LCD monitors revisited

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

For the background on this, see an earlier post of mine in the
XySearch archive:
  http://xywrite.org/msg01158.htm

Well, the replacement Iiyama CRT suddenly stopped working. It has
more than 2 years left on its 3 year warranty, so I'm having it
repaired. A pain to have to haul it nearly an hour's drive down to
the repair depot, but they showed me some smashed monitors people had
shipped in to them, so I'm glad I did. I secured another 17" loaner
in the meantime, but I've already had it with this routine; not having
a backup onhand for certain key items is no longer acceptable. So, a
week before the holiday I ordered a 19" LCD panel, which has arrived,
and I'm using it right now. It is a Planar, a leading contender from
the earlier post. Since these are sold direct, it was purchased sight
unseen, although I did read all the available press and user reviews,
and saw an older model of theirs being used by a vendor at a local
computer show.

I got this one from Dell Home Online, during one of their brief 25%
off sales, no sales tax with free shipping, plus the application of an
additional $50. off E-coupon. The latter was not properly processed
by their online system, and I had to phone my way up 3 levels to a
Customer Service supervisor, to make it stick. (Starting CS level was
evidently some guy in India. {Watch Lou Dobbs' frequent segment on
CNN, "Exporting America", about the outsourcing of so many jobs by
American companies.} He was totally useless. 2nd. CS Level was in
their E-Commerce division, definitely an American, who told me "Sorry,
there are no tools for correcting this, after the fact."  3rd. CS
Level was a supervisor, who damn well did have a means of correcting
it, and did so graciously.) Not usually my style -- at least not with
a mere 50 bucks at stake -- but sometimes you just have to be
persistent.

The caveats I mentioned earlier still apply, and my standards re LCD
vs. CRT have not really altered. That being said, this panel looks
surprisingly good, and quite a bit better than I expected. It seems
better than nearly all the Viewsonics, Sonys, NECs, Phillips, et al
that I've seen.  More than acceptable as a backup and a portable,
even one I might be able to live with as a regular replacement, if it
came to that. It was not reported as being distinguished at
interpolating down to 1024 x 768, from its native 1280 x 1024
resolution, but I'm running that at the moment, and the text here in
Netscape for OS/2 is looking sharp and clear. The native res. in W2K
was fine also, though smaller fonts (particularly on webpages) are not
the forte of this or any other LCD panel that I know of. For photo
work or full-motion video, I still have strong doubts that *any* panel
on the market is going to measure up to a really good CRT.

One other thing: the relative brightness of the panels that have a
good brightness spec -- as this one does -- is such that it is going
to be potentially a lot more fatiguing to look at over longer work
sessions than even the Trinitron-tube CRTs.

O.K., so you are probably thinking this is going to be an O.T. post.
Not so. I run Xy4DOS fullscreen in OS/2 and in W2K. In OS/2, we
don't have the various problems noted re the W2K (pre-SP4 ?) DOS
emulation, whether as a box or fullscreen. Instead, there are other
issues. Whatever the OS/2 DOS session font is -- and I'm afraid we
may be stuck with it -- it looks decent, but certainly does not
appear to be on a par with what turns up on a reasonably good larger
CRT. There is not a lines-per-screen issue. However, the first
character at the left edge of screen is clipped. This is particularly
noticeable with, say, a capital "M" or "U". The left half of the
letter runs off, stage Left. I can adjust the screen size parameters
*elsewhere*, but have no idea if this can be adjusted in a DOS or
Win-OS/2 fullscreen session -- or how to go about doing that if there
is.

For DOS-inside-Windoze, there will likely be all of the issues that
have been discussed here, and I'll have to review past messages on
these subjects and grapple with them. So you will probably be hearing
more from me about these issues, where I don't find a satisfactory
answer in the message base.


Jordan