CRT monitors

[azagahl]

Is there any place left that still makes or sells good CRT monitors?

I don't care if they weigh a lot. Lately, every LCD I've tried, including very expensive ones, have dead pixels that drive me crazy. I do not want a dot in front of my face for hours at a time. A lot of LCD's also have native resolutions I don't care for.

Edited October 26, 2006 by azagahl

[Tinker]

http://www.overstock.com/?PAGE=STOREPICK&a...014715&fp=f

[bonestonne]

i know how you feel about the dead pixels. my moniter came with a dead pixel, but my dad didn't want to go through the trouble of trying to get another one or replacement...its very noticable, always red. and on a 15.4" LCD moniter, its not hard to find. drives me up the wall because i have dark color background images, and then theres a red dot.

i went looking for CRT today, most people abuse them now, aren't worth much..if you're going for a CRT, at least get flatscreen, its a lot better looking than the slightly convex lenses of CRT moniters.

[LLXX]

Some manufacturers now have a zero-dead-pixel policy, so you can return the monitor if you do find any.

I find CRTs are too bright and have flicker, which my eyes hate. Not to mention the pixels are not perfectly square dots like they're supposed to be, but rather indistinct dots of light

[RJM]

I hate LCD's myself. Newegg still sells some CRT's.

At least CRT's don't have square pixels so they look good in all resolutions and not just their native resolution. Also CRT's don"t have to illuminate the whole phospher dot. I'd like to see a LCD light ½ a pixell!

http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCateg...?SubCategory=19

Edited October 27, 2006 by RJM

[bonestonne]

LCDs are also hard to clean...like the strange stains that appear on the display, very hard to get those off. whereas you don't have to be quite as gentle with a CRT..you can even use windex if you're careful.

[LLXX]

I'd like to see a LCD light ½ a pixell!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Not that it'd be a good idea anyway, since text turns funny colors.

[CoffeeFiend]

I tought I was the last person into CRTs on earth

LCDs often have poor resolutions, and they look god awful at anything else than that.

Contrast is poor, angle of view often sucks, brightness/color rendition is often far from ideal - given some sunlight or high ambient light you can't see anything on most, response times, etc. They look like crap if not using DVI (and that would require me to buy 2 new KVM switches and a couple video cards - not to mention the laptop which has no DVI plug). Not to mention dead/stuck pixels. And nice large LCDs are still expensive. The 19"s have come down in price, but the 21"+ still aren't cheap (and I'm NOT going down in size or resolution). I'm not too sure on how reliable they are either (especially the backlights - whose replacement parts seem to not be available for long)

The ONLY LCDs I've seen that didn't look awful were the Dell Ultrasharps. I had considered buying the 30", but it need special video cards (dual link DVI) in all my PCs, which is seemingly unswitchable using a normal KVM, and likely wouldn't work at all for other things (like the laptop with VGA only). I might buy a pair of 24" ultrasharps eventually, but there's no rush (the day one of my monitors die likely).

[jftuga]

A legitimate place for CRTs is in schools. Students can take a sharp item a poke a hole in a LCD screen. It is then completely ruined. CRTs are more durable is this respect.

-John

[azagahl]

Yay!

I got a couple of free 22" monitors from work (we are "upgrading" to LCD's). They are 5 years old but look good.

The only complaints I have are

1. Both monitors had this same problem that got really bad at high res, or with a high refresh rate. There were ugly horizontal ripples to the right of any text. The ripples alternated between normal and inverse images. I bought a new, thicker VGA cord and it fixed this completely

2. I noticed there are a couple of faint black horizontal lines. This has something to do with the aperture grill I think. It's quite normal.

3. One CRT monitor I tried had a dead pixel (I didn't check the other one). It's small due to the highest allowed resolution being so high (2048x1536 I think). I'm not sure if this is missing phosphours. It could be an occlusion I suppose, but it looks square to me.

BTW, one time I bought a very expensive CRT monitor and it had MANY dead pixels. Oh well...

[CoffeeFiend]

2. I noticed there are a couple of faint black horizontal lines. This has something to do with the aperture grill I think. It's quite normal.

They're likely trinitron tubes (common in nice large monitors). You eventually get used to it and don't really see them anymore. And yes, it's because it uses an aperture grill instead of shadow mask.

As for #1, cheapo cables are more prone to ghosting and such things (poor shielding too, so prone to interference as well). Easy to see with cheap KVM cable sets. It shows especially at high resolutions, so nothing surprising here.

But as far as #3 goes, I've NEVER seen that before. Weird!

Edited November 2, 2006 by crahak

[azagahl]

#1 was solved with using a better VGA cable; and I kinda of expected #2. Overall I'm happy with the monitors.

>But as far as #3 goes, I've NEVER seen that before. Weird!

It might be a lack of a punched out hole in the aperature grill. The brand new CRT I tried a couple of years ago (a ViewSonic one) had at least 5 dead pixels in a small group.

I noticed another problem - if I have a bright white square on a black background, for example, I can see a dim halo around it. I don't think it's an optical illusion. Possibly just ghosting.