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Hardware Upgrade: The HTG Guide to Picking the Right PC Monitor
You spend all of the time you’re on the PC staring at that monitor—shouldn’t it be a good one? Today, we’ll decode the specs and monitor jargon to help you find the best possible LCD screen for your needs. If you’ve ever been to an appliance store, you might have been intimidated by how much you need to know to buy the right monitor. In plain English, with simple bulleted points are some of the most important specs and information that most HTG readers will need to know before putting money down on that expensive new monitor. Have a lot of experience with displays and monitors? Let us hear your experience in the comments, or simply read on, and enjoy. (Author’s Note: CRT monitors are all but extinct in today’s monitor marketplace, so we’ll be more or less omitting them from this article, focusing mostly on LCD monitors. If you’re a die hard CRT monitor fan, tell us your reasons in the comments.) Types of Connections A standard DVI monitor cable A standard VGA D-Sub monitor cable The first question you should always ask yourself when buying a monitor is what type of connection is supported, including by the monitor, and by your video output. This can mean either on your video card or on your motherboard, depending on which output you’re using. Here’s a brief rundown of the two listed above, which are the two most common for monitors. A DVI output A VGA output
This is a personal choice, and is one of the major contributors to the cost of a PC monitor. While you know your needs better than we do, we can suggest a few guidelines.
Modern LCD monitors create images out of points of light called pixels. This model is slightly different than older style analog CRT monitors, which could easily use lots of different resolutions without loss of quality. LCDs have these pixels at fixed points, and these fixed pixels make up the native resolution of the display. If your monitor has a native or recommended resolution, it means that that resolution is in a 1:1 ratio with the actual number of pixels the monitor can display. With other resolutions, the computer will be redrawing the images on screen (with visible loss of quality) by using a process called interpolation.
Monitor brightness is usually not something that ordinary users will have to concern themselves with. Brightness is measured in units of candela per square meter.
Contrast Ratio is the difference between the brightest white and the darkest dark a display can produce. This is important to a display, because the greater the contrast in these two extremes, the more subtle differences in color and value a monitor can display. This is one of the best references you have to understanding the quality of your display. Newegg.com recommends a Contrast Ratio of 350:1 or better, although with current LCD technology, there’s not much reason to settle for less than 1000:1. Many monitors sell at reasonable rates, even with ratios of 10,000,000:1. Buy according to your needs and to fit your budget, as not every user needs an extremely high contrast PC monitor.
Any monitor worth its salt will display a full 16.7 million colors (24 bit) possible from an RGB colorspace. Some older VGA monitors may not display all of these, and will only work in color modes lower than 24 bit. Simply put, don’t use these if you can help it.
Viewing angle refers to the image distortion that happens when an LCD monitor is viewed from the side, or from a non-ideal angle, distorting and ruining the picture. In a perfect world, an LCD viewing angle would be 180 degrees, meaning that you can view the screen at any point, as long as you’re looking at it from the front. As it stands, many LCD monitors have viewing angles as high as 170 degrees.
It takes a finite amount of time for the pixels in a monitor to change from color to color, and the lag between changes is called the “response time.” This is measured in milliseconds (ms) and the smaller the number, the better the response time. Response time is not important for graphics professionals, but a slow response time could possibly affect video quality, and can be critical to the performance of PC games. PC gamers should demand a quick response time to ensure that their monitor isn’t subtlety affecting their performance in a fast paced action game.
Two of the most common monitor aspect ratios are 4:3 5:4 (Edit: 4:3 is more common than 5:4) and 16:9. These are the older “standard” aspect ratio, and the newer, widescreen aspect. The current trend is toward widescreen monitors, and given the way screen space is used in most ordinary tasks, wider monitors may simply be easier to use.
So what remains to be said about picture quality, and about which brands perform better? Ask ten friends for recommendations for any hardware, and you’ll usually get ten different recommendations. Brands are not terribly important in terms of video quality, although the manufacturing processes of some companies may affect the length of life of the product. We won’t comment on that, but in order to determine if your monitor has good picture quality, do the following:
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