Quote:
Originally Posted by xnomad
Thanks for all the replies guys. Now that I've started looking I'm spoiled for choice.
My CRT resolution is 1280x1024 and I run pretty much everything on COD on high with no dramas.
Now I'm worried about having a too high native res when stepping up to wide screen.
So you guys say that the IPS panels are the go? What about LG then? I found cheap LED backlit IPS panels with faster response times than the Dells.
http://www.lg.com/au/common/compare/...%3Fvalue%3DALL
I also remember losing quite a bit of the cockpit when borrowing the widescreen from work. You had to look down to see the lower half of the instrument panel. 
Here's my CRT:
http://imgur.com/953y0
Here's the borrowed from work flatscreen:
http://imgur.com/RkOwW |
Higher resolutions are always better to have, but since LCD monitors are generally bad at displaying lower than native resolutions you end up having an entire upgrade path forced on you whenever a couple of new games you want to play that can push your hardware come out: to run this resolution i need a better GPU, to run the GPU i need a new power supply, etc etc.
Definitely don't limit yourself in terms of resolution but take this into account. It was a heavy factor for me when i switched to LCD a couple of years ago, i knew i wouldn't be upgrading for at least 3 years so running 1680x1050 was an advantage in that regard (it's a 22" anyway so dot pitch is not affected that much, for bigger monitors it makes sense to go for 1900x1200 or something like that).
As for panel selection, the e-IPS panels used in the cheaper Dell IPS monitors were being made by LG, so there's a high probability it's the exact same monitor with a different brand and bezels/controls.
Right now the only drawbacks of ISP panels are the way they show black (takes a bit of time getting used to) and the lower refresh rates (i think they only just begun doing 120Mhz models and if they are even available they will probably be expensive). I don't mind because any kind of panel has its set of drawbacks. In the case of IPS the viewing angles and colour fidelity are so much better that i can live with a bit of a brighter black.
As for refresh rates, the LCDs don't flicker like CRTs do, so unless you plan on going for stereoscopy/3D or something like that there's no other reason at all to go for a 120Hz TN panel that has inferior colour quality, colour banding (due to the panel crystal alignment and viewing angle limitations, on many TN monitors the top and bottom of the monitor are usually on the margin, the top part gets washed out and the bottom part gets darker when viewed from a normal, straight-on position) and viewing angles.
And since many TN panels claim 170 degrees of viewing angle, we come to the final point: don't trust the quoted specs that much because the way they are defined is a bit too lenient.
For a viewing angle to be considered visible, specs define that 10% of the total brightness/contrast should be visible. In other words, a monitor claiming 170 degrees might only have a usable of 140, moving your viewpoint the rest 30 degrees results in losing 90% of your contrast/brightness (don't remember which one it was) but specs allow it to be quoted as visible.
Response times are tricky as well. LCD crystals function like little shutters, the backlight illuminates the back of the panel and depending on the crystal's rotation the amount of backlight making it to the front of the screen is adjusted. The amount of time between transitions of the crystals is roughly what response time measures.
The thing is, it takes less time for an LCD crystal to transit from "fully shut" (no light passing through, black pixel) to "fully open" than it takes for it to transition between two partially "open" positions.
When you see a 2ms response time in the specs it's usually for the "faster" black to white transition. However, our monitors don't run on full dark/full vivid mode all the time, in fact most of the time they display colours and shades that vary among in-between values. It's easy then to realize that what really matters is the "slower" gray to gray (or g2g for short) response time. For that, anything lower than 8ms is good, anything lower than 5ms is very good.
Finally, there is also a way to correct the tone of the black on an IPS monitor but it needs an extra polarizer. These monitors tend to be professional models and thus more expensive. I'm not really sure but it might also increase input lag a bit (the amount of time between when something happens in the game and when the monitor is able to display it), making them geared more towards professional applications and less towards gaming.
Long story short, things are complicated but the rough list of requirements i would suggest are:
1) IPS panel unless you want to do 3D.
2) Resolution that matches your GPU/power supply upgrade capabilities.
3) Low input lag
4) Fast g2g response times
Hope it helps.
P.S. As for the loss of available field of view in the game, this depends on how the game implements wide screen resolution. Older titles without proper widescreen support "chop up" some of the vertical range to adjust to the monitor while titles with real widescren support will increase the horizontal range. In one of the recent patches true widescreen support was added to CoD, so i guess you won't have any problems.