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[Hyperspeed]

I'm fed up of my hulking great big 15" CRT monitor. It's like a heater
in the summer and eats power.

No doubt the magnetic field from this dinosaur is harmful and it takes
up most of my desk.

Can anyone reccomend an LCD flat panel monitor that works on Amiga
that complies fully with OCS/ECS/AGA @ 15KHz... or at least when
scandoubled to 30KHz.

Obviously these screens have an optimum resolution such as 800×600 or
1024x768... so what is the best to work with native chipsets without
corrupting the screen quality?

I know a lot of them are now being made as TVs for kitchens and
bedrooms etc, so they should accept 15KHz by default right?

Would this be good enough to read small text? It'd have to be as good
as CRT quality, even if moving sprites etc. were a little blurrier as
is common with TFT.

[BIG-IRON]

I am currently working on an amiga laptop, and have adapted an lcd to work on the miggy it can be done and its not that hard! the older lcd have inputs that can be easily connected to a miggy but the new ones take some hacking. lcds are horible for gaming at the moment which is why on my athlon 64 rig I use a viewsonic 22 inch P225FB but for email, web stuff or anything really besides gaming lcds are ok. Problem is with lcds they have a native resolution usually 1024 by 768 and if you go up or down from that it looks bad sometimes REALLY bad. IMHO lcd technology is not that great and will be replaced shortly by organic or organo/electric displays (long story engineer crap) But if you can find an lcd cheap they are great for most things. And yes a 15 inch lcd would be great for almost enything! but gaming so go for it.

[spirantho]

TFT screens are fine these days for gaming... as long as you buy a good one.

My 18.1" Iiyama AS4636D (I think it is) is what I use for my Amiga (Voodoo III/Prometheus), Amiga native, Amiga One, PC, SPARCstation 2 and 3DO... it has DVI input, SVGA input (the Amigas and the SPARC through a Belkin switcher), Composite input (Amiga native) and S-Video input (the 3DO) all switchable.

On a good (and unfortunately expensive) monitor like this you can run anything - even MAME on vertical games because it tilts 90 degrees!

[MAD]

Hoya!

Cool!

Price please? ;-)

Be funky

M A D

[kvasarnomad]

Im to working on a A600 laptop
do you have any tips on what LCD that would be good and how to adapt the LCD?

[whabang]

You should get one which supports your miggies resolution.
Image quality really sucks when you connect with a VGA-cable, and enlarge the image.

Personally, I use a Samsung SyncMaster for my PC. I bought it four years ago, and I haven't regretted it for a single second!

[Panthro]

I use a viewsonic 17inch works fine :-)

[Piru]

Generally TFT's beat CRT in all aspects, except price. TFT picture is much sharper, including small text and moving objects. The contrast is superior.

Even scaling smaller resolution to full display size isn't showstopper anymore, the scaling technology has advanced a lot since early days. The only problem you might have is the 15KHz support.

I'm using 17" 1280x1024 TFT since 1.5 years, and will never go back to CRT.


PS. TFT is the first display that also allows me to see differences between gfxcard quality. CRTs were itself so bad quality I couldn't see any difference.

[HopperJF]

With my eMac, I obviously use the CRT monitor provided with the computer.
I was actually surprised then, to find out that the picture quality is actually clearer and better than that found on the LCD-based iMac II.

So some CRT's are actually better than LCD.
A majority of LCD's are also bad for gaming. I prefer CRT technology at the moment, and have no plans to have a LCD screen as well as the CRT screen which is part of my computer.

[vpcs]

LCDs can be handy.
Just pick up my 1200 grab my 15" LCD and it's almost portable.

[that_punk_guy]

Piru wrote:
Generally TFT's beat CRT in all aspects, except price.

And viewing angle, and colour fidelity...

I wonder whatever happened to ThinCRT?

[Floid]

that_punk_guy wrote:

And viewing angle, and colour fidelity...

I wonder whatever happened to ThinCRT?

