Even the ones that do full 24bit colour still suffer from the off centre problem anyway.

My Apple Cinema HD doesn't seem to suffer any off-axis problems. And, unlike my previous CRT, it hasn't gotten dimmer as it's aged. Even without using one of those Spyder calibration tools, I find that what I see on screen and what I get out of my printer are virtually identical. Let's hear it for the sRGB colorspace standard!

My Apple Cinema HD doesn't seem to suffer any off-axis problems

£1599 in the UK, ouch! I could buy 4 22" CRT screens for that price...

Does anyone here still prefer CRTs to LCDs

i do
im an avid gamer, and i cant stand to see high-motion games go blurry. ive yet to see an lcd screen that does not have this problem.

Speaking of games and monitors, do game developers all sit in totally blackened rooms when developing games on top of their preternaturally enhanced eyesight? It seems most games these days are so dim as to require me to turn the brightness on my monitor up so far that it blooms when viewing anything other than those games. What's wrong with making the game an appropriate brightness?

for mood enhancement, i think
ive spent some time trying to get through the painkiller demo that just came out. that game is so dark that its horrible. i turned gamma, brightness etc up, but i shouldnt have to. my settings are fine for the rest of the games i play

£1599 in the UK, ouch! I could buy 4 22" CRT screens for that price...

That's what I kept saying, but every time I walked into the local computer shop, there it was, calling out to me, taunting me. I tried to resist its charms, but eventually I just couldn't stand it any more. I gave in and it's been sitting smugly on my desk for maybe a year now. I'll never go back.

Why??? I am definitely someone who prefers CRTs on their "desktop" machine. What is so great about the LCDs? I've still got a tube. How I see it is that:

1. Tubes work better at different resolutions, while LCD needs to interpolate for non-native resolutions, sacrificing sharpness.
2. CRTs are much brighter and have much better off-axis color, brightness, etc., as has been discussed.
3. CRTs are "faster", which is important for gaming, though I realize that newer LCD technologies are addressing this.
4. CRTs are *way* cheaper.

The things I think LCD has going for them are weight and desk space. Since I don't move my desktop monitor, weight is not an issue for me. I don't know if the desk space is an issue or not. Would I really move the screen farther back on my desk? Probably a bit. It isn't worth those 4 disadvantages for me, however.

22" CRT flat screen monitors capable of 2048x1536 are under $600 now.

I don't get it.

Jim

Desk space is also no importance to me. I have a corner desk so there's already several square feet of space I'm losing already, and this is with the keyboard on the desk, not the tray

I still think that regardless of DPI, 1200 pixels in eight inches of space is not very good for people like my father.

I'd argue that your comment about brightness is not true. LCDs are also much sharper for certain things, like text. Looking at a bunch of xterms on an LCD is bliss.

I'm also torn on the subject, in addition to the fine points raised so far:

Add'l cons of CRT's - uneven pixel conversion at the edges
Add'l pros of LCD's - Portrait mode

I've got two side by side CRT's at the office and a 17" LCD at home.

-Zeke

Add'l pros of LCD's - Portrait mode

Yeah. We just got LCD's here and I'm loving portrait mode. I've got 62 lines of visible code now!

I can easily fit over 90 lines of code on my 1600x1200 monitor, landscape, in an xterm, even counting toolbars and window borders. What kind of big-ass font are you using?

OK, I can see that.

What kind of big-ass font are you using?

I've got 56 lines of code visible in my Visual Studio.NET window right now, on a 1600x1200 landscape screen. Given that VS.NET isn't renowned for being parsimonious with screen real estate, I've got to second Bitt's question.

I hate when games do that. I personally don't like to play in the dark. My keyboard skills aren't that sharp. The LCD I have at work is horrible at games. Not that I ever, oh nevermind, who am I kidding. There's too much of a mouse trails effect for me to see properly.

heh, well I'm only running 1280x1024, so that's part of the problem. That's the max this LCD monitor can do. If it had a higher resolution then I'd really be in business. Still, if I were running the same monitor in landscape mode I'd have fewer lines available.

My old tube monitor gave me higher resolutions, and therefore more llines of code. Actually I believe the number was the same as I'm getting now with the screen rotated. The text is more readable however, so I ended up with as much text but in a bigger font (the editor I'm using only has one font, I don't know the size). Still a plus over my old monitor.

edit: oh, and if get rid of the tool bar at the top I get 70 lines. That's not bad at 1240X1028.

I find my 20" desktop LCD better in *every* respect than the very high-end Eizo 21" CRT that it displaced. Both were in use at 1600x1200, and the LCD (driven digitally) is much much sharper and brighter than the CRT ever was.

