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  1. Hi,

    I was browsing through monitors the other day and it struck me that my clutter-obsessed mother would benefit from a TFT on her wall, rather than the CRT on the desk. There's no lack of choice in the 19" category but my question is this, will they look any good at 800x600?

    She currently has her 14incher at 26" from her eyes. Where the wall is, any tft screen would be approximately 33/34" away. I don't think 1024x768 would be acceptable (her eyesight is definitely 800x600 dependant) even though the screen is bigger - could be wrong though.

    Are there ANY 19" tfts with 800x600 native resolution? Will a lot of native 1024s or 1280'ers look bad in 800x600 ? ? ?


    It did occur to me that a 19 or 21" TV with a PC input could perform better, as any UK PAL model would surely be designed for above-average performance at 720x576, despite the imminent (please be imminent) status of HDTV.

    Many thanks to anyone who can help.
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  2. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    Native resolution of a LCD is based on it's size. But you can set the monitor to a lower resolution and it should be fine. And there are a lot of settings you can tweak in the Accessibility Options in the control panel.
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  3. Member Skith's Avatar
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    setting the resolution of an LCD lower than it's native resolution results in shrinking the size of the viewable image, which will have black borders around it.

    Changing resolution on an LCD does *not* work like that of a CRT where it always fills the full screen (at least, I have never seen or heard of an LCD capable of this).

    As redwudz said, you can tweak the accessibilty options and the desktop properties (Appearance tab -> font size).

    LCDs are (usually) superior when working with text (clarity), which should also help.
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    Skith..I'm afraid the black border thing hasn't been true for a long long time. You can set your lcd to any resolution available and it will fill the screen.

    a 19" lcd has about as much usable screen as a 21" crt monitor. So that should factor into your figures.


    So just to try and compare apples to apples, if your 14" crt were an lcd it would probably be called a 13" lcd because thats probably all the viewable space you are really getting.

    So going from 13 to 19 gives you 6" more diagonal which is almost a 33% bigger screen.

    Also, going from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 gives you about a 22% decrease in the size of things on the screen.

    SO! Mathematically speaking 1024 x 768 should actually look BIGGER on the 19" lcd than 800 x 600 looks on the 14" screen AT THE SAME DISTANCE..however. My math skills fail when we calculate the additional distance back and how much smaller it will appear. .

    Now...the 19" probably has a much higher native resolution (the resolution where everything looks just razor sharp). So to compensate for that you can download the cleartype utility from microsoft that does some additional smoothing of screen fonts.
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  5. LCD monitors can scale the image when using analog inputs. If clarity is an issue on a 19" LCD (typically 1280x1024) consider a 20" LCD that runs at 1600x1200. 2x scaling is likely to look better than ~1.5x.

    Using a TV is ill advised unless you are using DVI. Hooking it up via composite or s-video will give a very blurry picture.
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  6. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    Sorry, my NEC 15" LCD works fine at 800 X 600, though the native is 1024 X 768. No black boarders, it just resizes everything bigger.
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    I remember that black border issue being a question on one of the NT4 MCSE tests! Thats how long ago the black border was an issue on lcd's.
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    Although it is rather expensive the Dell E193FP 19" LCD is a good monitor for those with "aging eyes". Another slightly cheaper model would be the AOC LM940E. I have one of these I use in my shop. It's a good monitor and unlike the dell it can be mounted on a wall.

    Both of these monitors are analog and both have a good range of view (can be viewed from an angle without distorted imagery). They both have factory spec settings(using the OSD) from 720x400 all the way up to the 1280x1024.
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  9. Many thanks to everyone.

    She bought a Samsung 930BF after reading a few positive reviews (and despite one saying "of course, anything below 1024x768 looks BADDDDDDDD" but hey...). She's more than impressed and I'm going to destroy the wall underneath and attempt to make a channel for the cabling ASAP.
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    you can combat this by downloading the cleartype utility from microsoft..it's made to help with the nasty jaggies associated with low resolutions on LCD's.
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