{mosgoogle}The Best Way To Know If a LCD Is Right For You

You have probably heard it before, but it bears repeating...the best way to know if a computer monitor is right for you is to view it in person. Specs are a great tool for narrowing down your choices, but they are no replacement for hands-on experience. Plenty of large resellers stock a wide range of monitors and some are on display. Go down to every shop you can and see if you can find the monitor you are thinking of buying. You never know, that slightly low spec one you shunned in favour of that extra inch of screen may beat everything else hands down in ‘real world’ performance. This is a check list of things to consider when shopping for a new LCD for gaming.

Dot Pitch/Pixel Size

Dot pitch is the distance between phosphor dots (sub-pixels) or between TFT LCD cells of the same color on a display screen. A smaller number generally means that the image on the screen is sharper, as there are more dots in any given area.

A computer monitor with a smaller dot pitch is usually better, but this is not always true because of the methods used to measure it. There are many methods of measurement as well as differing pixel geometries on the screen and differing screen resolutions when judging image quality on the display.

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Dot Pitch/Pixel Size - Continued

Most of the time, dot pitch is measured on the diagonal, this gives the most accurate representation of dot pitch of the display. Later some companies introduced a horizontal dot pitch measurement. By measuring only the horizontal dot pitch and not the vertical, cheap, low-quality displays can appear to have a smaller dot pitch.

{mosgoogle}For example, a display with a 0.28mm (diagonal) dot pitch has a horizontal pitch of 0.24 or 0.25mm depending on some monitor construction variables, a good quality 0.26mm (diagonal) display has a horizontal pitch of 0.22mm.

Be careful not to get the two different measurements confused as that 0.26mm dot pitch monitor may have more dots per millimeter than the 0.24mm dot pitch display.

Contrast and Brightness

Contrast is the ability for the monitor to vary brightness between the foreground and the backgound. It is expressed in a ratio ( i.e. 500:1). Typically the higher the ratio, the better the image quality will be as the display will be able to show bright colors next to dark without washing out the black or dulling the colors. Display brightness is expressed in candela (cd) and is defined formally as:

Phew, what this means to us it that the greater this number, the brighter the display is capable of being. However, you must watch the power consumption of the unit. A display that has a very high brightness level will consume more power than others with a lower value. The old adage, "a light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long" sort of applies here. So a trade off between brightness and power consumption is something to watch.

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Viewing Angle

{mosgoogle}CRT monitors are viewable from almost any angle. That is to say if your view is not blocked by the curve of the screen or the surrounding plastic frame. TFT LCD’s have a narrow focus and therefore can only be viewed from inside a certain arc of angles. As the technology improves, this arc is being improved. This should not have any affect on the primary user of the PC, as they should sit facing the display. But if you like to have bystanders watching you achieve the ultimate score on puzzle bobble or you are trying to show off to your girlfriend your best trick in Tony Hawk’s pro skater, then you may have some issues (and they also might not be able to see the monitor ;-)

Analog vs. Digital connectors

Most TFT monitors use what is known as a digital video interface (DVI) to connect to your PC. Understanding what DVI is and how it differs from the video graphics array (VGA) interface used by old-fashioned CRT monitors is important if you're going to get the best out of your shiny new TFT monitor.

The main difference between TFT and CRT monitors is that TFT monitors are digital devices, whereas CRT monitors (and televisions) are analogue. It's just like the difference between old vinyl records (analogue) and modern audio CDs (digitl).

The socket at the back of an ordinary CRT monitor that you use to connect the unit to a PC is called a VGA connector. At the back of your PC you'll find a corresponding VGA connector that is built onto the graphics card installed inside your PC. You can then use a standard VGA cable to plug the monitor straight into your PC. That's straightforward enough; all you need to remember is that the VGA interface can only handle an analogue signal.

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{mosgoogle}Analog vs. Digital connectors - Continued

There's a problem here, though. The graphics card inside your PC is a digital device, and the images it generates are digital. To display an image on an analogue CRT monitor the graphics card first has to convert its digital signal to analogue so it that can then be transmitted along the VGA cable to the CRT monitor.

There's a risk of losing image quality during this conversion process, although this isn't really a problem for most modern CRT monitors, and they generally do produce excellent image quality. In fact, until relatively recently, many professional designers and photographers still preferred to use CRT monitors as they had a slight edge for high-quality photography or graphics work.

That is no longer the case, though, and the latest TFT monitors provide superb image quality. But, to get the best image quality that the monitor is capable of, you will need to use a DVI interface rather than VGA.As the name implies, the DVI sends a pure digital signal straight from the PC to the monitor with no conversion process to affect the quality of the image displayed on the screen.

You will, however, need to have a DVI connector on both the TFT monitor and on the PC's graphics card, along with a DVI cable to connect the two.It's easy to see if there's a DVI connector on your monitor or at the back of your PC, as it looks completely different to a VGA connector.

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What To Look For When Buying

{mosgoogle}As mentioned earlier, Response Times are the primary concern of any TFT LCD screen. Viewsonic is advertising their VP201s monitors as having Response Times (Pixel Response, Video Response) that are fast enough to present "Realistic, artifact-free 3-D gaming."

These monitors have a "blistering 16 millisecond (16ms) Response time." Hitachi also advertises their CML174B and CML 175B LCD monitors with Response Times of 16ms "enabling smoother computer video, animation and gaming movement." Samsung goes one step better with their 172X LCD monitor that sports an amazing 12ms Response Time.

Next, be sure to select a screen that has a native resolution that meets your needs. That is to say, if your system can only play games at 800x600 then buying a 2048x1536 monster display won’t give you any advantage and will almost certainly do more to hinder your game playing and your enjoyment of it.

Check the dot pitch measurement and make sure you are comparing like-for-like if you are looking at more than one display, especially from different manufacturers.

High contrast and high brightness, but low power consumption is a very good combination because this will give you impressive visuals and your display will hopefully last longer.

Other, smaller, concerns (like the price) I will leave to personal preference. A TFT LCD that satisfies all of these criteria will hopefully do justice to your game visuals and give you the gaming experience that you desire.

Willson Peterson is computer expert and network engineer. He is the author of “How to backup your computer data.”