17" Widescreen TFT advantages/drawbacks

[Pianorak]

Does anybody have personal experience of the Apple 17" Widescreen TFT monitor (shipped with the 1GHz IMAC SUPERDRIVE)?
What are the advantages (over a 19" CRT for instance) and drawbacks (TFT response times?).
Would a Widescreen monitor be a better choice for the MS Flight Simulator 2002?
Any advice would be much appreciated.

[ErnieK]

pianorak
Do not know the answer but thought I would let you know you are not being ignored

Whilst waiting for an answer do the following.
1 - book summer holiday.
2 - Go on holiday
3- Go in the huff because nobody is talking to you ;)

[Budfred]

Truth be told, you may be waiting a long time. Not many of us around here know much about Macs or Mac equipment....

[Pianorak]

ErnieK Hmm, since I positively dislike holidays, option three applies. ;)

Budfred Yeah, right, myself included. Have never owned or worked on a Mac. I have almost decided to go for a 19" CRT. Fear of the unknown? :cool:


Edit: Sorry, signature isn't supposed to be a link. Back to the drawing board.

[mjc]

All I know about it is that one of the guys at my ISP has one, and it looks sweeeeeeeeeeeet, I drool every time I see it, but that is just quick glimpses once or twice a month. More details than that I can't give....he just won't let me actually play with it.

[Pianorak]

mjc - tantalizing, tantalizing . . . :cool:

[Budfred]

I've been reading some really good reviews on 19" PC based LCD screens too. You might want to check some of those out. I read the reviews in the paper copy of www.pcworld.com and they have most (if not all) reviews on the website. They were in the last few editions.

[Pianorak]

Budfred Thanks for the link. Reading up on LCD monitors was instructive while at the same time confirming my suspicion that G B Shaw was right. America and Britain are devided by a common language.
Having drawn a blank response from another elite member of the PC community (no name mentioned; don't want to embarrass her) when mentioning TFT (Thin Film Technology) I am now fairly sure that American usage lumps LCD and TFT together, whilst Brits clearly distinguish between the two; TFT being cutting-edge and LCD being, well, to put it mildly, obsolete. I find it difficult to believe that PC manufacturers still push LCD screens except for the cheapest of laptops.
However, no doubt I will be proved wrong on this issue. :o

[deddard]

Yep - TFT is used to differentiate between the two main types of LCD screens.
TFT (Thin Film Transistor) responds much more quickly than the older Passive Matrix displays.
Passive displays were widely used as a cheaper alternative on laptops, such as compaq (I've got one sitting about a metre from me) and they are crap. The response times of the screen is quite literally nauseating - you don't want to look at these things!

Most, if not all new screens are TFT, some with a higher response time than others. I've not used the apple stuff, but have seen them, and they look really good.
The response times vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and also get faster as price increases. It's worth noting that some of the fast ones have a response time of 25ms - which, when you consider that this is considered fast, makes you realise why they are not so good for games. It doesn't matter what your graphics card or processor can handle, as the guaranteed response time will effectively give you only 40 frames per second (ok - it is likely to be higher than this, but can only be guaranteed at this rate) this is likely to improve in the future.

[Pianorak]

deddard Thanks for your response - and picking up my technology/transistor clanger. :o
Seeing that I want it mainly to accommodate my Flight Simulator I think I'll be better off with a conventional CRT monitor.