Which monitor is preferred for the display of graphics for games An LCD monitor or a CRT monitor What is the reason for the preference?

Answer 1

There are a lot of very different answers--and a lot of hot debates--over the discussion of the advantages of CRT and LCD displays; for gaming a CRT display is still usually the best choice.

Advantages of Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors

a brighter and sharper image

a "truer" color reproduction

faster refresh rates (the frequency with which the picture is "redrawn" on the screen) leading to little or no "ghosting"

cheaper for just about any given resolution

established, mature technology

Advantages of Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitors

consumes less power

generates less heat

requires much less room

offers widescreen images

screen size is not so limited by technology

Perhaps a bit of background about how these different technologies work might be helpful:

The CRT monitor is built around the same technology used in (until rather recently, all) televisions. A large amount of power is concentrated in a beam that is shot from a gun and which "draws the image" on the screen much too quickly for your eye to notice. A powered screen "keeps" the charge long enough for the beam to redraw the screen. The result is the illusion that images are moving on the screen. If you were to slow time way down you would see a single beam drawing an image back and forth, from top to bottom, one line at a time.

By changing the properties of the ray, it is possible to draw in a combination of red, green and blue light to recreate every (theoretically) possible color! And because we know the limitations of human vision, we can make the CRT beam just fine enough that our eye is completely fooled. We see a full-color moving picture where there is "actually" just an exceedingly fast beam of colored light.

To produce the full-color images on your screen, however, the CRT itself must use a considerable amount of power and the entire surface of the screen must be energized as well. (have you ever noticed the "static" charge on a TV screen that has just been turned off?) This means the CRT consumes a lot of energy and generates a lot of heat--two qualities that computers are constantly trying to minimize.

Yet its clear bright picture (it is, after all, light shining through an energized field) is hard to beat using other technologies. This technology also requires a lot of space. In order for the CRT to function correctly, the gun itself must be located some distance from the screen. This is why CRT cases are so big: Much of the space inside the box is actually empty, though needed to allow the gun enough distance to do a good job of reaching every bit of the screen.

So the CRT has some "built in" limitations due to its size.

(1) the bigger the screen, the farther back the gun must be. This puts an effective limit on the size of CRT screens.

(2) the larger the screen of a CRT, the more energy it takes to run. Therefore at some point the CRT becomes prohibitively expensive (on the electric bill) to run. The screen doesn't have to get all that large to start taxing the ability of your ordinary household electrical current to support its huge power appetite.

(3) the farther away the gun is located from the charged screen, the faster that gun has to generate and beam its light.

If you recall that the picture on a CRT is created by a gun firing a small but intense beam of light at a charged screen, you'll see that in order for the beam to draw the picture over the entire surface of the screen, it has to be located farther and farther back. The farther back the gun, the more power it will take to shoot the beam of light, and the dimmer the display will be (because of the energy "lost" when the beam has to travel farther to hit the screen).

Ever wonder why there aren't any "big screen" CRT televisions? In order to manufacture a CRT with a 40" or 50" screen, you would need to generate a prohibitively large amount of electricity and the gun (that shoots the beam of light that draws the image) would have to be located so far back (from the charged screen) that the entire unit would have to be huge and very expensive to run. All the equipment needed to safely harness this much energy also will be quite heavy, making CRTs comparatively difficult to move around much.

Yet because it has been used in so many applications for so long we know a lot about the way the CRT works and have worked out solutions for most of the issues we might run across. We also have figured out how to produce these monitors in huge quantities, thereby lowering their cost.

The result? CRT monitors produce brighter and crisper images, in a near-infinite range of shades and hues of color, for less money than most other technologies--as long as they can be separate from the rest of the computer (to keep their power and heat from interfering with the other heat producing components of your computer), and as long as they stay within the small-to-medium sized screens.

In contrast to the CRT, the LCD monitor makes its pictures by electrically stimulating the individual tiny LCDs on a screen. Roughly speaking, instead of drawing a picture on a charged screen, the LCD stimulates its array of many many very tiny LCDs so that they are energized in a precise manner and thus glow a different color.

LCDs have many fewer size limits than does the CRT. They have no component that must be located a certain distance away from the back of the screen, They generate much, much less power and they are relatively easy to build, even in large configurations. This is why you can see large LCD monitors that can even be hung on a wall like a very large framed painting.

