hello! im wondering what the webdesigners and dtp out there say. does it have to be a common tubed CRT monitor to work?

or do you think flat panels are as good as the heavy ones? whats about the colors and the smoothness?

I use a CRT (Viewsonic) for my design work, and any work involving colour. I find the colour can't be beat on a decent CRT (mine was near $600 when new)

I do use my laptop's LCD to "test" designs, however. A CRT has a tendency to 'smooth out' minor jaggies, which become noticeable on a super-crisp LCD.

I designed a website on a laptop once... never again. Once I saw it through a CRT I realized that it's not a good idea. Colors just don't work out to well when you're picking them off an LCD.

But do colors work well on LCD when picked off a CRT? I haven't used a CRT in a long time, so I don't know the answer, though I suspect the problem runs both ways. The important thing is color consistency - perfect color matching. Then, no matter how a site is displayed, it will be displayed seamlessly. Pick by the numbers, not by what looks right on your screen! :)

I've done some design work on a laptop - I was rather pleased with the results actually.

If you work with PCs all day you really ought not to be using CRT's these days, more radiation and can give you headaches. TFT's are cheap enough these days.

Hmm, I haven't seen any major issues involving color. Maybe light/dark tones but nothing major although I've been using mainly LCD's for 2 years now along with my notebook and powerbook so, unless you're designing for print, it doesn't matter so much really in my opinion.

Originally posted by Rich2k
If you work with PCs all day you really ought not to be using CRT's these days, more radiation and can give you headaches.

No argument on radiation, but my problem with LCD is I get headaches from the lower refresh rates. My highest rate is only 70KHz but only 60 at my preferred resolution and color depth, whereas back when I used to use CRT, I was over 90KHz. I wish I had the desk space to whip out the old 20" Trinitron for when I use Photoshop.

Originally posted by BigBison
No argument on radiation, but my problem with LCD is I get headaches from the lower refresh rates.

LCDs do not have "refresh rates", so to speak. The refresh rate on a traditional CRT is how many times a second the CRT's color guns redraw the pixels on the screen (hence the flicker many people see when the monitor is set to a lower refresh rate... you're seeing the screen's pixels refresh themselves.) LCDs do not refresh pixels in the same way CRTs do; hence, "refresh rate" is pretty much meaningless in LCD-land.

What your problem might be is simply an incorrect resolution. LCDs, when run at an incorrect resolution, have blurry text and graphic defects. Make sure your LCD is on its correct resolution. Also, if your LCD supports digital video (DVI), switch to that instead of analog -- it will provide much better picture quality.

To the original poster: As long as you use a high-quality DVI LCD, LCDs are fine for graphics. My only problem with designing on an LCD (I use an SGI 1600SW) is that color nuances often pop up more on my LCD; some color combinations I use with subtle color variations appear fine on my LCD but show up as a single color on the CRTs I work on. I actually feel that my LCD has better picture quality than most CRTs I have worked with. Get a quality LCD and you will be fine.