James Tyrer posted on Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:52:22 -0700 as excerpted: > I was very disappointed that I was unable to find a used CRT monitor. I > guess that it is just a commentary on our throwaway society. I can > understand why people throw away the cheap CRT monitors but the good > ones appear to get tossed too.
> So, I bought a 22" 16:10 LCD monitor. The expensive ones were out of my > price range but I did spend a bit extra for an NEC even though it is > still made in China. It took considerable adjustment to tone it down. > Still doesn't look like my Sony flat screen TV. > > Also, I bought a florescent back-lit monitor (like my TV). I am still > wondering about the LED back-lit ones since it has been impossible to > make true green high output LEDs. I understand that ones with a > synthetic band gap are supposed to become commercially available this > year. I wonder if this (True Green LEDs) will be the next thing to be > hyped in TVs and monitors. Kevin mentioned the size and weight, but there's the energy usage too. Here in Phoenix switching to (CFL-backed) LCDs and then LED (backed LCDs) saved me a LOT of money on my monthly electric bill. Of course here in Phoenix, about 8 months out of the year you're paying for every watt of power the computer/monitor uses twice, once to actually do the computing work, again to dump the heat from that back outside. It'd be a bit different in colder climates where people are heating instead of air conditioning for 8 months, but... Meanwhile, IMO it's worth your while to get LED for the quality in any case. The CFL-backlit are cheaper, and at least at my price-point, the rest of the unit is built cheaper to match, as well. Plus CFL's only half-way-there in terms of all the previously mentioned points, size/ weight/energy-efficiency all three. Put it this way. When I first went LCD, I went CFL-backlit. I run dual monitors so buy in pairs and they were OK as I knew no better at that point, but I cracked one so had to replace them, and I ended up buying slightly smaller LED-lit (actually side-lit, I think that set was). When I saw the dramatic difference, both in visual quality and as I mentioned in energy efficiency given the "twice" factor I mentioned, THERE WAS NO GOING BACK! Getting specific, with CFL-LCDs, I never could get kgamma to show all the color points no matter HOW I tried. With LED- LCDs, the improvement was immediately and dramatically visible as well as directly measurable via kgamma, which demonstrated FAR better dynamic range than with the CFL-LCDs. Well, those were 22-inch "full-HD" 1920x1080 (16:9, dual monitor in stacked config for 1920x2160, 16:18 aka 8:9), and I'm in my mid 40s and over the last few years have developed a need for reading glasses... or larger screens! So doing the math I settled on 42-inch, double the size, quad area, same resolution, as about the biggest I could comfortably fit in the space I had for them. But back about three years ago when I first decided this is what I wanted, the 42-inch LED-backlit models (of course at that size, monitors cost several times what TVs cost, same resolution and technology now that they're both LCD, due to the vastly more massive demand scale for TVs at sizes above 27-30", so I ended up looking at TVs) were running $700 each low-end, which meant with dual-monitor, I'd be forking out $1400 minimum, plus the mounting hardware and either shipping or sales taxes if not both, so more like $1600+, which was WELL out of budget range. Standard (CFL-backlit) LCDs were $400+ at the time, but as I said, THERE WAS NO GOING BACK! Then the recession hit and I wasn't in ANY shape to upgrade, but gradually, the price dropped. Finally, just in February, I was again in a financial position to shop, and I managed to find a 42-inch LED-backlit full-HD LG model 42LM3400-UC TV (the 42LM3700 is the same but with a sound bar) on sale for $400 at Fry's Electronics. Two of them and the mounting hardware, plus taxes, still came in under $1000, which was a target I was comfortable with. So basically, I waited THREE YEARS, my eyesight getting gradually worse for computing the whole time (I sure used kwin's zoom-effect functionality, the only thing that made it tolerable!), for LED-backed technology to reach my price-point at the size I was looking for -- LED-backed *REALLY* *IS* THAT MUCH BETTER THAN CFL-LCD! Of course had I bought the equivalently priced CFL-backed units, $700 back then, $400 now, with the bottom-end 42" CFLs now running under $200, I'm sure the quality would have been /some/ better. But it'd still have been bigger and heavier and less energy efficient, and I'd have saved no money over the LEDs, so what would have been the point? IOW, I won't try to argue the green-LED point, but I know from first hand experience that the LED-backed units really ARE better quality, at least at the low to middle-grade, and if you've the money for high end, why go CFL-backed in any case? Of course it's your money and your eyes, but I'd SERIOUSLY recommend that you either arrange to try a reasonable LED-backed monitor for a couple days with a possibility of return if you don't like it, or arrange to take your machine into a store and hook it up there to run kgamma, or something. Because if you're anything like as impressed with the results as I was, THERE WILL BE NO GOING BACK! for you as well. You really do owe yourself the experience of at least trying it. And if you end up disagreeing with me, I'd very much appreciate a mail (probably personal not list) telling me why, and preferably mentioning the brand and model as well, so I perhaps could look at it too and see if it's just me, or if I agree with you on that brand and model. Meanwhile, with the purchase of those 42LM3400s I rather accidentally ran into another nice bonus, as well. As I was purchasing the units for use as computer monitors[1], I hadn't paid much attention to the TV-targeted features, including 3D. But the TVs each shipped with four pair of 3D glasses, and unbeknownst to me when I bought them, it has a 2D-2-3D feature... which works quite well for things like plasma's picture-of-the- day wallpaper modules when they show panoramic scenes, etc. Of course it doesn't work well at all for text, but it's an interesting toy, for sure, and it has certainly brought out details I'd have never otherwise noticed in various pictures I've tried it with. I've tried it with youtube, etc, as well. It's OK there, but I think the compression used on many yt-vids probably lessens the effect, tho I do see it on some of the better quality ones. --- [1] Computer-monitors/TVs: I don't even have an antenna hooked up and don't know if I ever will, tho of course I can slip a DVD in the computer occasionally and watch that if I want. I got tired of ad-supported fare years ago, as they really DO target the easily influenced who are thus more effectively programmed by the ads, and at some point I simply found that too insulting to my intelligence to continue with, preferring the far more interactive as well as ad-blocked computer to the experience of the attempted forced-passive-programming of ad-based TV, to the point that when I finally yanked the TV card out of my computer, it was on an upgrade where I realized I hadn't even turned the thing on since I had installed and tested it on the then-new mobo two years PREVIOUSLY, so there was no point in even bothering any longer! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde-linux mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-linux. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
