Inspiration may start in your mind’s eye and finish on a printed page. In between, your design idea lives on a screen. The monitor or display you view all day is as important to your productivity as your PC processor or software. While the advice in this guide can almost be condensed to one sentence—“Buy as much monitor as you can afford”—it helps to brush up on today’s myriad features and fast-changing technologies before you make that investment.

You already know about the biggest technology change—the rapid replacement of cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors with slim liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels. The latter debuted as expensive status symbols, but have become more affordable even as they’ve improved to rival CRTs’ color quality. CRTs are still good values, but their dimming outlook reflects the same analog-to-digital shift that’s already transformed the music and camera markets.

Many of the same purchasing criteria apply to both types … as does the good news that your dollar now buys more than ever. Let’s take a look.

Historic sights: CRTs
CRT monitors work the same way as your TV set—or at least the old one you ditched for an LCD or plasma. (Plasma screens compete with LCDs as jumbo conference-room or signage displays, but don’t come small enough for desktop duty.) CRTs with flat rather than curved faces are referred to as flat or flat-square monitors … not to be confused with true flat-panel displays.

In a CRT, a gun mounted at one end of a picture tube fires electrons through a perforated mask of tiny holes at the other end, striking and energizing one or more phosphors arranged in trios of red, blue, and green. Each triad forms one pixel or dot in the display, with horizontal times vertical pixel count— such as 1024 x 768—called the monitor’s resolution.

The electron beam zaps back and forth horizontally while moving vertically over the tube; after finishing the bottom row it starts again at the top, whose phosphors are already fading. This vertical scanning frequency—how quickly the monitor draws a complete image—is called its refresh rate; most CRT users suffer eyestrain or headache from the flicker of a rate below 75Hz (75 frames per second).

As with TVs, screen size is measured diagonally. The edges of a cathode-ray tube are hidden behind its surrounding bezel or case—a 19-inch CRT offers about the same viewable area as a 17-inch LCD.

Aside from lower prices, CRTs’ main advantage over LCDs is their ability to scale images smoothly to less than their maximum (or native) resolution: Blowing up an image by switching a 1280 x 1024 display into 800 x 600 mode will look slightly blocky or pixelated on even the finest LCD.

Solid-state scenery: LCDs
Whether in a notebook or on a desktop, most LCDs—and from this paragraph on, the word “monitor” means LCD—are also known as thin film transistor (TFT) displays, which feature a sandwich of transistors, polarizing filters, and liquid crystals in front of a white light source or backlight. As different voltages are applied, the crystal molecules align in different directions, blocking or aiming light to red, blue, and green subpixels.

Switched-on pixels don’t fade like phosphors, so flat panels stay flicker-free at lower refresh rates (typically 60Hz). The hardware pixel grid also has perfect geometry as opposed to the imperfect aim of electron guns, so LCDs produce unbeatably sharp images.

What to look for
Compared to CRTs, LCD monitors use less electricity and have better immunity to electromagnetic interference (a ringing cell phone can scramble a CRT). Speaking of cell phones, users worried about unproven health risks cheer that LCDs’ electromagnetic emissions are lower than CRTs’, though the latter are certified safe by international standards.

On the minus side, LCD vendors often allow one to five bad or stuck (permanently black or white) pixels among the million or more on screen. Check the manufacturer’s quality control standards before you buy—try visiting the tech support or frequently asked questions area of the manufacturer’s website or search the site for phrases such as “defective pixel.”

Of course, a big appeal of flat-panel displays is that they take up much less desk space—an LCD’s depth is only a few inches—and are light enough for easy carrying from one room to another. Look for a VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) arm mount if you’d like to place the display on a wall. Speaking of the clutter factor, some monitors use an external, notebook-style power brick or AC adapter, while others use an internal power supply.

Some LCDs further reduce clutter by incorporating small audio speakers, so you don’t need them on your desk. But while good enough for system beeps or appointment-calendar alarms, their sound quality is terrible for CD listening, DVD watching, or game playing. A more worthwhile extra is a builtin USB hub, which lets you connect digital cameras, external disk drives, or other peripherals without awkwardly reaching for USB ports on the back of your computer.

Sizes, shapes, swivels
Most 15-inch flat panels provide 1024 x 768 resolution, too small for serious work. Twenty-inch and larger models—favorite replacements for huge, heavy CRTs—go to 1600 x 1200 and beyond. Both of these screens have the classic 4:3 aspect ratio. The 17- and 19-inch models in between are usually a little squarer, with 1280 x 1024 (5:4) resolution.

But a growing number of LCDs have a more stretched shape: a DVD- or HDTV-style wide aspect ratio, with resolutions like 1280 x 768 or 1680 x 1050. Strictly speaking, the movie-screen ratio is 16:9 while most widescreen monitors are 15:9 or 16:10, but that’s no deal-breaker.

Besides watching DVDs, the appeal of a widescreen monitor is its ability to show more stuff, whether it’s more spreadsheet columns for your budget, a two-page spread for page layouts, or an editing window plus tool palettes for working on an image. Combine that with an ultra-big, ultra-highresolution LCD, and you’ve got a designer’s dream screen—like Apple’s flagship Cinema HD Display or Dell’s UltraSharp Widescreen 3007WFP, each of which measures 30 inches diagonally and packs 2560 x 1600 pixels. (Each is also too much monitor for most computers’ graphics adapters; see the sidebar, “Plugging Them In,” at the end of this article.)

Flat panels’ thin bezels offer another route to a panoramic view: placing two or three monitors side by side. This workstation tweak, known as tiling, requires a PC with either multiple graphics adapters (usually in PCI slots) or what’s called a twin-head adapter with a pair of output connectors.