I can use smaller fonts on the LCD (for more lines of code in a window) than on the CRT because everything about the LCD is just *so* crisp!. DVD playback also looks Great! in a window or fullscreen.

And having an extra 24" of work surface back doesn't hurt either!

Face it folks -- the only real downside to LCDs is the price. That's a biggie, but if the prices were the same, would *any* of YOU (not your theoretical imaginary graphic artist friend) actually choose a new CRT over a new LCD of the same size these days?

Not me. Not a chance.

Cheers

I would hate to play some of my games at 1600x1200 because my system wouldn't handle it. Halo barely runs OK at 1024x768.

The drawing lag still remains a problem for gaming, as I understand it. Otherwise, I totally agree.

if they were the same price, i would buy one
but it would be run as a secondary to my crt

only when they fix the above mentioned problems can i use an lcd as my primary

25ms response (very typical now, faster ones are available too) means refresh equivalent to around 40 frames/sec. Games generally do 30 or less.

Cheers

I think you underestimate games these days. The first benchmark I stumbled on at Tom's Hardware shows framerates of often well over 100. But, like I said, it's from what I hear. It may just be prejudice, though.

ATi Radeon 9800 Pro at 1600x1200, 32 bit color:
UT2k3: 84.2 fps
Aquanox 2: 56.8 fps
Q3 Team Arena: 137.0 fps
Serious Sam 2: 62.9 fps

Hmm. This article about response times being invalid is interesting.

I need to see a properly tuned LCD display (preferably a 21") to make that decision. At the moment, though, I'm not sure I would. I've seen a few in action, but what I really wish I could do is be able to see the screens at Best Buy properly. They've got all their screens on the same feed, so I'm amazed they would sell any at all! Half of them wouldn't be displaying at their native resolution. Maybe none of them are!

So, no, I like CRTs. The price of LCDs just eliminates the choice entirely. Without the price difference the choice would be harder, but I'd make the same one.

Also, dead pixels are apparently much more common on LCDs than on CRTs, and the warranties don't seem to be very good on that front.

if the prices were the same, would *any* of YOU (not your theoretical imaginary graphic artist friend) actually choose a new CRT over a new LCD of the same size these days?

Perhaps I haven't seen the right LCD screen yet then Mark. All of the ones that I have used (which have admittedly almost all been laptop screens) have had a significant problem with colour and contrast changes off issue. Doing development, surfing and writing documents this is merely a minor distraction, but whenever I have tried to do colour correction of my photos using an LCD screen I have ended up getting wound up, because even a small movement off axis changes the colour balence and contrast that I see.

Are desktop LCDs that much better that this is a non-issue ? If so I'll have to take a look at one when I come to buy a new display.

P.S. "taking" a look at LCD screens is a problem as well. All the computer shops I have seen with a decent range of screens feed them by a single split, poor quality, VGA signal, which doesn't exactly show them at their best

I've got 56 lines of code visible in my Visual Studio.NET window right now, on a 1600x1200 landscape screen

I can only manage 36 lines on my 1024x768 screens and that involves resorting to 8 point fonts for the text editor.

Desktop displays -- 20" LCD (same size as a "21" inch CRT) and larger -- with 1600x1200 DVI digital feed. Absolutely no contest side by side with a good quality 21" CRT.

When I got my 20" LCD, I had the same "problem" -- expensive (CAD$1600), impossible to see one properly before purchasing, and the phantom menace of stuck pixels. Euewww! Yuck!

But then, how bad could something like that really be, compared to the CRT I was using (CAD$3000 new). The R-G-B convergence is *never* perfect on a CRT, not even on my super-adjustable very high-end Eizo -- so most of the pixels are fuzzy, though they don't look it until one parks a nice LCD alongside it. And the darned CRT takes a good 20-30 minutes to "warm up" to the correct calibrated colours, takes up half the friggin table, and shoots goodness knows what kinds of nasty radiation out at me and my cat.

So just broke down and ordered an LCD from my supplier -- read some reviews first to ensure that others hadn't already labeled that particular model as a dud, and just went for it.

Zero. Nadda. None. No.. NO regrets!

Cheers

Face it folks -- the only real downside to LCDs is the price. That's a biggie, but if the prices were the same, would *any* of YOU (not your theoretical imaginary graphic artist friend) actually choose a new CRT over a new LCD of the same size these days?

Same size and resolution, you're right, I wouldn't. I've got 104 lines of code in very nearly four xemacs frames side-by-side at 1920x1440 which you can prise out of my cold dead etc.; not so long ago, LCDs that could do that simply didn't exist, but nowadays they're merely ridiculously expensive, even compared to what I paid for this monitor five years ago.

Peter