Things You Need to Know about LCD Screens

Things You Need to Know about LCD Screens
Liquid crystal display, or you can name it LCD, is becoming the major display in world market. It has many advantages: less energy cost, less space taken, less eye damage... you name it. But before you sit on your couch and watch your LCD screen all day, there are a couple of things you need to know first.

First, you need to understand that the resolution of LCD screens is a fixed figure, which is also called "native resolution" or "maximum resolution". It is strongly advised that you set your desktop resolution to that fixed figure, otherwise it would lead to several problems like: bent and blurred images, certain pixels lose or going into blanks, or the monitor will simply stretch or shrink down the image. Therefore, you need to know the resolution of your LCD screen and adjust it to make the best visual effect out of it. It's not always true that the higher resolution the better LCD screen. If your screen is in a resolution too high, then the images and characters on the screen will be rather small. To make sure what the best resolution is for you, just try to make the resolution that is closest to the maximum resolution meanwhile fits your eyes. Of course, it is the best that you find the maximum resolution is exactly what you want.
The second thing you should know is that screen size and resolution are not necessarily related, which means bigger screen does not always have higher resolution. A good way to predict a screen's resolution is to check its price—normally, a screen with higher resolution comes with higher price.
Third thing to know is the aspect ratio. It is the ratio of horizontal/vertical aspects. The CRT monitors or the old fashioned LCD monitors have ratio of 4:3. The new LCD screens have 16:9 or 16:10 ratios.
I will provide some important features of LCD screen to you, hope it will help:
Screen Size
One of the first we think of when purchasing a LCD screen is the screen size. For a LCD screen, the size of the tablet is approximately the size of its visual area. That is one thing common with CRT screens. For monitors in the same size, the visual area of LCD is larger than the one of CRT, generally a 15-inch LCD is equal to a 17-inch CRT. Due to different user habits or different user purposes, the best standards or choices of your own LCD screens may differ. If you want to buy a LCD screen for working, file-processing, study or office affairs, a 15-inch would be a good purchase. However, if you're more like a game player or you use it frequently to watch films or process visual data/files, you may want to buy a 17-inch screen or a even larger one.

Response Time
Nowadays, one of the biggest selling points of a LCD screen is its response time, from primarily 25ms to the present 4ms; the speed of technology improvement is really amazing. The response time of a LCD screen determines the number of picture frames shown in one second. Usually when a screen delivers more than 25 pictures in one second, our mind would see the flow of pictures as one moving motion. If you want to enjoy watching DVD or playing video games, you'll need picture frames more than 60, which means your screen's response time needs to be better than 16ms. To put it in a simpler sense, the shorter the response time, the better the visual effect.
Brightness/Contrast
Liquid crystal is a kind of material with physic properties between liquid and solid, it does not radiates light naturally, therefore the backlight of a LCD screen determines its brightness. Normally, the higher the brightness, the better color the monitor delivers. The unit we use to subscribe the brightness for LCD screen is cd/m2; the brightness of a regular LCD screen is 250cd/m2. If the brightness is too low, the color the screen delivers will be very dark, your eyes might get tired after spending a long time before it. The contrast of a LCD screen is the proportion of brightness, that is to say, in a darkroom, the brightness of a black picture divided by the brightness of a white picture of the LCD screen. Therefore, the lighter of that white picture and the darker of that black picture, the higher the contrast of a screen, which also means a clearer and more colorful image quality, a better color laying effect. Normally, a LCD screen contrast will be 300:1; some higher quality screens could reach 400:1. However, traditional CRT monitors can reach 500:1. If the contrast is lower than 250:1, we would feel blurry when looking at the screen.
For game players or image processors, a higher contrast monitor would be better choices. However, it's not always true that the higher contrast, higher brightness, the better. Your eyes would get really tired too if you staring at a higher brightness LCD screens. Plus, higher brightness means shorter usage duration for the screen.
Viewing Angle
Since the light beams are almost vertically shot out of the LCD tablet, when we look from other angles at the screen, we don't get a clear image like we do with CRT monitors; instead, we get a color distortion. That's the problem of a small range viewing angle. In details, a viewing angle can be divided as horizontal viewing angle and vertical viewing angle. When you purchase a LCD screen, you might want to buy a screen with larger viewing angle. For now, a LCD screen viewing angle is generally more than 140 degrees.