Anyone who has passed by an electronics store recently has likely noticed the boxes next to the door stacked like small mountains. They are flat-panel computer monitors, and they're priced to make the mountains move.
As recently as last year, liquid crystal displays (LCD) were something you saw only in high-profile places; at the reception desk of hotels and cash wrap of convenience stores. But as the technology has come of age and supply has exceeded demand, the price of the screens has dropped dramatically. An entry-level Acer monitor that might have cost as much as NT$12,000 last year can now be had for as low as NT$8,500. The drop in price has fed a frenzy for all the things that having a flat-panel display can bring.
Foremost among these things is the small footprint the monitor has on your desk and the space you can reclaim from getting rid of your old cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor. The depth of the base of the average 15-inch LCD screen is little more than 10cm and the screen only a fraction of that. It seems the only bad thing about losing the large monitors is that flat-panels offer little to no room for perching stuffed animals and trinkets on top.
Another popular reason for trading in CRTs for LCDs is the belief that the latter has an improved picture quality. Actually, this is largely a myth. The old cathode ray tubes still refresh images far faster than today's LCD monitors. The other issue that bugs many LCD owners trying to use their screen for home entertainment is that, as the viewer moves at an angle to the screen, the picture quality can often rapidly deteriorate.
While these issues aren't as problematic as they once were and are improving with each new generation of monitor, given that comparably sized LCDs can cost twice as much as the old cathode ray tubes, many people have opted not to make the change.
Of course, if you are interested in making the change, you'll have a wide variety from which to choose. With hundreds of brands on the market and each of those brands producing several models, it's difficult to pin down only a handful worth considering. As an example, Samsung's monitors are often praised by testers and reviewers, but each new reviewer will cite a different model they like best. As Samsung markets some 20 models that often seem to differ in name only, who's to say which review is right? With that in mind, this review will talk about what to look for in a monitor instead of which monitor to look for.
With regard to image quality, the best number to look for on a monitor's specifications is its pixel response rate. The pixel response rate is the number of times pixels turn on and off and therefore how fast the display can redraw the image on the screen. A lower (and therefore faster) response time is better. This issue is most important for people running game software or watching movies. Many models claim 30 to 40 millisecond (ms) response rates. Better models have 25ms or faster rates. However, this compares with 16ms for most cathode ray tubes.
Speeds are getting faster, however. Hitachi's CML174 brags of a 16ms pixel response time, but it's price tag isn't much to brag about. An easy way to check if the monitor's refresh rate is fast enough for your taste is to simply scroll down a page of text. Most LCD monitors will blur the text so that it's unreadable, whereas a CRT will simply move it down the screen, as is. If it doesn't blur enough to bother you, then don't worry about the pixel response rate.
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