CRT monitor protection lobby grows

WE ALL STARE at them as much if not more than we observe our beloved friends and family so I really shouldn't have been surprised by another bulging virtual mailbag that followed recent articles here and here on that age-old debate - the last few years anyway - of CRTs v LCDs.

Most folk seem to want to maintain the CRT, pat it, praise it and smother it with affection. Eric Baker mailed in to say:

"Just recently I bought a Minolta color printer from Newegg which included a 19-inch Benq (905T) LCD display for free. I needed the printer anyway, and figured this would be a good excuse to upgrade from my 1998 17-inch Dell/Sony 1025HTX. I loved the sharpness and brightness of the display. It ghosts a little in games, but not enough to be a deal breaker. The main thing I noticed were the poor color (must've been a 6-bit LCD) and the glaring obviousness of the individual pixels.

"Long story short, I'm not hurting for desk space so I'm back to using my trusty CRT and my girlfriend is probably the only person in the world with a Pentium Pro desktop and a 19-inch LCD."

You're quite the gentleman Eric. Next you'll be loaning her a copy of Wordstar. I just hope she knows what she's got there.

Richard Warnock pitched in with a tragic tale of attempting to find CRT love being prevented by scarcity.

"After watching my six-year-old 19-inch Sony HMD-A400 Trinitron CRT slowly lose brightness over a years time, I finally got tired of squinting. After doing some targeted research, I found that CRTs have become nearly extinct in the retail spaces of the USA.

"Newegg, for example, lists a grand total of 27 CRT monitors. Three of those listed are touchscreen CRTs. There are one 22-inch, five 19-inch, five 17-inch listed as in stock of the 27. There are also two open-box 19-inch monitors listed. Everything else is listed as out of stock. Other online shops are even more sparse.

"Best Buy lists three 17-inch CRTs. CompUSA lists nine: one 21-inch, two 19-inch and six 17-inch. Staples has one 19-inch and one 17-inch listed. Office Depot lists four 17-inch monitors. Officemax has one 19-inch monitor listed. Fry's at Outpost.com has two 17-inch CRTs and a 14-inch for pre-order. Walmart lists a 21-inch, a 19-inch and a 17-inch CRT. Going to pricerunner.com, there are a grand total of 143 product listings for all CRT sizes. Amazon shows 17 listings for CRTs. So, in spite of all the hue and cry, what are we to do? I wholeheartedly agree that LCD monitors are technically and visually inferior to CRT monitors. But the reality is that Philips and Sony have both stopped making glass CRTs. If you must have a CRT, buy it now, while there is still something remotely resembling a choice.

"What did I do? After finding my chosen replacement (The Samsung 997 series) would set me back $200+ USD, I wound up going to my local Best Buy and plunking down $240 USD on a 19-inch Samsung LCD."

DV Young questioned claims of LCD longevity: "LCDs do not last longer than CRTS. Anyone like me, who has had a Sony, or other TV or CRT monitor for 15 years plus and going strong can tell you that. Name one quality LCD still going strong after that long or plasma or lcos or dlp for that matter. All these technologies say they will last 60000-80000 hours at 8 hours a day, thats 20-30 years. Yea right! what a bold face lie. Five would be lucky.

"And DLPs need bulb replacement at $200 every year or two thats up to a thousand dollars every five years.

Sony knows CRTs have better picture quality in most cases to all other display technologies, but are hard to make in larger sizes, and have little profit potential, which is why they have discontinued one of the best HDTVs around, the xbr960 hdtv."

Rufngod was short and sweet: "I'd simply say that for the best image quality, CRT. But for your eyesight, desktop space, and energy savings the LCD is a no brainer. I bought the Matrox Triple-Head to go, and frankly can't imagine having three 19-inch CRTs making crispy critters of my eyes, never mind that I wouldn't have enough space on my desktop. The three ViewSonic VX922 do quite nicely in games and most desktop applications. Plus it's a 210-degree field of view in FPS games!"

Touristguy87 suggested usability testing: "It's a shame that you can't quantify the difference between CRTs and LCDs, with some kind of performance metric since so many people say that LCDs are not good enough for high-end graphics work. Put 'em to the test. Make them work with LCDs and show us how much worse their work will be if they have to use LCDs."

JonPWills was among several defenders of LCDs though: "I would like to point out that the latest LCDs don't look that terrible outside of their native resoltuions. I'm using a Niko 32-inch widescreen LCD which I bought for 650 USD as my primary desktop monitor. It looks great in a, granted, narrow resolution range of 800/600 to 1366/768. I had to use a little program called Powerstrip to add the high-def resolutions, but after I added it, a wide range of games support the wide screen. Actually I found going wide screen for my PC was a much easier experience than trying to get wide screen support for my gamecube.

