Datasheet

Book VIII
Chapter 1
Finding and
Installing the
Hardware You Need
777
Upgrading the Basic Stuff
✦ If you play games or work with fast-moving images, make sure that
you can put up with a specific LCD’s response time before you buy it.
LCDs are notorious for not keeping pace with some games, turning crisp
images of, oh, smashing taxi cabs into mushy blobs of smashing taxi
cabs. Come to think of it, maybe there isn’t all that much difference.
An LCD’s response time is the amount of time it takes for a pixel to
change from black to white and back to black, although some manufac-
turers measure the (much faster) time necessary to change colors. If
you spend your working day, uh, working, a 10 or even 12 millisecond
(ms) response time suffices. If you watch video or play games, look for
5 ms or better. Some people say that they can see a difference with 2 ms
response times. If you think you might want 2 ms, make sure that you
compare fast and (relatively) slow monitors side-by-side and see
whether it’s worth the difference in price.
✦ The manufacturing process occasionally produces screens with dead
pixels. A dead pixel shows up as a black spot (or some other nonmatch-
ing color) in the image. Most manufacturers consider an LCD display
functional if it has no more than three dead pixels, but a single dead
pixel may drive you crazy, especially if it sits near the middle of the
screen. If you look at a screen and immediately notice its dead pixel or
pixels, pass it by or return it.
Go to gdargaud.net/Hack/DeadPixels.html for a useful dead-pixel
detector.
✦ An LCD can be difficult to read from certain angles, particularly far
from the screen’s centerline. This situation can be a problem if several
people at a time have to watch the computer screen.
For more information on what to look for in a monitor, read on.
Eliminating the video card middleman
CRT monitors live in an analog world: They’re controlled by signals that vary
in strength, much as a television attached to a Nintendo gets driven by three
cables controlling the red, green, and blue colors.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, are all digital, all the time. Internally,
they control each dot on the screen with 1s and 0s, on and off, just like
your computer.
The video card was invented specifically because the bits inside your com-
puter needed to drive an analog monitor. The video card translated 1s and
0s inside the computer into varying-intensity red, green, and blue dots on
the screen. In short, video cards served as digital-to-analog converters, feed-
ing signals to CRT monitors.