flat screen or not?

i am thinking about buying a new 17 or 19 inch monitor. at first i was thinking i would get it in a flat screen version but after toms reveiw(some sort of distoriton in the outer part of the screen) i am thinking maybe i should get a regular monitor. i don't really ahve that big of a problem with glare in my room right now. so which one would you guys get? all i use it for is school work and light games. so i would definetly be getting a shadow mask.

and beyond flat screen or normal screen, what monitors do you all have and how would you rate them? i'll start, i have a kds 17inch .28dpi. it was a good price and lasted a long time.

repeat after me, we are all individuals!

From what I have seen, the only real benefit of flat-faced monitors is some glare reduction.

In general conventional curved CRT’s tend to give sharper characters for a few reasons. They tend to have a tighter horizontal dot pitch 0.22mm, better convergence specifications and the fact that the tube is curved in two directions makes it easier to adjust focus uniformity and convergence at the factory. This is not to say every conventional monitor will provide better text, these attributes simply increase the odds of getting better text. Monitors vary model to model and lot to lot.


Jim Witkowski
Chief Hardware Engineer
Cornerstone / MOnitorsdirect.com

Jim at http://www.monitorsdirect.com

I have a Flatron 915FT+ and I can tell you there isn't any noticeable distortion at the edges of this monitor. Unfortunately the monitor my company forces me to use at work is a curved CRT. It is always a relief to get back home to my Flat monitor. Go with a good quality Flat monitor and you will not be sorry. Also don't get confused with the dot pitch numbers. The .22 horizontal Jim is talking about is roughly the same as a .25 diagonal pitch. To convert Horizontal pitch to Diagonal pitch multiply the Horizontal number by 1.1547

Last Monday I bought my first flat screen monitor for personal use. I absolutly love it and I will never go back to a regular tube monitor. Like you I didn't have a problem with reflections but with the flat screen it is noticably less.
I was previously using a Samsung SyncMaster 550s with a Toshiba FST picture tube. It was a good monitor and it was compact. I have a space issue. If I could afford a nice 17" TFT monitor I would have one.
I bought another Samsung. A SyncMaster 753DF with a shadow mask DynaFlat tube. So far I am very pleased with my choice.
Where I work we have the Trinitron aperture grille monitors and the damping wire at the 1/3 and 2/3 section of the screen really bugs me.
Personally if the tube wasn't developed by Sony the damping wires probably wouldn't bug me. But I am one of the few people on the planet that thinks Sony makes overpriced, overadvertised GARBAGE.

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