TR Forums

Hey. I'm looking all around at 15" lcd's, trying to find a good on for no more than about $450. Right now, I'm using a borrowed KDS RAD-5 , so that is my point of refrence currently. Any suggestions would be great. Also, any links to other people's roundup's would be cool, I've been able to find many single reviews, but few comparions.

Peace,
Will

I have a viewsonic VG150. I love it, downside, it's a analog input. So, there is signal loss from digital/analog/digital conversion, BUT it looks damn nice. Supports 1024x768 has a nice display of non native resolutions. Good intuitive interface.

I'd give it a 8.5 out of 10, loses 1.5 for analog input.

How well does your VG150 deal with high-motion things like movies and/or games?

Peace, Will

I watch movies on it all the time. I myself don't see any blurring/ghosting/artifacts during high motion. Some people say they do, I dunno. I would really recommend heading to a local circuit city/best buy/whatever and checking them out yourself. That's what I did with this VG150. Your eyes will be the final judgement.

Check out the Sony 15" models. They cost a little more, but they look PERFECT. Highly recommended, even over the good Viewsonics.

Just as a follow-up, I descided to spend entirely too much money and get a Planar PV174. Its so nice...

I have a KDS Rad-5 and love it except for the sticker damage. Better to send it back at the end of the warranty period with a note "the sticker isn't working anymore - please replace."

I just got a Samsung 570v tft monitor and I think it looks great. I but it at Frys for $399.00. I have used Samsung monitors before and they are very reliable.

My advice on buying an LCD monitor: DON'T.

I'm viewing this message on a Hitachi CML-170SXWB and I wish that I had saved the cost of this LCD monitor and stuck with a quality 19" CRT.

My opinion:

The ONLY areas in which an LCD is superior to a CRT are weight, size, power, and heat. In the MORE IMPORTANT areas of cost, refresh rate, flexibility, viewing angle, and image quality, a decent CRT wins over an LCD every time. A top-of-the line CRT will usually cost less than a cheap LCD with half of the viewable area.

An LCD is fine if you never use it for anything other than word processing, e-mail and web browsing and you fix your desktop to the physical resolution of the monitor.

If you play games or watch videos or use other resolutions, LCDs pretty much suck. The ghosting trails due to the slow drawing rate of the LCD pixels is annoying when playing DVDs, and it can make it very difficult to play games. Depending on the quality of the image-resizing algorithms in your monitor, looking at an image at something other than the native resolution can be anywhere from ugly to almost unreadable. Many games won't let you select the exact resolution of the monitor. Even when you can change resolutions, your video card might not be able to run the game smoothly at so high a resolution. LCD's are trendy tech toys, but they have not yet reached the point that they are a reasonable replacement for a good-quality CRT.

I just got a Sony SDMM51D. It's very nice, but it could be better. The contrast is certainly not as good as a CRT and you can see some dithering artifacts with images that take advantage of 32 bit color. On the other hand, it's very easy on the eyes. The DVI in also makes it super sweet.

Check out the dual monitor thread for a picture.

I've got a site running ViewSonic VE150m LCD screens. They use it in combo with ATI AIW cards to view TV signals and DVDs. No ghosting from what I can see. The setup is sweet.