Technologies:

A PC Guide That Won’t, Technically, make your Head Explode.

by Rob Cheng and Bill Zahren

Monitor
(This aint your grandma's TV)

So you rush out and buy the hugest, most mind-altering processor known to man with something like a gazillion megahertz of data digesting power, so burly it's close to becoming self aware. Great. But the big processor purchase has you a little short of cash and you decided to go with a greasy, dusty old 14-inch monitor that the office network guy doesn't even want anymore.

Please stretch yourself out on the couch immediately and breath into a bag. You're not thinking right. Visions of gigabytes and megahertz have overloaded your rational brain, squeezing out clear thinking on something as outwardly plain as a monitor. You're arguing, "It's just a monitor. It looks like a miniature TV. What's the big deal between 14 and 17 inches? There are more important components in my PC to spend my cash on."

The poor monitor. It's not as sexy as the blazing CD-ROM drive and doesn't conjure the images of brute power the CPU does. But, when your rational brain returns from its oxygen-induced hiatus, you'll realize that the monitor is one of the most important parts of your PC. It's also one of the most expensive parts of the total package. The monitor is the thing that presents you with all the great color, motion and graphics that your CPU unleashes from the CDs and other sources. Scrimping on the monitor is like spending all your money on the highest tech VCR and then hooking it to a black-and-white TV.

So, since you'll spend much of your computing life looking at the monitor, it makes little sense cutting corners here. This all may lead you to believe that the monitor is just another component that is out of date before you get it out of the box. That may, in turn, cause you intense queasiness and create a desire to be near a toilet at all times.

Apply a cold compress and relax. The great, stomach-settling news about monitors is that the technology has advanced much more slowly than the rest of the PC. That means you can probably buy a PC with a high-quality, large monitor today, and when you go to upgrade your PC in a couple of years, you won't have to buy a new monitor because the quality will still be just fine. The way monitors connect to PCs is also changing much more slowly, so you likely won't have to worry about that either when you upgrade. Because of the relatively stable technology, the monitor turns out to be one of the best investments within your system. So please move away from the toilet. No need for the upset stomach medication. Breathe through the nose. Relax. Much better.

Today's desktop PC buyers are generally going for a 15-inch or a 17-inch monitor. The industry trend is to offer the 17-inch standard with desktops. Monitors with 20 inches of viewable area are also available, but those are generally only needed by people with specialized needs, like spreadsheet or Auto CAD work and probably will remain a real niche market item. Most people seem to agree that a honking 20-inch monitor on your desktop can be overkill unless you need it for such specialized purposes. (Looks like the huge office and big desk, not the enormous monitor, still reign as the true power symbol among office dwellers. Furniture makers are rejoicing.)

Somewhere, a long time ago, the leaders of the monitor industry got together became ensnared in the ancient computer industry tradition of trying to make things as confusing as possible. Their contribution to the verbal squalor was the difference between "tube size" and "viewable area." Television manufacturers all deal in actual tube size, measured diagonally across the screen. Monitors tried to do that too, but they didn't allow for the part of the tube that gets covered from view by various monitor cases. So a 17-inch monitor may only have 15.9-inch diagonal of viewable area. If you took the case off, you could see all 17 inches, but the stripped-monitor look really busts up the home or office decor, unless you're going for that post-apocalyptic feel.

The upshot of all that is pay attention to "viewable area" when you buy a monitor, rather than diagonal measurement of the entire monitor tube, known as a CRT. Fortunately for everyone's sanity, the monitor industry's goal is to get to the point where the name of the monitor (for example a "17-inch monitor") is actually the viewable area.

While we're talking about monitor size, let's give some thought to the other end of the monitor cable: the video card. Large, high-tech monitors aren't worth their weight in 5.25-inch floppy drives if they aren't hooked to a quality video card. It gets back to that thing about hooking an amazing VCR to your grandma's black-and-white TV. If you have a poor video card, it can't feed the monitor enough information to take advantage of all the monitor's quality. We'll put our video cards on the table in a separate section.

Once you've resolved to shop for a big monitor and video card combination, you'll have to plunge face-first into the fairyland where pixels, dot pitch and resolution all dance and sing.

First, there's "resolution", which is the number of tiny dots (their friends call them "pixels") on a monitor screen, expressed in the number of dots across by the number of dots down, like 640 by 480. (If you want to count the dots across and down your monitor screen, be our guest, but we suggest you get a hobby instead.) Most monitors can change resolution through software adjustments, since the software and monitor control every single little-bitty dot on the screen. This ability lets you use relatively lower resolution (which makes things bigger on your screen) for games and other uses, and crank up the resolution for fine, precision work like spreadsheets and other productivity applications.