"One thing I don't think I saw mentioned was power usuage. My Niko 32-inch widescreen LCD uses less power than my Samsung 21-inch CRT. That's kinda nice eh?"

It certainly has potential to save the ice caps, Jon.

Pneffx, who took a pop at our old friend and CRT obsessive Fluppeteer: "This CRT guru seems like a guy who can't get over his ex-girlfriend. I have not used a CRT in five years and would never go back. The LCD does it all for 99% of the population. Plus the chicks love them. As always the Inquirer got it right the first time."

Clearly a man who knows the female mind, that Pneffx.

Richard K How wrote: "Fluppeteer does make valid points but I think the radiation from his CRTs over the years has clouded his judgment over the aesthetics side of owning an LCD, having recently forked out 400 spoons on an NEC 20-inch widescreen clearly there are people mad, like me, who buy these things. LCD did have poor viewing angles but they solved that for the most part. LCD still suffer from latency although I can't detect it running Q4 at stupid frame rates. LCDs will eventually simulate a refresh rate by flickering the pixels to fool your eye into believing images are in motion."

Beowulfr is another man in favour of a skinny display. "Just as a counterpoint to all the CRT huggers out there, I must say that my 24-inch Dell LCD performs quite well. I also have a Viewsonic P95f 19-inch CRT (the pro series for digital photography work etc.). The Viewsonic CRT does have a slightly better colour range, but on the other hand images are sharper and less distorted on the Dell LCD.

"Furthermore I found that the Dell LCD plays Half Life 2 in non-native resolution perfectly well. There is certainly no massive loss of image quality. Neither is ghosting or sparkling noticeable to me, though it may be to some people.

"Of course, the Dell 24-inch is a pretty high-end LCD; I have seen lots of crappy LCDs in computer hardware stores and I put off getting an LCD for a long time because the standards weren't good enough. However, the best computer monitor I have ever seen is a 15.4-inch widescreen LCD on an Asus M6N laptop; the colour accuracy, the clarity and the brightness were all better than anything else I've seen, including my big Viewsonic and Dell monitors."

Russell Collins asked an intriguing question. Can INQ readers hep unwrap this enigma within a riddle?

"I don't know if you ever read or heard about IBM's patented flat-panel CRT technology (a pure CRT that can be almost any size but only 2cm thick), but it appears to have gone the way of the dodo and I'd like to know why. See here: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010719S0011

"I read this article years ago and eagerly have awaited a product to hit the shelves since then with baited breath. Yet for five years now I've not heard another word on the concept... not even to say if it's been dropped or not.

I think this is the perfect compromise between LCD and CRT! Imagine the portability and desktop space you can save and still have ALL of the benefits and quality of a CRT for theoretically less money than an LCD!

"I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but I've often wondered if this idea wasn't buried by IBM and the LCD industry due to the obvious repercussions on the LCD market. Imagine LCDs becoming obsolete for the desktop and the billions of dollars lost that was spent on factories and research into developing them to replace the CRT. It's happened before with other better technologies; seems the almighty dollar will always trump the happy consumer."

The Requiem, appropriately enough, offered a nice summary:

"Look, it's real simple... holding onto a CRT will get you nowhere. Investing into newer technology will allow way better displays to come to market. CRTs are not like LCDss which is WHY I think LCDS are BETTER!

"It's hard to upgrade CRT's, they have reached their pinnacle point...

"However, LCDs probably have 10-20 years of life left and will only become better. Wasn't it just announced that LCD technology has finally surpassed CRT in ALL image quality aspects? Including deep colors (full-color spectrum) and nanometer perfection?

"Either way, LCDs can be improved upon big time, and as my sources have told me, they are just now beginning to scratch the surface. We have OLED and SED displays that will be out in about a year or so and these will rule the world as we know it. The SED is like an LCD and CRT put together using the best of both worlds. There will be PC monitors and TVs with higher contrast levels, deeper blacks and tens of billions of colors... nothing will come close. So people need to start investing into newer tech, I mean, how long are they going to keep their old CRT's?.. and they are computer guys, most of them in the field? Bad decisions and arrogant thinking... move on people."

Finally, Fluppeteer wrote in again to say: "Sorry I sent you to sleep (and I hope your dinner wasn't too burnt) - you aren't the first. :-) I'll go and find a PC Spod magazine to give me some money...

"Fluppeteer (Owner of *two* Timex Data Links, but also a T221 LCD - which Apples don't drive properly, because its resolution is too high.)"

Thanks all. It's been real. µ