Last year I was asking for advice to replace my old 17" CRT monitor (linky). Instead of buying a new LCD I ended up getting an iMac and putting the old Wintel PC and monitor in a cupboard. Fast forward to now, and I'm moving interstate in three weeks time. I'll be trying to fit whatever I can into a couple of cars to make the trip, but it's probable I'll need to leave some things behind (and it's not going to be the shelf-fulls of books I've collected over the years!). Given the 17" monitor is now nearing nine years old, the picutre dim and slightly shaky, it's possible I might have to turf it. Which means if I want to use the PC I'll have to get a new monitor for it. I'm also planning on getting a good quality second monitor for the iMac, but I'll just ask about a monitor for the PC here. The PC itself is somewhat low specs by today's standards. Specifically, the graphics card is an older AGP Radeon 9700 Pro, and I usually ran the thing in 1024 by 768 mode for both work and games, although some games needed to be run in 800 x 600, some legacy 2D games even lower. Unfortunately today it seems most monitors are LCD panels with a much higher base resolution and I don't think they scale very well. When I resurrect the old PC, I'll be using it as a legacy PC gaming machine and Windows XP test bed, so the monitor doesn't need to be great but I'd like it to deal with the lower 1024 x 768 resolution with grace. What sorts of monitors do you recommend I should be looking at? Is there anything new out there, or do I have to hunt around for something second-hand? Or am I crazy to be turfing my trusty old 17" PanaSync CRT (I would feel a bit guilty about leaving it behind; I've been using it almost non-stop from 2000 to early this year).

That's what I think too. I'm mainly looking for an LCD monitor that would work well for a computer that's going to be running at a low resolution.

Quote: Original post by daviangel
Yeah, most monitors look like crap at non-native resolutions so what you want to look at is the smaller LCD's probably in 15-17" range that run at 1024 x 768. My 20" LCD's native is 1280x1024 which is good enough for me at the moment.

I'll hunt around for some smaller monitors. It seems most stores over 19" as the smallest size these days.

Quote: The difference is very easy to tell if your LCD has a low color gamut and a bad refresh rate! There is a huge quality difference between different models of LCD. Look for one with 97-100% of the RGB color gamut, and 2ms refresh, and the highest contrast ratio.

No such monitor exists! The cheap TN-based panels will not produce proper colors and the best and most expensive PVA/MVA/IPS panels will not not reach those response times. Also TFTs are often advertised with having up to 10k to 1 contrast, which is bullshit.

Scaled TFT image quality is always bad, but can still be worse depending on the monitor. Your only options to avoid this are getting a 1024x768 panel (nearly impossible, though I have seen LCD-TVs that have it) or have the panel display 1:1 with black all around the picture (for this you need DVI).

Update: It occurs to me that 15" TFT monitors are still being manufactured, those have a native resolution of 1024x768. Note that 15" tft is almost as large as 17" CRT. Still you could get a larger monitor for the same price and use 1:1 scaling.

[Edited by - olep on September 14, 2008 10:40:49 PM]