"Dot pitch" is a short way to say "the distance between the little dots on your screen" measured in millimeters from the center of one dot to the center of another. The concern for desktop monitor dot pitch is the same as the concern during the limbo "how low can you go?" The lower the better. You'll want dot pitch below 0.28 mm for a desktop system. Tiny dot pitch isn't as important with big PC screens that measure around 30 inches or so. Since they are made to be viewed from a greater distance, lower dot pitch would actually be bad, since it would make everything so tiny that you'd have to sit about a foot away from it to make out the images.

The dots - and their resolution and dot pitch - are what separate a monitor from its entertainment cousin, the television. TVs present images using tiny lines of light and color stacked together running across the entire length or width of the screen. The lines work great for what they were intended for, analog television signals that depict movement. Lines also require less machinery to produce and control than dots, so TVs have tons less electronics inside them than monitors, making them generally much less expensive.

When it comes to TV's picture, it's a lot like a bad shave - the closer you get, the worse it looks. To better see the difference between a PC monitor and a TV picture, park yourself as close to a TV as you usually get to your desktop PC. You'll notice something right away: from that range, the picture is, well, crap. Blur City. If you ever tried to work on a spreadsheet program using a TV screen, you'd go blind and insane all at once. But it's not that big of a deal since TVs were made for people to view moving images at a distance of about 10 feet away.

Despite the flaws, TV pictures did their 10-foot job nicely for the first 40 years television existed. They still look good at that range, provided you're watching television or video. More recently, signal technology started outgrowing TV screen technology. Today's computers are capable of sending very detailed images to the monitor, and pixels just handle it better than lines. Nothing personal, just the fundamental difference in TV and monitor technologies. PC monitor quality also accounts for why PC games have gained popularity even in the face of good game systems that attach to televisions. The game systems themselves may kick out some quality signals but the TV, with its design limitations, just can't make the best use of the signals.

A further advancement in the quality of PC monitor and television pictures has come thanks to what's called "Trinitron technology." It sounds like some kind of robotic device, but "Trinitron" was developed by Sony and is really an improvement over standard "shadow mask" approaches because it improves picture quality by letting more light come through the monitor or TV. Just in case you thought life - including computer-aided life - was no longer a series of trade-offs, Trinitron monitors do have one unique aspect. They have two "holding bars," a technical term for barely visible black threads going horizontally across the entire screen in two places. After a few sessions with a Trinitron-based monitor, you don't even notice the faint lines, but they are still there.

While the technology for desktop monitors has remained relatively stable for several years, monitors big enough for group use have been a different story. In the past, a 31-inch monitor that delivered TV size with monitor resolution cost $3,000 to $4,000 all by itself, a price that makes Mount Bile in the pit of your stomach just erupt. Add that to the cost of the computer connected to the monitor and you've got a nearly five-digit nightmare that sends all but the hardest core monitor maniacs shrieking. Talk about niche market.

With new approaches, like the one GATEWAY 2000^® used for our Destination^TM Big Screen PC, the industry has made major strides in conquering even that high-dollar monitor hurdle. What Gateway did when we created the specifications for the Destination monitor was realize that a monitor that big doesn't need to be capable of a resolution of 1600 by 1200, or have minuscule dot pitch because images would be so fine you'd have to sit on top of the monitor to even see them. And why get a 31-inch monitor when you are going to sit a foot from it? A 17-incher will do nicely for that, unless you're a Niche Baby, in which case you'll need a 20-incher or bigger for stuff like computer-aided drafting (CAD), graphic design and other detailed work.

So we decided to work with our allies to develop a monitor capable of 640 by 480 or 800 by 600 resolutions. By stopping at these two high-quality settings, we could take some of the high-priced electronics out of the monitor, lowering its price and still having plenty of quality. 640 by 480 and 800 by 600 both provide rich images when viewed from TV distance and both resolutions beat TV pictures like dusty rugs on a clothesline. And, our Big Screen PC monitor design better allowed mass production, which got us into all that cool business stuff like uniform quality and economy of scale and drove the price back to earth. The Destination monitor's resolution also allows it to present CD-ROM-based signals and other digital signals. When digital TV comes into vogue in the not-so-distant future, pixel-based TV sets will start popping up all over the place.

So, please, don't plug the blazing system of the cosmos into a lame monitor. Monitor quality should be right there with a big CPU on your priority list. Your eyes will thank you for years to come.

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