CRT Vs LCD Monitors and TV's

You have to be prepared to shell out £500 plus to get a flat panel with decent color.

You can find something in a crt flavor for £60.

Depends what your priorities are.

I just switched from crt to lcd, had a loewe crt that was getting on to 12 years old but didn't want to get ride of it as the picture was still so good (and lack of cash). This year switched to a sony 925 and its brilliant (i'm sure others will have their own preferences) but it's like night and day. Only down side is that is shows up the poor quality of old dvd etc.

It depends on what you are looking at. Never used them for work but the media has to be good quality - as mentioned above, a poorly mastered DVD will look like VHS no matter what the quality of the display device.

OLED (NOT to be confused with LED backlit LCD) is currently the highest available technology. There are others waiting in the wings that will blow everything out of the water.

I'm waiting for my 6 year old plasma to die before I move on to the next flat panel.

I have this Philips 9000 series Smart LED TV 46" Full HD 3D Max, and I can say its a joy to watch anything. But yes, its backlit led;x

http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbi ... FL9706H/12

If you look at CRT specs like you do with LCD or Plasma panels you'll see all sorts of irritations and annoyances.

I moved over a while ago and honestly when researching you read far to much in to it as I was used to CRT (I had a Freeview CRT). Plumped for what I like the best in the end (isa Panasonic Freeview/Freesat 37"er) and will not look back. You don't notice things after a little while. I still see my old CRT at my in laws and wonder what I worried about.

OLED still has no convincing product on the market - lots of PR puff but nothing yet available. Expect £5-10k for the first ones...

LCD is good enough and cheap, most other technologies are dead in the water. They might be better, but they aren't such good value.

I went to comet/PC world today, huge new superstore in Chester with masses of TV's and computers. The TVs did look pretty good but the monitors were crap... Is this a case of bad set up? Much like the "fat mode" of the old CRT wide screens that many people left on (4:3 stretched, probably why people think the old CRTs were crap...)

Some of these monitors are £200+ LEDs but look!

Have to say, that's one of my main gripes about modern TVs - aspect ratio setup. That and the spec for HDMI assuming everything is widescreen and that the source will correct - the problem with that is the source often doesn't correct / frame properly and also assumes the video is widescreen / 16:9.

To my mind, whilst not perfect and a bit limited, at least SCARTs wss with pin 8 facilitated watching 4:3 stuff correctly. Nothing worse than stretched, distorted, zoomed or cropped stuff because people don't really get aspect ratios, hate black bars, and think that because they've paid for the entire screen it should always be filled regardless of the original framing.

Have to agree with aspect ratio.
At my school the White boards are 4:3 the monitors are Widescreen (16:9, not my favoured 16:10) but becuse they share the same picture the widescreen uses the 4:3 setup and stretches. Makes creating circles fun
And the IC techy doesn't like them switched to the perminent 4:3 mode the Dell screens have where it all looks good :roll:

Anyway, that setup looks poor on the screens. Look for IPS panels, they cost more. Still I use TN panels and they are still much nicer then my old CRT's on my eyes though mine are quite a few yers old now.
Quite often good to look at reviews on them and see what colour gamut or quality is like, you cannot do that in the Dixons group shops.
As for TV's I find Richer Sounds have a better display and setup.

Also for Computer screens I prefer matt and semi-matt over the shiny ones, which for laptops (diverting a bit) make it a bugger to find. either need to go Business range or Samsung it seems.
This review is somewhere to start for a nice size monitor. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6115/hp-2 ... ps-monitor

If you want a flat telly then plasma is the only way to go just now.