Features

That monitor your looking into looks great, top specs fella, I hope its all you wish for!

Not everyone is lucky enough to have space and even so they my prefer an LCD, TFT or whatever but those that still enjoy CRT's really don't justify being knocked.

CRT’s are still being redefined and still offer many things which no other family of screen can.

CRT’s can offer top performance at much lower prices as many people now prove to be quit bias in favour of the new slim futuristic looks of the latter families of screens now available.