Best Lcd Monitors For Gaming
First of all it needs to be said that LCD monitors aren’t made for gaming. Good old CRT monitors have much better reaction times than most of the LCD monitors available today. This may be because of the huge difference between the digital and analog technologies. While analog devices don’t process anything, they forward and modify signals very fast, digital devices have to encode and decode signals, they both take time.
In our case, the LCDs slowest part is not the chip itself, but the liquid crystals that have to move into place to obtain the right color and shade for each subpixel.
This will soon change in all flat panel monitors and TV’s, because the LCD parts of the structure will be replaced by highly efficient LEDs (light emitting diode) that don’t need backlighting or liquid crystals to cover the light source. OLED (organic light emitting diodes) simply have to be placed between two protective sheets and the right amount of electricity has to be supplied in the right time. These new panels are able to function partially, meaning that the inactive part (black) of the screen is completely unpowered, so no light is emitted. For extreme energy saving you may switch your programs to run on a black background. This way very few pixels have to be powered, compared to the traditional LCD where all pixels are lit all the time and the liquid crystal filter has to be powered for an color other than perfect white.
OLED display panels have a sub-1ms reaction time, very close to plasmas, so they are ideal for gaming, but because their colors are of very good quality they can be used almost anywhere instead of CRTs, LCDs, plasmas or projectors.
Alienware (owned by Dell) makes some of the best gaming LCDs based on mature liquid crystal and TFT technologies. One of the most impressive accomplishment of this firm is a very wide screen, bent to further improve gaming experience.
This one has LED backlighting and a 2880 x 900 resolution. It’s a much better idea than ATI’s Eyefinity, because this way there’s no annoying frame between the monitors that form the huge desktop area.
Don’t get me wrong, Eyefinity has its uses, but until monitors will be available with frameless design (the image will stretch from one side to another with the last columns of pixels almost in the air).
Alienware has two simple monitors too, although their response time is 2ms instead of 1ms, twice the reaction time of an OLED monitor or plasma. Still these are the best LCD monitors the computer industry has to offer for gaming. They also support 3D because of their high framerate. Unfortunately this 3D still requires glasses, sold separately by nVidia for a couple of hundred bucks.
Both models come in FullHD resolution and all kinds of input ports to connect to practically any kind of computer or console.
Prices aren’t scary at all, the 23” model (in reality only 22”) costs $400, while the 21.5” model can be yours for only $300. Although I don’t recommend using these monitors with 3D until these technologies are more extensively tested, 120hz refresh rate also means that non-3D images appear more solid. More frames always mean less strain on the human eye.
Written by Karpat Zoltan, date Aug 31, 2010 in LCD Monitos
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