Monitor questions

[hotcakes22]

Hello,

I was wondering if there are any disadvantages to getting a large (24") monitor. Does the image quality ever get flushed out or does it tax the system more?

Also, is there any advantage to getting an HDMI-supported monitor?

Thank you.

[Sylvander]

"any disadvantages to getting a large (24") monitor"
How close or how far away do you intend to sit near this monitor?
The bigger the screen, the farther away you could sit.
If you move in close to, it would need to be configured for very high precision/detail/screen-area, otherwise you'd see the the individual picture-cells [pixels]...[it would be pixelated].

So if you set the "screen area" to a very high value...
If there was a moving image on screen [e.g. a video]...
The CPU would need to have great capability and/or it would work very hard to try to redraw such rapidly changing and extremely detailed or precise images.

Then of course all that info for all those individual pixels would need to be stored in memory locations, and those too would be rapidly changing.
So it would be necessary to have a lot of RAM capacity.

Of course, that may be easy to do with today's processors and RAM.

That's how I see it; hope I have that right. :)

[hotcakes22]

Thx for the reply.

Do you think it would look washed out at 1024x768?

[saphalline]

Computers do not have ink in them that is further diluted on larger monitors. :p Images do not lose image quality on larger monitors, there is only the size/detail to consider as Sylvander has said.

Modern 24" monitors are very likely to be widescreen LCD models, in which case their native resolution is either 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Setting the resolution to 1024 x 768 (4:3) on a widescreen (16:9) monitor would make the image appear stretched and pixelated. The first is a problem of aspect ratio (like stretching an older movie on a widescreen HDTV) while the second is a problem with details (the pixels of the image do not perfectly align with the pixels of the display). Aspect ratio problems are not at all desireable, so it's best to keep 4:3 and 16:9 separate if possible. Pixelation is not really a problem for moving images, such as games or movies, but it is a big problem for detail work, such as pictures or text. When at all possible, stick to the native resolution of an LCD monitor!

If we're talking about a CRT monitor, that's a slightly different story in terms of pixelation. CRT's are largely immune to pixelation (the good ones, anyway) but aspect ratio problems are still going to be present. (It's a geometric problem, so...)

[hotcakes22]

Thanks for your thorough response.

Are native res and max res usually the same?

How would 1280x800 look on a 24" (max res 1920 x 1200)? Correct dimensions but low image quality?

I'm worried because running things like games at 1920 x 1200 would demand quite a good system.

[Sylvander]

My 18 inch CRT screen is set to 1024x768 and looks pretty good to me.

24/18 = 1.333

1024 x 1.333 = 1365

768 x 1.333 = 1024

So something around/approximately 1365 x 1024 would look OK.

here's some detail of my image...
The real image on screen is much clearer than the screenshot.
.