Dream Screens

The Future Is Flat

LCDs have found niches in environments like hospitals and as part of store kiosks. Their high prices have kept them from being widely adopted elsewhere. But analysts predict that, within the next decade, the LCD monitor will supplant the CRT as the top choice for both professional and personal use. LCDs are lighter, more space- and energy-efficient, and--even more important--better for your eyes than CRT monitors.

However, don't expect CRTs to disappear anytime soon. LCDs represented just 3 percent of the total monitor market in 1999, according to industry research group Stanford Resources. The initial costs necessary to manufacture these monitors are enormous--"a billion dollars" per product line, according to Sam Miller, ViewSonic's director of advanced display technology. Those costs have been passed on to customers as sky-high prices, limiting sales. Another factor: the lack of a standard digital interface. That issue was resolved with the adoption in fall 1999 of the Digital Display Working Group's Digital Video Interface, or DVI.

Thanks partly to standards like DVI, the LCD scene is changing: More flat panels are appearing on the market, and the average price of a 15-inch LCD monitor these days has dipped to under $1000.

It's been more than a year since our last LCD roundup, so we decided to take a new look at the LCD monitor market. The LCDs we saw made a good impression: Almost all of them did exceptionally well at presenting crisp, legible text. Some were less effective with color graphics, however, struggling to render realistic skin tones, or displaying either faded and washed out or oversaturated colors.

The average street price of all the monitors we tested was $1042, ranging from $899 to $1299. By comparison, the average street price of a 17-inch CRT--which has a viewing area equivalent to that of a 15-inch LCD--hovers around $300 for a unit with acceptable image quality. So it's no wonder that cost-conscious shoppers have shied away from LCDs.

We collected a sample of 15 monitors for this review and evaluated how well they displayed routine business items such as text in word processing documents, a newsletter, and spreadsheets, as well as application windows, color and black-and-white photos, and Web pages. To distinguish image quality further, we tested the monitors' ability to display a plain white screen, text of varying sizes, gray-scale images, and a background image of very closely spaced, vertical black-and-white bars. Then we combined the results of these performance tests with rankings based on price and features to come up with our overall rating.

We awarded our Best Buy to the Eizo Nanao FlexScan L330. The FlexScan L330 combines the best overall image quality we saw with an appealing $949 price tag. Honorable mention goes to the Philips Brilliance 150P, which offers a solid all-around package for the same low $949 street price, and to the CTX International PV510, which offers impressive text and graphics performance as well as the lowest price on our chart ($899), but is held back by its thin support and skinny feature set.