If ThinCRT are who I was thinking of,** they were/are one of many companies working on "FEDs," or Field-Emissive Displays. These are basically a CRT with one gun per pixel, and you can find them in various expensive equipment... but they've been expensive, and there have been concerns about the materials used to create the electron guns.

It turns out carbon nanotubes are both cheap, easily produced (these days), and should last without ablating, so look for a sudden influx of cheap Taiwanese FEDs around the time OLED technologies take off. (The only problem is, of course, nanotubes might be as bad as asbestos when ingested or inhaled... but the chemicals involved in other electronics manufacture aren't always that healthy either.)

For direct-view displays (because I can't remember everything up-and-coming in the projection category, and projectors still need boring high-wattage lamps, anyway), there are really only a few technologies bouncing around right now. Everyone knows CRT and LCD, the 'new hotnesses' are:

OLED, Organic EL, Light-Emitting Polymer and related: Globs of chemical on a substrate that give off their own light. OLED is the big buzzword because chemical combinations that create light-emitting diodes are easy to drive and power-efficient; "electroluminescence" can refer to a number of things, but usually conjures the idea of a high-voltage/high-frequency requirement (like the Indiglo in your watch)... I gather most of the light emitting polymers are LED-based anyway, and 'organic' may or may not be a misnomer for a particular design, because companies are constantly trying new substances to produce something that works. The 'big battle' in that space seems to be between vapor-deposition (Kodak) and inkjet-printing (Epson).

'Folded' CRTs: Please tell me I'm not hallucinating this one, as I can't remember the proper term for it if it does exist. I could swear that, a few years back, RCA or someone figured out you could mount the electron gun off-center in a CRT, and use a 'mirror' of sorts to deflect the beam, creating a projection-TV arrangement within the tube itself, and allowing for a 'low profile' arrangement. If these were produced, they seem to have gone out of favor pretty quick, being as big and heavy and hard to manufacture as a regular tube, without the price premium and true flatness of a plasma panel.

Plasma: Cross a CRT with a fluorescent light. No concerns about electron-gun manufacture, since it doesn't need 'em, but big and gas-filled and fragile. Drive circuitry could probably be adapted to stimulate solid globs of EL phosphor as easily, but the full RGB gamut wasn't available in solid materials 10-15 years ago, and phosphor lifetimes are always a concern. A little more complex than a FED, since each pixel is a sealed gas-filled cell, but the phosphor backing of each cell lights across its full area (like a fluorescent tube), so it scales well to make 'giant,' relatively bright displays. As long as you don't let them burn in. (Early color designs could seem a bit flickery, since, like a TFT LCD, they have to modulate the pixels rapidly to create the illusion of varying luminance; if you haven't seen a recent $10,000 version, they now look like giant, bright LCDs, but without uneven backlighting, and with a complete viewing angle.)

FEDs: As mentioned above, an if-only that might be coming, like color LCDs were a dream in the 1980s. Probably not worth making wall-sized displays out of, but CRT tech is well-established and can mostly be reapplied here, and you get all the sharpness and direct-addressing of a fixed-resolution panel. If OLED takes a while to get cheap, these could take the ten-to-20something-inch desktop-panel market back from LCD. Upshots: Flat panels, less need for leaded glass and shielding (since each gun is right next to the phosphor, no need to fire electrons with quite so much energy), no magnetic susceptibility (since there's no magnetic steering), pixel-perfect accuracy (no more convergence/mask-alignment woes), probably no dead pixels, or at least none stuck on, no worries about blue fading any more than with a CRT... Downsides: Still glass, still a bit fragile, still likely to build up a dust-attracting charge... but think about how much of a CRT right now is just shipping cost, and at the desktop sizes the tech is good for, the fragility should be no more an issue than it is with shipping china from, er, China. (Personal opinion: I still think inkjetted OLED will be cheaper, but I also thought CD burners would forever be expensive and replaced with something sane.)*

EPaper: Reflective technology; either little electrically charged balls trapped in some sort of liquid (original 'epaper') or globs of colored oil and water (Phillips)... High-contrast, hopefully-cheap-and-high-DPI displays, roughly mimicking ink on paper. But remember to bring your book light, unless they adapt the oil-based tech to allow backlighting. Nobody's talking about how to use these to display motion, yet; Sony's just launched an eBook novelty using the monochrome version. Biggest upshot, at least in the monochrome incarnation: image stays when power's removed.

