Flat Screen Computer Monitors

The main advantage of having an LCD display is that you get a beautiful flat screen computer monitor with no geometry problems. There are some important drawbacks that you should consider before spending all that money on an LCD computer monitor.

CAD or 3D designers who need precision will love LCD or flat screen computer monitors. Unfortunately, there are also some serious drawbacks, which should be considered before making the plunge.

So what are the drawbacks of flat screen computer monitors?

Contrast is lower on LCD flat screen computer monitors

The contrast for CRTs can go as high as 700:1. The best 15" LCDs have to make do with 450:1. And models with contrast ratios of 250:1 or even 200:1 aren't rare either. These low contrast ratios cause darker shades to be displayed as black. Any details that depend on these color gradations get lost in the process.

Even gamers are affected by the problem, since displays suffering from really low contrast ratios will only be able to reproduce sequences in dull, drab colors.

If you work in a room with a lot of sunlight or if you have sunlight shining directly onto your desk then you may find a LCD flat screen computer monitor too dim to use properly.

LCD flat screen computer monitors have less color depth

Practically all manufacturers claim that their monitors display 16 million colors. The ceiling for most of them used to be 260,000 colors, a level at which the Neovo F-15 is still holding steady. It makes do with a 16-bit color display, although it claims to be able to display 24 bits.

Overall, though, the displays appear to have made enormous strides in the past year, even if they haven't yet been able to match the CRT's color spectrum. Instead of displaying colors that melt seamlessly into one another, images evidence a grainy, speckled texture. You get a similar effect if you reduce the number of colors in Windows.

Low refresh rate or slow response time

If you've got a newer CRT monitor, you wouldn't dream of using a refresh rate slower than 85 Hz. And while the maximum refresh rate of a CRT monitor is a good yardstick for its quality, this isn't the case for a comparable LCD monitor.

In a cathode-ray tube, an electron beam scans the image onto the panel. The faster it can scan the panel, the better the display, and, consequently, the higher the refresh rate.

Ideally, you would set your CRT to run at 85 to 100 Hz. In an LCD monitor, the image isn't created by an electron beam, but by pixel triads, each consisting of a red, green and blue subpixel. The image quality depends on how rapidly these diodes can be turned on and off again. This rapidity is known as the response time.

For most flat screen computer monitors the response time varied from 25 to 50 ms. In other words, the maximum number of images displayed per second varied between 20 and 40, depending on the model.

This means that when you play fast action games on an LCD monitor you get a noticeable afterglow or bluring of the image. This is why only the latest 15" and 17" fast response LCD monitors can be used for action games.