predatorgsr :
If you don't want to spend the money on an LCD, thats fine, but don't pretend that LCDs aren't better in pretty much every way that matters.
Matters to who ?
A 15 year old out to impress his friends ?
A high power exec ?
An avid gamer ?
A guy who makes a living in photoshop ?
A business dude who prepares financial reports all day ?
Why can't the answer just be that you choose the monitor which works best in your situation ? Like most things, there is no best for every situation
Displaymate makes the software which is used to test / calibrate every monitor that exists. Here's their take.
http://www.displaymate.com/crtvslcd.html
CRT wins in 11 categories. LCD wins in 5
LCD Weaknesses:
-Each panel has a fixed pixel resolution format determined at the time of manufacturer that can not be changed. All other resolutions require rescaling, which generally results in significant image degradation, particularly for fine text and graphics.
- Have a fixed resolution and aspect ratio. For panels with a resolution of 1280x1024, the screen aspect ratio is 5:4=1.25 which is noticeably smaller than the 4:3=1.33 aspect ratio for almost all other standard display modes. For some applications may require switching to a letterboxed 1280x960, which has a 4:3 aspect ratio.
- Have difficulty producing black and very dark grays. Not suitable for use in dimly lit and dark environments.
- Bright-end of the intensity scale is easily overloaded, which leads to saturation and compression. When this happens the maximum brightness occurs before reaching the peak of the gray-scale or the brightness increases slowly near the maximum. Requires careful adjustment of the Contrast control.
- Lower contrast than CRTs due to a poor black-level. Don't believe the published contrast ratios. Real world operational values are substantially lower.
- Have an irregular intensity scale and typically produce fewer than 256 discrete intensity levels. For some LCDs (read "just about every TN type" ) portions of the gray-scale may be dithered.
- The internal Gamma of the panel is very irregular. Special circuitry attempts to fix it, often with only limited success. Affects the accuracy of the gray-scale and color mixtures.
- Pleasing images but not accurate because of problems with black-level, gray-scale and Gamma. Reduced color saturation at low intensity levels due to a poor black-level. Generally not suitable for professional image color balancing.
- Limited viewing angle. Brightness, contrast, gamma and color mixtures vary with the viewing angle. Can lead to contrast and color reversal at large angles. Need to be viewed as close to straight ahead as possible.
- Slower response times and scan rate conversion result in severe motion artifacts and image degradation for moving or rapidly changing images.
- Considerably more expensive than comparable CRTs.
CRT Weaknesses:
- The CRT beam produces images with softer edges that are not as sharp as an LCD at its native resolution. Imperfect focus and color registration also reduce sharpness. Generally sharper than LCDs at other than native resolutions.
- Subject to geometric distortion. Most CRTs have user controls that can reduce or eliminate the distortion. The more controls available the less distortion you're likely to see.
-Relatively bright but not as bright as LCDs. Not suitable for very brightly lit environments.
- Give off electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields. There is considerable controversy as to whether any of these pose a health hazard, particularly magnetic fields. The most authoritative scientific studies conclude that they are not harmful but some people remain unconvinced.
-Large, heavy and bulky. Consume a lot of electricity and produce a lot of heat.
Personally, I use a laptop for everyday convenience but we have 3 desktop LCD's, 3 laptops w/ LCD'sand 2 CRT's. The LCD's are great for draft and every day prep working, but if there's any colors involved such as in a report, all final graphical editing is done on a CRT as it far more closely matches printed output than the LCD's do. The LCD I'm using was $1,000, one CRT (Eizo) was $1,100 and one CRT (Eizo) was just under $2,000. I'm not about to go out and buy a $5,000 Eizo LCD to replace it so I can come close to the color reproduction on the CRT.
If I spend 80 hours preparing a report or a set of CAD plans for a building, I'm quite happy to use the LCD for the first 78 hours.....but my final editing, formatting and "color work" gets done on the CRT. For example I was doing a site plan for a 9,000 sq.ft house on the ocean in "The Hamptons" last week. I wanted to show "water" in two different shades to distinguish ponds from pools. Working on my LCD I went for a blue and a more coral like blue. The latter came out more green than blue when printed. The other part of it is that depending on where the body of water was on the screen, they all looked different shades as on LCD's color changes with viewing angle.
I do find one non tangible aspect of LCD's tho that doesn't appear in any list.....their smaller bezels do give a better feeling of "immersion" as I will generally sit closer and the edges are almost outside the field of vision. Then again, maybe if I painted the CRT cases black, it wouldn't be as noticeable.
The footprint bit I don't really understand. Unless you are using a wall mounted monitor both actually take up the same amount of "usable" desk space. I don't get any use out of the empty space behind my LCD's and width's are comparable. All of our puters are on desk "returns" (the skinnier part of an L shaped desk) and they are only 18" deep.