I took the plunge into LCD world

[speedy4500]

Dell had a special one day offer on their 18.1" Ultrasharp LCD, $436 shipped to my door for a normally $529 monitor without shipping, and it's supposed to be a panel on the same level as the NEC 18 inchers. Woohoo!!! Now I will be able to use the DVI port on my Ti4200. I will finally see something I haven't seen in a long time: some deskspace since my current 19" Flatron CRT is so huuuuuge. Now I gotta get rid of this monster somehow.

[USAPGAPRO]

Nice.

[bluestreakLB]

you could give it to me.

[gingo]

Thats a great deal, I got my 17" for only $36 less.

Whats the response time on that? 25ms?

[speedy4500]

I don't think Dell specified response time, but a third party review said ghosting was minimal. I really am not a huge gamer (I play a little CS and some driving games, that's about it), so response time wasn't my primary concern. I moved to LCD primarily due to the convenience and it happened to be really low price :D It was definitely an impulse buy! Dell is saying it should arrive on the 8th, so once I get it hooked up I'll let everyone know how it is.

[filip04]

i took the same plunge almost exactly a year ago... i will NEVER switch back to crt's!! NEVER!!!!!!

[speedy4500]

Well, it came today. It's hooked up to the DVI on my Ti4200. I haven't touched any adjustments at all on this thing, the picture is perfect out of the box. My Flatron was one of the best 19" CRTs available, but still was difficult to get the kind of geometry and sharpness this LCD has right away. I cannot see any dead pixels and the backlighting seems very even, but I haven't tried any programs that might help identify defects. It's kinda neat in the dark as the black stand and border seem to make the image/screen just float in mid-air in front of me. Performance seems quite adequate while I was watching The Rock, but shall take some use to pick out any bugs. Now some bad things: physical adjustments are minimal, I can tilt the screen and the base is such that the entire assembly can be turned side to side, but there is no height adjustment, which I find a bit disturbing, as it really can't be that difficult to build a base with height adjustment, especially on a $500+ big screen LCD. The power cord is also kinda short, but is the typical computer power cord type, so a longer one could be purchased easily.

[Bertus02]

Just wondering if the picture is any crisper compared to your crt. I am thinking of going lcd w/ dvi, but want to know if you can achieve the same picture with a high end crt. i currently have a ancient 5 yr old gateway 17" and the picture is pretty bad.

[speedy4500]

Well, if you have a 17" CRT with bad picture right now, I'd definitely reccommend a quality flat panel. An LCD with DVI is the most "natural" display for a computer as it keeps everything digital, instead of a D/A conversion that is necessary for a CRT. A similar quality picture might be acheivable with a high-end CRT, and would have the advantage of being able to change resolutions. However, with my LCD monitor, I just plugged it in and the picture had better geometry and was crisper than I ever could acheive with my CRT.