Video ✦✦✦✦ In This Part Chapter 6 Video Chapter 7 Monitors and Flat Panels ✦✦✦✦ III III PART [...]... hardware and software drivers to support DirectX 9, but the most demanding PC video games (including Microsoft’s Halo and Valve’s Half-Life 2) require it for the best appearance and performance Use a video card supporting only a lesser DirectX revision and you should expect poor graphics and slower display rates That said, don’t forget that the PC video card market is intensely competitive, with both ATI and. .. adjusted) look for the ones that are sharp and bright, with good color and contrast Software such as DisplayMate (www.displaymate.com) can help you evaluate LCDs (and CRTs) before you buy and help you tune your system for peak video quality The Samsung line of desktop LCDs illustrates what you can get as of late 20 03 You can get LCD panels with both analog (VGA) and digital (DVI) inputs from 15 inches... into a several-thousand-dollar boom box that plays CDs, we didn’t see any point in turning it into an expensive television In both cases, we were wrong We didn’t anticipate the value of an MP3 library holding literally thousands or tens of thousands of songs, and didn’t realize how useful replacing the tape in a VCR with the disk in your computer could be Adding a TV tuner to your PC lets you create... further, and as production methods and Chapter 7 ✦ Monitors and Flat Panels 97 volumes improve, prices for even larger, higher resolution LCDs will come down, too CRT Specifications and Measurements Although less expensive, CRT monitors are more complex than LCDs The technical characteristics that define your monitor’s performance are focus and convergence; color balance, tracking, purity, and saturation;... is called the maximum video bandwidth and is typically in the range of 50 to 150 megahertz (MHz) An acceptable maximum video bandwidth is implied by a manufacturer specification that the monitor will handle the resolution you want To be sure that it does meet your requirements, look at a maximum-resolution display with alternating black and white bars If you see ghosting (and the monitor cable hasn’t... adjacent triads get some illumination from the beam and light up A poorly focused monitor can’t form a one-pixel edge Misconvergence and poor focus most often show up at the corners and edges of the screen, or in the center if the corners and edges are right Figure 7-4 shows why this happens The extensive bend required in the electron beam to reach the sides and corners of the tube tends to distort the beam,... and force you to compromise by setting the controls for a place between the center and the outside As a result, neither area ends up in focus or well converged on the monitor Phosphor surface To reach dots at the outside and corners of the screen, the electron beam has to deflect at a relatively large angle Maintaining uniform focus and convergence from low to high deflection angles is difficult, and. .. performance after it’s been on for a while as well as when it’s cold, and also when you have the brightness and contrast cranked up (which increases the heat load on the shadow mask) Chapter 7 ✦ Monitors and Flat Panels 99 The brightness and contrast your monitor delivers is the result of a balancing act with the sharpness of focus and accuracy of convergence A brighter image is the result of more power... panels and video cards have connectors like that shown in Figure 7-2 If you have a choice between DVI and standard VGA, use the DVI connection Figure 7-2: DVI connector ©2004 Barry Press & Marcia Press LCD monitors are typically specified in terms of viewable diagonal, interfaces, brightness, contrast, and viewing angle Buying an LCD panel is much like buying a monitor — see the unit in operation and (assuming... Chapter 7 ✦ Monitors and Flat Panels 1 03 A good monitor stores control settings independently for each resolution, so you don’t have to keep readjusting the controls The typical controls you find on CRT monitors include: ✦ Horizontal size and position — This control adjusts the width of the raster on the screen and lets you center the image laterally You’ll find that both the horizontal and vertical characteristics . your software and output by your video card. To understand how the monitor and video board work together and contribute to the performance of your computer, we’ll start at the monitor and work inward. traverse of the screen starts at position 1 and moves to the right. At the end of the line (2) the beam turns off and rap- idly moves down and to the left to 3 and the start of the next line. The sweep of. operations for high-speed 3D graphics are texture mapping and polygon rendering, you usually measure 3D software and hardware performance in textured pixels (texels) per second and filled poly- gons