What to know before buying monitor?

Over the years monitors have transformed from those bulky CRT monitors to square LCD screens to stylish flat wide screen LCD's and now to new stylish extremely thin LED screens. On average every PC user spends at least 5 hours a day looking at the monitor. If the picture is fuzzy and not clear enough then there is a very high possibility that the eyes get damaged.

An older CRT monitor

A wide LCD monitor


A newer ultra flat widescreen LED monitor



Monitor Sizes
There are many different sizes of CRT, square LCD, wide LCD and wide LED monitors available on the market at the moment.

If you want an older CRT screen then sizes can range between 14" to about 20", they use the 4:3 aspect ratio.
If you want an older LCD screen then sizes can range from 15" to 19", they also use the 4:3 aspect ratio.
If you want a newer wide screen LCD then sizes can range from 18.5" to about 27" and even larger. They use the 16:9 if they are full HD or 19:10 if they are not ratio.
If you want a newer wide screen LED then sizes can range from 18.5" to about 27" and even larger. They also use the 16:9 if they are full HD or 19:10 if they are not ratio.

Image quality
The sharpness of the image in a monitor greatly depends on your Graphics card as well as whatever resolution you are running at. Nevertheless the quality of the monitor plays an important role.

Here are some of the tips that you should know before buying a monitor.

1. There are three types of monitors namely CRT, LCD and LED. The monitor that looks like a TV is a CRT monitor. In CRT monitors there is a Cathode Ray Tube that shoots electrons into the screen to create the image. An LCD monitor is smaller in width and consumes less power and is healthier if you are going to be spending large amounts of time at your PC. The LED screen looks the same as an LED monitor and the difference between it and the LCD is that it has a much higher contrast ratio resulting in darker blacks and much lighter whites.

3. A CRT monitor is much heavier than LCD monitor as you can imagine by it's bulky appearance. A LCD monitor is very lightweight and so is a LED monitor.

4. The distance between two adjacent pixels in a monitor is called 'dot pitch'. This is measured in millimeters (mm). Smaller the dot pitch the clearer the picture quality. Usually there are monitors with dot pitch varying between 0.20 mm to 0.27mm. Some manufacturers use diagonal dot pitch while most of them use horizontal dotpitch. The diagonal dot pitch is always longer than the horizontal dot pitch

5. Resolution of a monitor has to be considered with care. Most of the CRT monitors have resolutions of 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280x1024. The square LCD monitors have 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 resolutions. Newer wide screen LCD monitors have resolutions of 1600x1900, 1680x1050 and the Full HD 1920x1090. When the resolution is higher the images and text will appear smaller. But you can see more text and bigger pictures in the monitor with high resolution.

6. Another thing to note is the 'Refresh rate'. This rate is usually 60Hz, 73Hz, 75Hz, 85Hz. Refresh rate of 85Hz means the picture on the monitor is refreshed 85 times within a second.

7. The brightness and contrast can range between a low 5 000:1 to a high 80 000:1 in a LCD monitor and an average of 5 000 000:1 in a LED, yes that's 5 million to 1 with a LED. This just shows how much better a LED monitor is to a LCD.

8. If you are a gamer then the thing you have to look at with LCD monitors and LED monitors is the response time. If it is 16ms then this is a very bad monitor for gaming and you will experience a ghosting effect in most games and if it is 5ms then you will have an average gaming experience. What you want to get is a 2ms response time monitor, with it you will have the best gaming experience with no ghosting what-so-ever.