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Originally Posted by David198502
interesting about TN monitors....as i have no clue about it, it was something new you mentioned.
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TN based monitors were a good choice many years ago for gamers when most lcd's were still pretty expensive. and initially many of the the mid-range better quality panels (MVA and PVA, both 8 bit color) where not quite fast enough for fast moving games like FPS. but within a few yrs these 8 bit monitors also improved in speed and came down to around 8 - 12 msec (and hence speed wasnt an issue anymore), but they always stayed 30 - 50% more expensive then the TN technology. in the last 3 or 4 yrs with prices having come down so much further, still buying a TN screen is not really justified anymore (unless price is the only selection criteria). if you hear/see a sales pitch of how fast a particular monitor is they are trying to sell you, your next question should always be "sure, but how good is it at doing anything else"
(eg, how good is it at displaying video, the color and tone quality for detailed images, and what problems does it have with "display artifacts"). and even then dont trust the sales person, go and look for some in depth online reviews from reliable sources.
its all horses for courses tho. if you dont want to spend much money and want as large of a display as you can get for your $, you by very definition will land in the TN price zone. but with more careful background reading you could well end up with a significantly better display at 25-30% more money.
the best type of lcd's (with the most true color fidelity) were always IPS, but at roughly 2 or 3x the price of MVA and PVA only professional gfx artists etc could justify the cost initially. in the last 6 yrs or so prices have radically come down for lcd's, and you can now even buy a cheap korean 27' IPS screen for around 300$ or so for ex (but buyer be aware, not all IPS screens are as good as the specs might sugest). btw, one of the things that makes the screens on the recent iphone series (4, and 5 i think) so nice to look at is not just the higher resolutions they started making them, but they deliberately chose IPS technology (same with Imacs). a similar issue with the new high quality samsung lcd tv's in the last few yrs, the series 8 (top of the line, highest price) uses IPS technology, the series 7 (still very good but one notch lower) uses a MVA type panel i believe (and the soon to be released series 9 is also IPS). for the average TV viewer this might not matter much (most LCD tv's are not properly calibrated or setup anyway), but if you look at good quality source material on a well calibrated panel, the differences can be very significant (a bit like the difference between 480p and 720p). for us, hunting little grey/black dots and "little clusters of jumbled pixels" sliding across the screen against a terrain background, that difference in display technology can be all the difference between "now you see the distant aircraft" and "now you dont" (with in our case, "display artifacts" helping to identify that distant aircraft, so the worse the panel, the easier you can see it)