Hello everyone,

Sorry I haven't been around in a while, I've been in a major transition of moving further north from my school so i'm limited in my resources^^;

Anyway, I thought i'd ask this forum this since i'm a bit muddled in my decision of which to get =/

Now, i'm a CG (computer graphic) artist and a Graphic Designer and I have been thinking of upgrading my monitor to an LCD. About two weeks ago, I've been looking at LCD screen like some from HP and the Apple 30" HD display and i've googled several hi-res images and, to my eyes anyway, I really liked the colors displayed.

I've been thinking about getting a large 22+ LCD monitor or recently i've been looking at LCD HD TV's. One I liked was a Samsung 32" HD 4000:1 contrast and 1366 x 768 resolution. I brought my laptop today in a Circuit City to see how it would work just for a test and two of them got a "Not Supported" message when trying to detect the PC signal.

Ok i'm gettin' longwinded here^^; My question is, should one that cares about quality and color and screen size/resolution invest in an LCD HD TV so it doubles as a TV as well (assuming it has VGA input) or search for a large LCD monitor?

My only main concern is when I get my new computer, i'll have a 512MB GDDR3 NVIDIA card so it will UP the resolution dramtically. 32" LCD TV's have a 1366 x 768 resolution and some of the guys there said it can't be changed as this is the resolution max for any source.

I recall though that my friend has a 256MB DDR3 card in her 15" laptop. Normally the resolution on a 15 inch notebook would be 1024 x 768. She was ale to have 1280 x 1024 (something high like that) because of the video card. Will I be able to increase the native resolution of the LCD TV if i had a powerful enough video card to do it?

Hope anyone followed along^^;

If your going to use it for a computer, widescreen LCD monitor all the way. Using the VGA input on our LCD HDTV just isn't as good as an actual monitor. Dell has a really nice 20" widescreen LCD coming out soon thats around $299.


Alex

You won't ever want to change the resolution of an LCD panel anyway. The only way to get the maximum quality is to run it in its native reso, anything else will mean scaling the image which will reduce quality and may introduce artifacts or blurriness etc. As you are a graphic artist, I think this would be bad news.

Using an HDTV as your monitor can be tricky. There are certain issues you should be aware of. HDTVs don't always run at the same reso that a PC would, overscanning etc. I think this article might be worth a read.

Thank you both for the comments. By the way adb22791, after I submitted this topic, I clicked on something in Google while searching for large screen monitors and I saw Dell on the top. I looked at their site and they have a wide 30" LCD monitor! :O

What I loved even more was the desktop was shown on their monitor images (taskbar and all) so I got a real sense of how big a resolution i'm looking at here @_@ 2560 x 1600!! That is insane size and I would totally use that since the price is about the range I was looking at for an LCD TV.

Chroder, I fully read the article and it does sound very tricky indeed. I didn't even know that it would be possible to "break" the TV when attempting this the wrong way. Maybe i'll just get an LCD TV just to use as a TV/DVD/console gaming. But that Dell 30" panel is looking very attractive to my eyes right about now^^

Home & Home Office: Monitors & Accessories

Well thank you both for your input as it helped greatly for my decision. A monitor I would want more though at the moment...I can wait for the TV. Maybe it would be a nice christmas present. I really want to start doing more CG and soon^^;

I guess I just wanted to have a two-in-one unit while providing HD resolution. I could always make sure that my Video card is capable of HD and have a HDTV Tuner and use that for my Dell monitor couldn't I? I think I could do that as I want to hang that up on the wall so I get a home theater-like feel.

Again thanks for the comments^^