not quite sure if its is in the display section, or not because its about monitors, but not HD screens. any who, about the computer monitors, whats considered good for a contrast ratio? what does that mean? and also, what is good for the brightness? im planning on getting a monitor too, for my dad and im not sure whats considered good or sub par. appreciate any advice.
Contrast ratio is the ratio of the brighest the screen can go to the dimmest it can go. Since LCDs can't display a perfect black, the white is a quantifiable number of times brighter than black. A good contrast ratio is four figures, so 1000:1 or better. However, my monitor has a contrast ratio of 700:1 and is more than acceptable. As for the brightness, it is usually measured in a unit called nits, or candela per metre squared. A good value for that is above 300 nits, better still, 400.
sammorris do you know any good ones that are around 20" with 1000:1 ratio and 400 nits? 350nits is good too. sorry if this thread is a little old
aspect as in the square monitors? if so, widescreen i guess. wouldn't that be better?i always just assumed widescreen would be better. what would you prefer
Well for the same screen size, a normal 4:3 monitor will be bigger. It just depends what sort of use you'll have for it. If you watch a lot of films, widescreen would be better, but you can get very nice 4:3 monitors with good performance nowadays. The general trend is towards widescreen, but for 20", a 4:3 monitor will have a resolution of 1600x1200, whereas the widescreen will be 1680x1050.
well it seems the only main use of a widescreen monitor is for movie/video viewing right? so i guess ill go with a 4:3 monitor.
Most games support widescreen these days, so I'm not trying to dissuade you, but that's their primary selling point.
yea i think ill go for the 4:3 because doesnt widescreen have alot of excess space on the sides of the browser when surfing the internet? and if i just enlarge it, itll enlarge the text and look weird, so yea 4:3 is suitable for me. so which kind of 20" 4:3 are good?
I am viewing this site, on my 24" widescreen monitor, running at its native resolution of 1920x1200, and all looks well.
its just so hard to chose! lol. well id like to hear what people think about monitors, 4:3 or widescreen. anybody have anything to say about it? pros or cons?
I've owned two widescreen PC monitors, and they are both perfectly fine for all uses. Because the resolution is changed, nothing gets stretched horribly when you're word processing etc, but it does require games to support widescreen resolutions. If they don't, you will experience reduced picture quality. As of the moment, all games manufacturers support widescreen resolutions except EA, who don't support it for any of their games. Games like Crysis that are only published by EA are fine, since they were made by companies who actually know how to code games properly, but things like the need for speed series, and all the EA Sports games will look a little blurry on a widescreen. On the other hand, getting a 4:3 monitor means you won't be able to play DVDs or HD films occupying the whole of your screen (unless you stretch them which looks a bit nasty). Especially if you find a panoramic film (2.16:1 is it? something like that), that will in fact use less than half of your screen size. Then there's the size of the monitors themselves. A 20" 4:3 monitor is 194 square inches in size. A 20" widescreen monitor is hardly any smaller, but carries a resolution with 10% fewer pixels, so the image definition isn't quite as good. So it's decision time. The Dell, 2007FP is an awesome 4:3 monitor, but I don't really know about any others. With widescreens you have a huge market to choose from, and most people seem to be buying widescreen monitors these days...
for widescreen would this be good? im just narrowing down my options for widescreen and 4:3. im thinking about turning to widescreen because i do watch a lot of my movies on the computer, but i have some old games that im pretty sure doesnt support widescreen and dont want loss of quality.
Bear in mind a large number of games that don't support widescreen can actually be modified to run in widescreen mode, it just takes a bit of googling and .ini file editing. The 2008WFP should be an excellent monitor. All the other Ultrasharp ones certainly are.
how much are average 20" monitors by the way? i want something thats good but not too expensive. the 2008WFP is nearly 300, and ive seen monitors a lot more, but also a lot cheaper. if the games do not support widescreen can i still use them without modifying it? even if i lose quality. or is there a way to to just play in its normal 4:3 res. with some black empty space on the side so it wouldnt lose the quality?
If games don't support widescreen, they'll still work, and they won't even look too bad. I'm just a bit of a graphics obsessive so I can clearly notice the difference, some probably can't even tell. You can probably fiddle with your graphics drivers to modify the size of the image on the screen if the res isn't right. My monitor automatically resizes the image if I run 2048x1536, but I don't think it does it for other resolutions, and I don't know if any other monitors do it. As for cost, there are cheaper 20" monitors out there, but I personally wouldn't skimp on one, a good monitor is a very valuable thing to have, and the Dell Ultrasharps are some of the best.
hey after doing some search, do you think http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005085 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005096 are better? the last one says its 3000:1 ratio, but reviews say 5000, what the heck? lol. anyways the thing i like about dell was that it had the camera and microphone built-it, which i thought was a really nice feature, do you think the camera and microphone is worth the extra 50? dell also has this truelife thing, is that anything special? and also, does all monitors have HD quality stuff? like the ones i listen above, do they have that feature?
They both look like decent monitors, I'm dubious about the 5000:1 contrast, that's higher than I've ever seen before on an LCD. As for "HD quality stuff" I've no idea what you mean, explain?