SRAM LCD: Speaking of low-power, this is a subtle variation on LCD I haven't heard much about recently; someone figured out how to build a LCD a while back where each TFT transistor somehow acts as a SRAM cell. Benefits: Display state preserved with just a trickle of power, if any at all, and the screen can act as its own framebuffer... but only of use to small devices. For all I know, they're already using this somewhere.

Finally, your reward for having read this far...

Iridigm: The only company doing anything marginally surprising, though they were actually around before Phillips announced their color oil-drop epaper, which will probably undercut them. Reflective displays using an interference principle, with tons of tiny electromechanical subpixels modulating the reflected light itself. Benefits: Low risk of dead 'pixels' ruining your day, unless a whole pixel's worth of practically invisible subpixels go at once; no fading, presumably fast-enough response, low-power... Downsides: Still needs an external light source, and who's going to care when flexible, practically-disposable OLED and epaper solutions get cheap, while monochrome LCDs are still 'good enough' for eParkingMeters? (Personal opinion: I want siding made of this stuff.)

---

*If you haven't noticed, not only are burners cheap now, but hard drives themselves have already moved towards zoned recording, possibly even zoned-spirals. Beware Floid's sense of what's sane, though he's already started compensating himself.

**Edit: They are, though the company's actually Candescent. I guess the nanotube idea isn't *that* recent a development as regards FEDs, so they could be using them as much as vapor-deposited diamond or whatever the last big ideas were in that space... the big breakthrough seems to be that there are now cheap-and-scalable techniques for actually putting nanotubes where you want them on an industrial basis.

YetAnotherEdit: And while I could've sworn I was reading about some sort of FED-related nanotube breakthrough this month, I could equally be thinking of this article, which promised some sort of self-assembling lattice without the involvement of carbon.

[Hyperspeed]

There's been conflicting reports in this thread...

LCD better than CRT etc.

I never expected TFT screens to rival tube screens for gaming because
of the way they store the charge longer (causing a slight blur on
insanely fast moving objects).

But what is most important to me is a screen that can run AGA so I can
still use my classic Amiga, this is also important to Picasso-IV users
who have their own video-passthru and scanddoubling.

Would I be right in saying that if 1024x768 is default for most LCD,
then 15KHz Amiga modes of a lower resolution stand a better chance of
crisper display on a LARGER screen such as 17" or 19" LCD?

If a 640x512 had to be displayed on a 17" (which was designed for
1024x768) wouldn't it be more accomodating?

Hope you get what I mean, it would be nice to upgrade my viewing area
as well as my desk space... but I refuse to sacrifice the Amiga
custom chips and their dedicated software.

How could you live without your `banging the hardware' scene demos
that mostly run in PAL 15KHz!

[seer]

I'm on the TFT monitor side.. (The Bright Side ;-))

Have a look at this gives a bit of info.. And maybe a bit of help.

I never expected TFT screens to rival tube screens for gaming because of the way they store the charge longer (causing a slight blur on insanely fast moving objects).

Having 3 of these TFT's (see link above) I can say I never notice this "blurring".. If you get a TFT with a low "Response time" (25 or lower) then a TFT is perfect for gaming.. It's easier for the eyes to look at and in general the contrast/colors are better.. Also, I always hated how multisync CRT monitors need so much adjusting to get the picture right (You know "pincusion" (SP?) and rotation etc etc).. TFT auto adjust with the touch of a button..

[HopperJF]

seer wrote:
I'm on the TFT monitor side.. (The Bright Side ;-))

Bright? If you're at the exact right angle perhaps, and not playing Quake