Is LCD monitor good to watch movies?

[fANMIR]

Hello !

I am going to buy LCD monitor Hyundai ImageQuest L50A. Are lcd monitors good enough to watch divx/dvd movies?. I have limited space and lcd is the only one choice for me. That model works in 1024x768 75Hz and have reaction time 20ms. How does it work with pal movies? (one frame every 40ms). If you have any experiences ar other ideas I am looking forward for them...

thanks for your answers

[xnakx]

I have used a dell 17 inch flat panel and have had an ok time with divx movies. mpegs do not apear to be that awful good.

either way you can tell the diffrence between a lcd and a crt(sharpness and even scan lines in some cases)

hope this helps

xnakx

[snw]

I have 2 different flatscreens. One connected trough dvi (philips 17b something..) and one analogue(philips 151ax). Both screens plays the movies fluently and are sharper than crt monitors. That may be anoying sometimes if watching a badly encoded movie but gives more crispness if it's good quality. That can very clearly be seen on the dvi screen which really shows every block in movies... So my opinion is that many movies look better on crt, but if it's a really nice done divx or dvd source i'd prefer tft. hope it helps some.

[timeToy]

IMHO CRT monitor will always be better (smoother gradients, better color depth and better scaling), LCD can be sharper, but this does not apply for video because of the relatively low resolution (720 pixel max). Plus CRT have "natural" filtering that help masking ringing artefacts from MPEG2 or DivX.

[ima2hd]

I agree with Timetoy Personally I would not want to watch a movie through a LCD. Movies need to look like movies ( FILM ). Watching them on a LCD is very un-film like. If you don't have the room maybe someone on here has a recommendations on a LCD that might give you real movie watching capability, but I'm not familiar with any that do.

[The Belgain]

I had a cheap (was €350 18 months ago!) 15" LCD (Proview) and it was really bad for watching movies because the contrast was poor (only 250:1) which means that dark scenes look horrible because what should be black becomes a shade of grew. Look for an LCD with a contrast of at least 350:1 or 400:1 (higher is better) and u should be ok, though i still think a CRT is ideal.

I'm now going back to my (again, cheap...i'm a student) 19" CRT (the flatscreen isn't mine anyway) and I'm much happier. LCDs r very nice for everything other than watching movies though.

Hope this helps.

[Deptmaster]

It all depends on the quality of the flat pannel. Check out the 18" Sony and Gateway flat pannels both are incredibly sharp with accurate color and nice wide viewing angles. The prices are equally high though around $800 for the gatway and more for the Sony.