What to look for in an LCD?

[Username]

I'm looking for the best 19" LCD I can get for my money. I know all about CRTs but these LCDs kinda confuse me. What stats should I look out for and what do they mean? Is there a guide for this?

[ryandinan]

Well, a lot of people will tell you to look for faster rise/fall times (the addition of both will be the average response time).

A LCD monitor with a 25ms response time is average these days, which is only good for an effective "refresh" rate of 40Hz (even though the monitor will operate at 60Hz or higher).

You also want to look for good color reproduction. Look at how the monitor renders yellow and gold colors - typically, these suffer on a LCD...

Lastly, you'll want to look for a monitor with the resolution you are comfortable (and capable of) using. The higher the resolution, the faster the video card you're going to need, since everything is going to have to run at that native resolution (in order to look decent that is).

-Ryan

[McFuggums]

yea the rise/fall **** ms 16 bout the best u can get atm for a resonable price that is... if a monitor has 16ms, it takes appromently 16 miliseconds for a single pixel to light up and off, the higher you have of it less ghosting you have, ghosting is when u can see a trail on an image, i guess u could call it graphics lag =/ and it really sucks bad.

native resolution: the resolution the montior displays best at, if you try to run an LCD at something other than the native resolution it looks like crap, i didn't think it a big deal, but i tryed to play a game at 800x600 when my native was 1028x1024 and it looked like ****! so u better have a good video card if u get a 19/17 inch LCD cuz your gonna have to be running stuff at higher resolution.

brightness: how bright the LCD is....

how the colors display (greys/blacks yellows/golds etc)

viewing area: determines at what angle u can be at and still see whats on the monitor

DVI/Analog connections: type of connection, and arguably better image quality, i find tho that the disputed analog at par with DVI and even more flexible, when they say DVI increases image quailty.

and I would consider swivel and tiltin options self explaintory

oh ya and the price!