This does not mean the LCD gives us "a technology without limits". Probably the first difference you will notice between a LCD and its CRT cousin is the comparative dullness and dimness of the LCD image. Because the individual LCDs are stimulated to the "glow" stage of the electronic tiny components, the LCD display requires much less energy to run.

And while LCD makers now produce parts able to display hundreds of thousands of colors, each independent LCD ultimately is on or off--this digital nature of LCDs mean that CRTs will always be able to provide a "truer" picture, although there is some discussion about just how much the human eye can pick up and process. It may be that at some point, the LCD is able to produce an image in so many hundreds of thousands or millions of colors that it is "good enough" to be indistinguishable from the CRT's analog image to the naked eye.

Yet again this benefit of electronics reap some sizable rewards. The LCD requires relatively small amounts of energy to run, so even large screens can be run with modest power needs--and without the large capacitors and coils of the CRT screen. Also, because there is no gun shooting at the screen, the LCD doesn't require some specific depth in order to energize the entire screen. LCDs can be made exceptionally thin. Some designers have even played around with integrating LCD displays into clothing!

This is exactly why LCDs are so popular with laptop computers, and machines designed to have a "small footprint" (meaning that with everything unpacked and set up, it won't take nearly the amount of room on your desktop as a CRT monitor alone would have taken). There really is no way to put a CRT into a laptop. If you tried the best you could hope to accomplish is something like the old Compaq "luggables"--they may be able to be picked up and moved from place to place, but you will not be able to include anything but a dinky little screen and you might as well forget about batteries!

However, the LCD is a relatively new technology. Up until a handful of years ago, only "monochrome" (black-and-white) LCDs were readily available for cheap. As the cost of LCDs drops, manufacturers are able to include more of them into increasingly affordable big panel displays.

We also don't really know the lifespan of a typical full-color LCD monitor. They haven't been commercially available until much recently--we can't run entirely reliable tests on the lifetime of a LCD monitor, say twenty years, until the LCDs we are using have in fact been around for 20 years. This is itself a bit of a puzzle, in that new and better (smaller, brighter, more color intense) LCDs keep regularly appearing on the market. This means that while you might benefit in some ways by knowing the "estimated lifespan of an LCD", the only such tests we have are on old and outdated components. A test of components not widely used anymore is of limited value to users whose LCDs are composed of much newer (and perhaps longer-lasting) components.

Some of the newer technologies haven't made their way yet (and may never reach) the point that is profitable for individual monitors. Large plasma Televisions, for example, may be found in High Density screens from a number of independent television manufacturers, but always in large scale systems and for very, very large (and expensive) television sets. Yet they provide a clearer, brighter display than do large LCD screens. People who pay a lot for HDTV (high definition television) often want a better display than LCDs can provide.

So for many gamers, nothing yet beats the high-quality analog picture and overall cost savings of the CRT monitor:

--its picture is usually brighter, more vibrant and "truer." Your game's graphics will appear deeper, more lively than on an LCD.

--you can buy a great CRT monitor for much less money than an equivalent LCD, thus freeing up space in your budget for a faster video card or better surround sound speakers or MORE MEMORY!

--we now know that the lifespan of a good quality CRT unit is at least decades--so a good used machine (assuming there is nothing wrong with it) will last probably longer than most any other part of your computer set up.

--Therefore, the truly value-conscious gamer can usually find good used CRT monitors for as little as $20, now that so many computer users have converted to LCD monitors and have no use for their used CRT monitor. (Check Craigslist in your area, check out the classified ads or cruise some garage sales.)

--When gaming, often space on the desk is not such a problem since the monitor is the only focus, unlike an office desktop which might need space for papers, files, books, etc.

--Heat is not so much a concern at a fixed gaming station when you can separate the case from the monitor to help dissipate the cumulative heat.

On the other hand, for some gamers the LCD is hard to beat:

--because of the technology, a LCD monitor doesn't have to be square. The wider formats of some LCD monitors gives a broader viewpoint, especially for "first person" games in which you (the human player) see what your character would see. You are more likely to benefit from seeing more side-to-side than up-and-down.

--While CRTs are definitely cheaper than LCDs in the "normal" 15"-19" monitor size range, once you start getting larger your CRT monitor options begin getting very expensive. So if your heart (and eye) is set on that really cool 32" monitor gaming experience, you are out of CRT land and definitely into LCD territory, even if you prefer CRT technology.

--Not all gaming stations have a huge amount of available space. Especially in apartments, condominiums and older houses space might be a deciding factor. The LCD will take up much less space than a comparable CRT monitor and will generate a lot less heat in a small space.

