On 3 Jan 2004 at 5:09, John Francis wrote: > If not more - I think Barco claim around 10k:1 for their top-of-the-line > systems.
Sure Barco's products are very capable as are LaCie but most top line CRT monitors that are within the average consumers $$$ will out-perform comparably priced LCD in colour and contrast critical applications such as photography. For spread sheet work or WP etc there is no way I would recommend a CRT. > 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. I've compared my old NEC monitor to quite a few good LCD screens on my desk and none came close. My lighting is set up such that I can exclude natural light from hitting the screen surface when required and all lighting is behind the monitor so that it never falls on the monitor face. If any user is running colour critical workstations without concern for ambient lighting they will never achieve good results regardless of the monitor type. Every good design/photo/pre-press environment that I've set-up or been involved with we've considered lighting as part of the system. > 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. It's a long time since I've owned a card that could not provide a true 12-bits per pixel. I've used Matrox display adaptors for years for both my clients and my own machines. Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
