A new monitor

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I've been using a 15" monitor for the last 3 years and I think nows the time to upgrade to 19" for gaming. I've had a quick look round but quickly found myself out of my depth. What properties should I look for in a gaming monitor? What is the difference between stuff like LCD and TFT? Thanks for any help.

 

Thanks Tal, I'm still looking around at the minute. From the 21" monitors I have seen so far they are way out of my price range. What I might do is take some of the things I use around to my mates and try them on his 19" monitor to see if the resolution is okay. The main reason I'm getting a larger monitor is for a better gaming experience so the stretched / blurry resolution is not something I want.

 

Duffin, I currently have my laptop set at 1024x768 (my preferred setting), but on my 2nd monitor, I run my games at the monitor's native 1280x1024 resolution. In games/TV the 1280x1024 resolution looks great...but when you're just browsing the web, or using other windows apps, 1280x1024 makes the font a little too small for my crappy eyes to see, so I just lower the resolution down to 1024x768 if I have to use it for something other than games/TV.

I've played BF1942 on a 19" LCD with the response time of 16ms, and I didn't notice much ghosting...for a good gamming monitor, I'd aim for something 8ms or less. Manufacturer wise, Dell continually gets rave reviews on their monitors, Samsung is also quite good. But the choice is up to you.

 

I honestly wouldn't worry about high resolution monitors. I work with a 21" at 1680 by 1050 with fairly under average eyesight and its all fine. How? For games, as long as your graphics card can handle the games at that resolution (keep in mind that games at higher resolution look pretty darn good even if you have to turn down the video options). For daily use, say word processing and web browsing, you can simply increase the text size. In word, make the document 125% zoom instead of 100. In the webbrowser, increase text size (control +,-).

As for ms response time, I advice against going for the ultra fast response time monitors. Although i'm sure there are others on the boards that can explain the different types of panels used in LCD monitors, let me say that in my experience i found that the ultra fast LCD's (which use a cheaper panel that can achieve such a high response at the cost of color quality) are a bad choice. They tend to have backlight bleed around the edges that lights up black areas (say if your watching a widescreen movie on it and there's bars). I also found them to be cheap and quite prone to problems. My monitor has a response time of 10-12ms and I experience no problems whatsoever - No motion blur or what-have-you, and I play a lot of FPS games. Hell, id go so far as to say that anything under 16ms probably won't be a problem.

Basically, my buying advice would be to get the salesman change the display on the potential monitor to all black so you can check for backlight bleed - it is essential for the gaming immersion factor to avoid this at all cost as you'll find yourself staring at the corners and not playing the game. Make sure your happy with its color quality. If the thing looks cheap, I wouldn't expect it to last very long (I have had very bad luck with ACER LCD's...).

 

Just to clear up a few definitions:

Contrast ratio
measures the difference between the brightest possible colour and darkest possible colour. Higher contrast monitors will have a wider range of colour and will be able to display

response time
measures the time taken for a pixel in the monitor to change from black to white. As mentioned above 8ms is faster than your eyes can detect, hence no ghosting. There's pretty much no advantage of having a 4ms monitor over an 8ms monitor (apart from bragging rights). Additionally many of the 'super fast' response times, such as 2ms actually measure the time taken for a pixel to turn from light gray to dark gray (rather than from white to black, as it's supposed to be). Imho this is a tad misleading.

Since you won't be able to see any ghosting with a response time of 8ms, so it probably isn't worth paying extra for anything lower. You would probably do better going for something with a higher contrast ratio (more is better, 1000:1 is better than 500:1).

Just to toss in another brand name, I think Viewsonic is tops. There's tonnes of good reviews out there and they're not really too expensive either. Dell, Lg and BenQ are good too.

Also you'd probably already know this, but LCD's have more screen space than equivelant sized CRT's. A 17" lcd will only be fractionally smaller than a 19" CRT.

 

If you are going to upgrade to Vista, make sure that Vista supports the monitor, else it will refuse to use that monitor.
It's not that Vista can't use the monitor, it's just that it won't because of DRM-related reasons.

 

Yeah, You really have to look out for that one. Most makes won't advertise how the rate the response time.

Another good point. If you plan on upgrading to Windows Vista within the lifetime of the LCD, make sure it supports HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection).

 

This is a bit misleading, the monitor will work of course. But you need a HDCP-compliant monitor to view HD-content properly.

 

Well I thought getting a new monitor couldn't possibly be as complicated as all other computer hardware but I've been proved wrong! I've done a little research and I've found some much monitors which are much cheaper than Dell's. The companies are: HannsG, Videoseven, LG and others like that. I'm not sure whether to get a cheaper monitor from a less well known brand or whether to save up for a while and get a Dell one later. I've been playing alot of FPS recently and don't seem to be majorly disadvantaged by having a smaller monitor. Thanks for your help everyone.

 

I'd go with a LG over a Dell any day.

 

Wow - I've never been able to tell any difference. In that case, Duffin, you may want to check a few monitors with different response times. Find the one where your eyes can't tell the difference then go for refresh rate over anything faster.

 

19" LCD is for pansies. Real men know that true monitors begin from size 33" and up.

Honestly, I saw this big wide-screen monitor in our computer-lab a few months ago and it was stunning. Even if you can't afford one that big, the very least make sure that your next monitor is wide-screen. There is a difference in gaming and movies.

 

This may sound like a very stupid question but could you have two monitors the same size, but one with a widescreen resolution and the other with a 'normal' resolution? I think that it will be better to get one from a shop, as otherwise I may end up with dead pixels (thanks Tal). So the lower the response time the better (atleast 8ms), check its compatible with Vista and ask for one that has widescreen. Oh and check for 'backlight bleed'. I have an E6600 and a 7950GT so resolution shouldn't be a problem for my system for gaming. Thanks again everyone your help has been invaluable.

 

On the contrary, widescreen is fantastic for normal office work and browsing, as it means you can easily fit two things on your screen at once. Now that I have my widescreen 19 inch, I wouldn't be without it.