LCD Specs: Useless?

Buying Tips: The Eyes Have It When You're LCD Shopping

When shopping for an LCD, your best bets are to check independent reviews such as PC World's Top 100 (see our Top 10 15-inch LCDs or the 17-inch displays we tested) and trust your own eyes. Here are some buying tips:

• Size: A 15-inch LCD offers about the same amount of viewable screen as a 17-inch CRT, a 17-inch LCD as a 19-inch CRT, and so on. Ross Young, president of the LCD research firm DisplaySearch, says you should expect to pay $209 to $620 for a 15-inch LCD, $314 to $815 for a 17-incher, or $559 to $994 for a 19-inch screen.
  
  
• Resolution: LCDs operate best at their native resolution--which is typically 1024 by 768 for 15-inchers, and 1280 by 1024 for 17-inchers. The higher the resolution, the more data the screen can display at once. However, icons and text can look small if a screen's native resolution is unusually high for its size.
  
  
• Brightness: For multimedia images in a well-lit room, brighter screens are better--say, 300 to 400 cd/m2 (a measure of luminance; see "Lab Notes: What About Brightness?") compared with the 200 cd/m2 (or so) of most mainstream LCDs. But as PC World's tests also called vendor brightness ratings into question, try to test brightness by looking at a blank white page in a word processor set to fill the page.
  
  
• Viewing angle: If you aren't always looking at your monitor head-on, or if you want several people to see the display simultaneously, you'll want to check out the viewing angle. But here, again, don't trust the specs: Move horizontally and vertically to check for subtle color shifts and loss of contrast.
  
  
• Response time: This is the time it takes to turn a pixel on or off, or to change its color. If you plan to use your LCD monitor to watch movies or play games, faster times are definitely better; don't settle for a response time of more than 16 milliseconds. However, there's a trade-off: Motion flicker increases on fast-responding LCDs.
  
  
• Interface: Most mainstream LCDs have only analog inputs, but for a premium you can find some that also offer a port for digital input, which generally should produce sharper images without requiring adjustment. But using that port also requires a graphics card with a digital-out port and an appropriate cable, and DisplaySearch's Young says most people are happy with analog.