Why LCDs suck

I'm rather fed up with the difficulty of finding a decent LCD monitors. Here's the problem: with an LCD screen, you need approximately 3" of distance for every 1" of diagonal screen size in order to see everything you need to see and to not see the individual pixels of your image. This size was based on a 720P television, so 1080P screens can actually be a bit larger.

When it comes to desktop LCD monitors, you can still use the same measurement. Problem is that we tend to sit much closer to our monitors. I measured, and I sit almost exactly 2 feet from my monitor. Translated, this means that if my monitor was 720P, it should be only 8 diagonal inches in size.

My monitor is not 8 inches. It is, in fact, 19.

An 8 inch diagonal monitor, widescreen, would be approximately 7 inches wide by 4 inches tall. In this space, there are 27.35 square inches, and there are 921,600 pixels in this space, or 33,700 pixels per square inch.

Now, scale this up for a 19" monitor. A 19" widescreen monitor is approx 16.5" wide by 9.3" tall, for a total of 154.25 square inches. To see the pixels the same effective size, you would need a total of 5,198,400 pixels on your screen, or a resolution of 3040x1710

And the vast majority of 19" monitors are only 1440x900. A few are as high as 1680x1050.

Now, Dell offers LCD screens on some of their laptops that reach as high as 1920x1080 on a 15.4" diagonal screen. This tells me that the technology to reach higher is out there. But LCD manufacturers continue to offer LCD monitors with horrible resolutions as their flagship lines. To reach higher resolutions, 2560x1600 (the highest I could find on a computer monitor), you also have to choose a screen with a 24" screen size, and as we've seen from my example above, this is still too low a resolution to see graphics without pixels, unless you sit 3 feet from your screen rather than 2.

The next problem, though, is that the response times on monitors are still too high. Consider this: If you have 60 frames displayed in a single second, each frame is displayed for 16.67ms. If you have a 5ms response time, that means that 30% of the frame's life is taken up by changing pixels. That's much, much too slow for me. A 2ms response time, however, means only 12% of the time the frame is up on the screen it's going through a change, and that's a whole lot better.

Just try finding a 2560x1600, 24" screen with 2ms response time. If I could find one, I'd buy it and just deal with having to sit 3 feet away from it. Sphere: Related Content