LCD displays???

[TubaTodd]

Hi,

I'm in the market for an LCD display. I have a few questions that I am sure this forum could help me with. First, what is the difference between the Analog and digital LCD displays? Secondly, can anyone recommend a sub $1000 15" LCD monitor? If you can not recommend one, then can you point me in the direction of a magazine review of them???

Thanks so much....in advance!!!

Todd Morgan
Musician and amateur computer nerd

 

[jonaBishop]

I'm also in market for a 15" LCD. So far everything is directing me to IBM T55D. It's retail price is set to around $1200 but you can find them at around $900.

 

[Theslowone]

Digital input is going to be better overal, but the main difference is to go digital you are going to need a video card that supports it such as the geforce dvi, you can still hook up it up analog but that is kinda destroying the point. The best at the cheapest price is the samsung, not that i am a samsung fan or anything, but theres look like a pretty good deal, around 550.

sorry couldnt be more help.

 

[Theslowone]

Onsale.com has some good prices on LCD's but not the one for 550, cant find where that one was, but they have one for 699, and 754.

 

[Doggiedog]

The most popular type of LCD monitor out right now are analog. LCD screens are inherently digital but in order to make them compatible with mainstream video cards, they need to have a legacy analog input connector. This causes a problem with analog LCDs because they lose a bit of their inherent advantage in screen sharpness as opposed to CRTs because once the signal is inside the monitor it needs to be reconverted from analog to digital (it also increases price due to extra circuitry).

A critical factor in deciding which LCD monitor you get should be screen size scaling. LCDs have fixed pixel sizes. When you change say an LCD screen with a native resolution of 1024x768 to 800x600 it causes problems for the monitor. Cheap LCDs with poor scaling circuitry may cause text to be illegible (i.e. an L may look like an L but a 8 may look somewhat like a B). If you've ever used an old laptop some methods companies used to get around the scaling problem was to just put a black band around the screen. A lot of screens now are using pretty good scaling circuitry. I think screens with Genesis Microchip circuitry are particularly good scalers. I know Samsung uses their chips. If you do decide to buy an analog LCD (for compatibility) you should make sure you test it out first by changing to many different resolutions and trying to read text. If you get a digital LCD make sure you have a video card that supports your monitor as there are many different types of connectors (I have a GeForce 256 DDR with DVI out).