--Sometimes people do things with their computers other than playing games (*gasp*)! Some computer applications are better with an LCD screen; especially if you are juggling stacks of paper, open books and various sticky notes the extra space you get with a LCD monitor can be extremely helpful. This is particularly the case because the extra space taken up by the CRT monitor is often "prime desktop" space--right in front of, or slightly to the side of the user.

A couple final notes:

* Most monitors are measured and sold like Television sets: The diagonal measurement of the screen. Therefore a 20" screen measures 20" from left bottom corner to the right top corner of the image. This (obviously, when you think about it) doesn't work for screens that are not square. So LCD monitors that are wider than they are long will often use a simple width measurement. Just be sure you are comparing apples to apples--there is not yet an accepted standard for measuring non-square monitors, and a 20" wide monitor might not be bigger than a 19" square monitor.

*Most high-end (gaming) video cards now support multiple monitors. A quick check is to see if there is more than one video jack on the outside of the card (the part that is exposed through the back slot in your computer). In that used CRT monitors are so inexpensive, it might be worth your while to "check out" gaming with multiple monitors.

*While it is sometimes possible to run a TV off a video card, be very careful. Even though they use the same technology, a television and a video monitor do have important differences--important enough to fry your video card, blow out the picture tube in the TV or even, if you are particularly careless, burn your house down! So before you start plugging devices into your computer be certain they are compatible.

*You can sometimes successfully address the "too much space" limitation of your CRT monitor with a flexible, movable arm. These devices typically fasten to the lip of a desk or table or into a wall stud and allow you to position your monitor so that it is most comfortable for you (and frees up even more desk space than an LCD monitor would use!).

Just be careful and read the specifications of any hardware you are using; most extension arms will specifically state the maximum amount of weight they are able to safely hold. And remember that a 50-pound monitor at the end of a 5-foot-long extension arm will put a lot of stress on whatever supports that arm.

CRT monitors are heavy, and the bigger they are, the heavier they get. Sometimes a less expensive extension arm just isn't strong enough to support your monitor. Check out your monitor's weight before you buy the arm. A bathroom scale will work just fine. The safe thing to do would be to allow some extra weight capacity for the effects of time, degradation of materials, temporary stresses, etc. To be safe, you might want to use an extension rated at 60 pounds for your 50-pound CRT monitor, for example. (If this seems excessive, just picture for a minute the scene right after your monitor crashes onto your system case, a stack of DVDs and/or parts of your body.)

*In some specific cases, it might make more sense to leave the monitor on the desktop and use the moveable arm for other things for which you might otherwise use the desktop space. That adjustable arm with an attached hard platform can be a nifty holder for open books or reference materials, or even for a keyboard and mouse pad!

*Remember that even though you can avoid heat problems for your computer system by separating the monitor from your computer, that is not the only source of dangerous heat to your system. If your gaming space is in a small enclosed area, be sure you have good ventilation so that the heat your system generates can be spread out over your whole house, rather than staying concentrated in the little room.

The best answer is to locate your gaming station in a large, well ventilated room. If this is not possible, be sure you turn your system--including your monitors--off before you leave and close the door. It is possible for the ambient (outside room) temperature to rise high enough that your computer cannot get rid of the heat it generates. There are (sometimes) safeguards in your computer system to shut down before the level of heat inside your case gets high enough to fry your processors--don't count on them. If you must, get a couple of inexpensive room fans to keep the cool air flowing around your equipment when you are gaming.

*Also don't forget that both your computer and (especially your CRT) monitor(s) will transform (expensive) electricity into (undesirable) heat even when you are not in the room. Also consider that someone is paying for the electricity that system is using whenever it is on. This is particularly an issue for CRT monitors because of the much greater amount of energy they use.

The responsible thing to do these days is to minimize your electricity use. The more electricity we use, the more expensive it is to generate so our power bills keep rising. That amazingly cool gaming station with multiple CRTs, programmable strobe lights, external RAID Type 10 array, huge amplified 6:1 surround sound system with separate channel amplifiers including a huge dedicated amp for your massive subwoofer and a separate hot sound system for listening to the "music that moves you" while you game, sucks up a lot of juice. Wherever you are on the "we must change the way we live to be responsible world citizens" debate, it should be clear to everyone that turning off your system when you are not gaming makes sense, even if you are not directly paying the electric bill.