Can’t afford a giant screen? You can still see a whole 8½ x 11-inch InDesign page or web page without scrolling if your monitor is one of the versatile models that can pivot or rotate between landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) orientation, with accompanying software (the best known is Portrait Displays’ Pivot Pro) to rotate the screen image 90, 180, or 270 degrees. You can find pivot capability in both 4:3 and widescreen monitors, many of which have a built-in sensor that realigns the display as you pivot it, with no need to press a software hotkey.

Basics and not-so-basics
Whether or not it can pivot, a monitor’s base should tilt and swivel so you can adjust the screen to your liking. If you’re working under bright fluorescents or other overhead lights, most LCDs tilt a few degrees forward as well as 20 degrees or so backward.

Look, too, for a height-adjustable base, allowing you to move the screen up or down a few inches. The ergonomic ideal is to put the top of the monitor at or slightly below eye level, so when looking at the middle of the image you’re looking down at an angle of 15 or 20 degrees (more if you wear bifocals). Samsung’s SyncMaster 970P has a triple-hinged, desk-lamp-style base that tilts all the way back to horizontal and even further, so you can show your work to someone on the opposite side of your desk.

LCD makers boast about wide viewing angles— within an arc of anywhere from 160 to a slightly silly 178 degrees of the screen’s 180-degree plane. Vertical viewing angle can be important for a pivoting screen, but otherwise you should be more worried about glare or reflection from windows, lamps, or other light sources behind you.

Traditional antiglare screen coatings or filters lend a slightly muted or diffused look to the display. Recently, a technology first seen on notebook PCs has infiltrated the monitor market under trade names such as Sony’s XBrite: Lacking the antiglare surface, these LCDs look glossy black instead of flat gray when turned off. When turned on, they boost contrast and clarity, although you may catch a glimpse of your reflection in dark areas of an image. Whether one is right for you is a matter of personal preference.

Blacks and backlighting
The need for a backlight behind the screen image means LCDs have difficulty showing a “perfect” black, but improved backlights and higher contrast ratios have made this more of a quibble than a disqualification … and concern about short-lived backlights has largely receded with three-year warranties and 40,000-hour lifecycles. Monitors with two backlights instead of one offer more uniform illumination from edge to edge. NEC’s MultiSync LCD2180WG helped pioneer the use of LED (lightemitting diode) instead of the usual CCFL (coldcathode fluorescent lamp) backlight technology to increase color gamut without losing luminance.

Numbers to skip
Another thing LCD makers boast about is response time: how quickly pixels can turn on and off or change from one color to another. Slow response can lead to ghosting or smearing effects in fast-moving video or 3D game graphics. But advertised response times have plunged from 20 or 25 to as little as 1 or 2 milliseconds. You can ignore this specification for 2D design or image editing.

Similarly, we’ve gone this far without mentioning contrast and brightness because your subjective vision is more important than numbers on a spec sheet. Brightness is measured in candelas (formerly known as candlepower) per square meter, or “nits,” with monitor minimums in the range of 200 to 250. Brightness exceeding 350 or 400 nits is nice, but less important than a high contrast ratio. In fact, you’ll probably end up dialing down the brightness controls to avoid eyestrain with some of today’s color- and eye-popping 700:1 to 1,000:1 or greater contrast ratios.

Numbers that count
Other numbers are essential for color matching or calibration. Insist on a monitor that lets you adjust values such as color temperature—the shade defined as white, such as 6500K versus 9000K—and gamma, the nonlinear relation between applied voltage and pixel luminance that determines contrast range (such as the sRGB color space’s 2.2 or the 1.8 used by early Macs and many printers). You should also be able to adjust hue, saturation, and lightness for red, green, and blue—and with some monitors cyan, yellow, and magenta as well. Finally, you should be able to save your settings as a custom profi le for later reuse or load an existing ICC profile to align the monitor with a particular printer, scanner, or other device.

DG has discussed the importance of calibrating your monitor so its colors sync with your RGB or CMYK workflow in our “Color Solutions” series by Rita Amladi (see issues V11N1, V11N2, and this issue for more). While programs like Photoshop help set up gamma or ICC device profiles, the upper echelons of Eizo, NEC, LaCie, and other vendors’ monitor lineups come with ambient- light reducing hoods, advanced color-calibration software, and often colorimeters or other hardware calibration tools.

Color quandaries
A monitor’s gamut is the range of colors it can display, usually depicted as a partial-spectrum triangle on a 2D CIE color chart. The Adobe RGB color space is larger than the standard sRGB space, just as the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) gamut is bigger than the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) gamut. Look for monitor presets that emulate sRGB or Adobe RGB devices, as well as specifications listing a monitor’s range or percentage of the two gamuts.

What’s known as true color or 24-bit color is the result of most computers’ sending 8 bits of data—enough to specify any of 256 values—for each red, green, and blue subpixel. The possible combinations yield a palette of roughly 16.7 million colors.

Your computer is probably set to what’s somewhat misleadingly called 32-bit color, which doesn’t actually add any more colors. Instead, it adds either padding for a smoother flow—because most computers process data in 32-bit chunks—or an alpha channel that specifies a color’s opacity or translucence.

But while your screen can’t show more than 24-bit color, high-end LCDs can fill those 16.7 million slots with choices from a larger palette, thanks to what’s called a 10- or 12-bit lookup table. This means the monitor changes incoming 8-bit data to 10- or 12-bit, then back to 8-bit, so the pixel can be any one of about 1 billion or 68 billion colors, respectively. This gives more points of shading between white and black—and will help tide you over until computers and printers catch up with today’s monitors.