{"id":719,"date":"2006-09-21T03:49:15","date_gmt":"2006-09-21T03:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=719"},"modified":"2015-02-08T15:15:36","modified_gmt":"2015-02-08T15:15:36","slug":"21-inches-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/?p=719","title":{"rendered":"21 Inches Of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.glaringnotebook.com\/zimages\/toiol.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>So I got myself a 21&#8243; Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. Most specifically, an IBM 6558 P202, a 21&#8243; behemoth running at 1600&#215;1200 resolution at 85 hertz. Multiply 1200 by 85 hz to get its maximum vertical refresh rate; 102 khz.<\/p>\n<p><b>LCD Rant<\/b><\/p>\n<p>No, it&#8217;s not a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor. I hate current LCDs in the market, as the technology has not matured. The Dell 17&#8243; LCDs I use at the office are very comfortable and look good, but they run at a slow 16ms update rate (thus being useless for games). The Samsung 17&#8243; LCDs in the office, meanwhile, run faster at 12ms, but no matter how I adjusted the moire and patterns, I could never get consistent sharpness or a comfortable view. 19&#8243; LCDs can reach 1440&#215;900, while 17&#8243; LCDs max out at 1280&#215;1024 resolution. A 17&#8243; CRT does 1024&#215;768, which is lower&#8230; but most 19&#8243; CRTs do 1600&#215;1200 at 85hz (except Samsungs), and some even allow 2048&#215;1536 at 60hz! A 21&#8243; CRT usually has the same pixel clock and thus, same resolutions, just at a bigger scale.<\/p>\n<p>I also had to keep adjusting the Samsung LCD&#8217;s brightness (when I had to use it at the office). It would be uncomfortably dim one moment and bright the next, so I had to adjust it about&#8230; each hour. I love Samsung CRTs, just not Samsung LCDs.<\/p>\n<p><b>I see dead pixels.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>LCDs are sold with a warning that says that as a part of the manufacturing process, a few pixels may be dead, meaning they stay a certain color no matter what you&#8217;re looking at. Unless there are <b>seven<\/b> dead pixels (or worse, 1%, which is 13 thousand pixels on a 1280&#215;1024 display), you can&#8217;t get it replaced under warranty.<\/p>\n<p>CRT manufacturers don&#8217;t chicken out.<\/p>\n<p><b>L C Death<\/b><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aprilcherrie.com\" target=\"_BLANK\">Cherrie<\/a>&#8216;s Dell laptop&#8217;s LCD died after one year of extensive usage. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kamigoroshi.net\" target=\"_BLANK\">Edrei<\/a>&#8216;s Toshiba laptop&#8217;s LCD died after 2.5 years of extensive usage. I don&#8217;t know if this will happen to desktop LCDs too, but hey, I&#8217;ve had my good Samsung CRT for 5 years already.<\/p>\n<p>Buying an LCD is not an investment for the future. I&#8217;d stay with my CRT, and buy an LCD later if it gets cheaper and better than CRTs.<\/p>\n<p><b>Color And Gamma<\/b><\/p>\n<p>CRTs also have accurate color and gamma. A major annoyance (going from my 5-years-and-20-days-old Samsung SyncMaster 750s CRT to the Dell LCD at work) is how the Dell tends to brighten the shadows, especially dark mids, giving the picture a <i>dry<\/i>, desaturated look. The Dell is already at minimum brightness, and the Samsung, its maximum brightness!<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.glaringnotebook.com\/zimages\/toiol2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The upper picture is an example of what I&#8217;d see on a CRT; the lower one is on a LCD. It brings out the ugly compression of JPG, which doesn&#8217;t look so nice in the shadows.<\/p>\n<p>NVidia&#8217;s Display Optimization Wizard helps you to set the correct color and gamma for your monitor. In my Samsung&#8217;s case, it was 70% brightness. However, if I was to Photoshop pictures to follow my Samsung&#8217;s brightness, it would be so much brighter on another CRT (on an unbranded Medion 17&#8243; CRT, 0% brightness was my Samsung&#8217;s 100%, and 0% brightness on the Dell LCD was still much brighter than my Samsung&#8217;s 100%. But NVidia says that everything should be darker, really.)<\/p>\n<p><b>Brightness Correction<\/b><\/p>\n<p>And so, I left my Samsung at 100% brightness, and adjust gamma in Photoshop to look slightly dark (but with detail hidden in darker mids). It wouldn&#8217;t turn out so bad on the Dell. Meanwhile, on the Dell, I had to brighten the mids just a bit. If you noticed, my latest pictures all have blacker shadows; darker mids bring stronger color and more saturation, and pictures with a lot of darks also have smaller filesizes using JPG compression.<\/p>\n<p><b>Price Wise<\/b><\/p>\n<p>A 19&#8243; CRT is also the same price as a 17&#8243; LCD, and does better resolution, doesn&#8217;t mess with your colors, better gamma, and is better for games too. My computer table is the same size; we&#8217;ve always had space for CRTs until recently, so why are you all complaining about space?<\/p>\n<p>P.S. I got mine secondhand. It had defocusing towards the left and right of the screen, so I got a discount, whee! The defocusing was quite annoying at 1600&#215;1200 when reading small text, so I bumped up the font sizes for everything. (Well give it a break, it was 7 years old.) I could afford to do so at such a resolution! For games and movies, the defocusing didn&#8217;t matter, since we only pay attention to the middle of the screen. Watching a DVD full-screen has never been so visceral on a computer before! Also, such high resolution means that the DVD doesn&#8217;t look sharp enough for the screen!<\/p>\n<p><b>Why&#8217;d I get it?<\/b><br \/>\nThe Medion 17&#8243; monitor, after fixing, had the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glaringnotebook.com\/?p=646\">same problem again<\/a>. So I put it aside, moved the Samsung 17&#8243; monitor from the primary computer (on the right) to the secondary computer (on the left), and the IBM 21&#8243; to the primary computer. The last time I had two monitors of different sizes was in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glaringnotebook.com\/?p=68\">November 2002<\/a>, with a shitty Princeton EO950 19&#8243; CRT. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glaringnotebook.com\/?p=158\">Click here<\/a> to see a 17&#8243; versus a 19&#8243;. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I got myself a 21&#8243; Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. Most specifically, an IBM 6558 P202, a 21&#8243; behemoth running at 1600&#215;1200 resolution at 85 hertz. Multiply 1200 by 85 hz to get its maximum vertical refresh rate; 102 khz. LCD Rant No, it&#8217;s not a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor. I hate current [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-pictures","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8666,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions\/8666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glaringnotebook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}