> > This is assuming of course that you are comparing them next to a CRT with has a > high reflectivity phosphor mask and isn't hooded (or otherwise protected from > direct lighting). Using a CRT under ideal conditions can provide a 10x contrast > advantage over LCDs.
If not more - I think Barco claim around 10k:1 for their top-of-the-line systems. But if you just have two mid-range devices sitting on your desk - no hoods, no special lighting setup to avoid glare, just a typical office environment - the chances are that the CRT will fail to deliver almost all that contrast. For the big users, of course, it helps that once you've got one LCD screen calibrated you've got almost all of them calibrated; individual variations are much lower than on CRTs. That's not important to the home consumer, but even there the stability over time can be a significant consideration. One final point: unless your graphics card can handle more than 8-bit colour, it's pretty near irrelevant whether you go with a CRT or an LCD. In order to drive their displays the SGI graphics workstations feed 12 bits of colour into a back end that produces, effectively, a 10-bit gamma-corrected signal to control the final output brightness. Even that (around a 1000:1 ratio) is far, *far* better than most PC graphics. [Thats 8/10/12 bits per RGB component, of course, not total bits/pixel]
