As for the “practically invisible” number: cite? I’m not even a hardcore gamer and the fixed resolution problem alone has deterred me from switching over. Surely I’m not alone.
Regarding your second assertion, the magazine “PC Gamer” begs to differ.
No, but you’re practically alone. Ask any major computer retailer how many CRTs they sell a month for every LCD. I’m guessing it’s not even close.
Come on, do I really have to dig up the numbers that show console games outselling PC games almost 20:1?
Which means nothing, since nobody needs to go to a major computer retail to get a CRT. They already have a CRT. Duh!
Given that your assertion that “gamer” no longer applies to PC users, I’d say that the “1” in that 20:1 of yours proves my point. The term applies to both PC and console users, both of whom still buy and play games - sometimes on their newly-bought LCD TVs and monitors, and sometimes on their not newly-bought CRT TVs and monitors. All the groups still exist. (Even CRT console gamers, I’d bet!)
Are consoles really that dominant in terms of sales? That’s unfortunate - console gaming is inferior to PC gaming in just about every way. So if developers abandon PC gaming, gaming as a whole will suffer. On the other hand, as consoles become more PC-like, it’s probably easier to develop for both.
I’m in the market for a new monitor - my old CRT is dimming from age and I managed to crack the glass next week. I’m finding myself annoyed that LCDs seem to have almost completely replaced CRTs. I see them as competing technologies that both have advantages and disadvantages, and if LCDs drive CRTs out of the market it hurts consumer choice.
I used a friend’s LCD for a few days and had mixed feelings. The native resolution issue was annoying - I tend to use a lower resolution than most people do because I prefer bigger text for easy readability at the cost of more screen space - but LCDs aren’t very flexible in this regard (although there was some DPI setting in my video card drivers that made everything bigger - does anyone know how that works, exactly?).
But even though I was using a 2 ms response time monitor, you could tell something was up with the motion. It felt like I was getting 25-30 FPS even if I was getting 150 because it all blurred together.
I’m not sure which way I’m going to go, but it’s irritating that the choice is gradually dying off.
I see, it’s going to be one of those conversations. Well then I’m done, because I don’t feel there’s any point in discussing anything with people who think “PC gaming” and “console gaming” are somehow different forms of video games and that one is inherently better than the other.
My eyes! The toggles do nothing!
The IT department is clearing out all the CRTs at my office as we speak(or as I type, whatever). They just now switched out my 20" CRT to a 17" liquid crap display. This thing is going to drive me both blind and mad by days end. I feel like this is all some cruel experiment, as someone is getting their kicks watching me squint and squirm. My eyes can’t naturally, easily focus on word; I really have to strain them to be able to read on this damned thing. Then when I do get up and walk away from the monitor I feel like I have had a good 200 flashbulbs cameras photographing me starting at the sun for an hour or week or two.
I’ve been messing with the monitor’s controls for about the past half hour and nothing I do seems to be even part way right. I can’t have my desktop resolution at anything other than 1280x1024 without it looking like complete shite.
So LCD folks, any recommendations on finding the proper settings, do you get use to it, or are me and Stewie’s old pal Squiggly Line about to be come quite familliar with each other?
Please pardon any errors in my post, as I can’t-fucking-see!
Is brightness the problem? Have you tried dimming it?
Here at work I’ve reduced my LCDs’ brightness to 0 and the contrast to 50 (from 127/255), which reduces the eyestrain considerably.
There are a lot of people in the U.S. and around the world that have to deal with something called a budget. They can afford a CRT. They cannot afford an LCD.
As long as an LCD costs three times what a CRT costs, CRTs won’t go away. Quality and features are irrelevant.
You’re right, my hijack didn’t add anything to the thread - sorry. I was surprised to see that number - I wonder how much the ease of PC game pirating vs console pirating affects sales numbers. To be fair, though, you did call PC gaming dying and that “gamer” didn’t even mean PC gamers anymore - and then got indignant about how anyone could think the two types of gaming were different.
What are people referring to when they talk about an LCD monitor’s native resolution?
I have a laptop and an LCD monitor for my desktop, and neither has exhibited any problems when I have tried to change resolutions on them. Both are able to show resolutions from 640480 on up to 1280whatever. (The “whatever” differs for the two monitors.) All resolutions are perfectly comfortable to work with in both monitors.
Do I have extra specially neato monitors or something?
-FrL-
That’s incorrect. An LCD monitor today goes for roughly what a CRT went for a few years ago. Give or take a few dollars.
I guess I was a little unclear. I meant, to the majority of the population if you say gamer, they will think of the consoles first.
And I really doubt piracy has much of anything to do with the differences in sales and everything to do with the huge number of games that come out for consoles that don’t come out on PCs and the ease of use of playing games on a console as opposed to playing on a PC.
I also never said PC gaming was dying and I’m unsure where you even got that.
Turning the brightness down helps a bit, but I noticed the contrast has to be down just as much or else the letters get about a pixel wide white outline that really sucks. A lot of the problem has to do with the size of the letters, they are almost too fine; ittalics are a real bugger. Oh, and why the hell does the text size option in the view tab(ctrl+scroll) of IE(my only option) seem to work for maybe a few words on a page? If you change the text size it should change all the text, otherwise what’s the point?
Did you try the following:
Right click on the desktop
Click on “properties”
click on the “appearance” tab
click on “effects”
try out different selections under the text “use the following method to smooth fonts” (or wording to that effect)
-FrL-
You must have; most LCD montors (as in, all of them that I know of) have a fixed number of pixels across; when you try to show a screen resolution that does not divide that number evenly, you get artifacts. That is, the image’s ‘native’ pixels will be spread across the LCD’s pixels in an uneven manner.
The best way to see this is to get an image where every alternating pixel is black or white, as in:
X_X_X_X_X_X_
X_X_X_X_X_X
X_X_X_X_X_X
_X_X_X_X_X_X
and try to look at it at various resolutions. On some resolutions it will look something like this:
X_XX_X_X__X_X_
X_XX_X_X__X_X_
X__X_X_XX_X_X
X_XX_X_X__X_X
X_XX_X_X__X_X_
_X__X_X_XX_X_X
This is not a good thing. It’s less visible the higher a native resolution your monitor has, but it still can be annoying and troublesome.
Ooh, dang that does help; especially here on the SDMB, which really, isn’t that what truely matters? Thanks Frylock! I guess that’s why you’re on top, rockin’ like a clock, eh?
:dubious: If they’re not going to buy *either *monitor, they’re not going to be a demographic that’s marketed to. Once nobody’s buying CRTs because everybody already has one, they’re going to stop being mass produced, and their cost is going to go up, and even less people are going to buy them.
LCDs are pretty cheap these days. I just purchased a great 24 inch 1920 by 1200 LCD monitor for $450. About 7 years earlier a 19 inch CRT monitor was around $600.
I’m fairly confident that most of the current purchaces of flatpanel monitors are by persons who already had an CRT, and are “upgrading”. These are the demographic that most definitely are not out buying CRTs, since they only reason they’re buying at all is that they percieve an advantage to LCDs and want to take advantage of that. Presumably this demographic will eventually disappear, though, and some percentage of the disparity between CRT and LCD sales will disappear with them.
This is not to say that LCDs are not eating into CRT sales; they assuredly are. I just don’t think that the current rates so sales is an accurate reflection of the preference of users, due to the temporary market of people switching over which provides a boost to LCD sales that has no comparable boost to CRT sales, since CRT-preferring users need only upgrade when their existing monitors break or wear out (or are outclassed by a larger-sized CRT).
Do those people live somewhere where they get free electricity? The total cost of ownership of an LCD is already below a CRT after a year or two.
Assuming 14 cent a KWH power (pretty high), the monitor on 10 hours a day and 65 Watt power savings. You save $33 a year. I think it will take a lot longer than a year or two to pay this back.
The 65 Watts comes from here.