Widescreen Gaming Forum

I've been looking at these two monitors:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824001226
and this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824001078

The first one (4:3) has a TFT/TN panel which means picture quality isn't as good but the response time is faster (5ms, almost half that of the widescreen). With the second one (widescreen) TFT/PVA which I think has a bit better picture quality, but the response time is slower (8ms). Is this correct?

Also look at the resolution. The fullscreen is 1600 x 1200 and the widescreen is 1680 x 1050. So am I really gaining anything with this widescreen? All I'd get with the widescreen is 80 more pixels on the sides but I lose a lot more on top/bottom. Where as the fullscreen is almost as wide (1600) but you get a lot more top/bottom. Is this correct?

Any other suggestions besides these two?

Don't think of widescreen in terms of pixel count. If maximizing pixel count was the measure of how useful a monitor was, they'd make circular monitors. Widescreen monitors are more useful because of the *shape* of them. The wideness is great for multitasking; you can have one app open on one side and have enough room on the other side for another app. With a standard monitor, if you had one app open, you'd have a bit of extra wiggle room on the right, a little on the bottom, but not enough for adding more stuff.

Games and movies are better on widescreen too. If you play HL2 on a 20" widescreen and a 20" 4:3, the widescreen monitor will show you a wider field of view, while the 4:3 one will be much more narrow in comparison, it will just use more pixels to draw it. Widescreen movies will be bigger on the widescreen monitor with smaller black bars.

Also, don't pay too much attention to specs on paper like response time, contrast ratio, and the like. They really don't mean much. I've seen 8ms monitors with worse ghosting than my own 25ms monitor. Mathematically, a 16ms monitor should be able to handle 60 frames per second without any ghosting at all, and anything faster just means that the pixels spend more time waiting for the frame buffer to catch up with them.

I guess my biggest concerns are the response time (don't want ghosting). And do I lose any top/bottom with this widescreen compared to the fullscreen? If the fullscreen is 1600 pixels wide, and the widescreen 1680, is the fullscreen almost as wide as the widescreen?

I guess my biggest concerns are the response time (don't want ghosting).
As I said, don't rely on the claimed response time. In theory, anything 16ms or lower will be ghosting free. In reality, the claimed response time is meaningless.

And do I lose any top/bottom with this widescreen compared to the fullscreen?
That depends on what you're using it for. In games that are hor +, you don't lose anything from the top or bottom. In games that are vert -, you do.

If the fullscreen is 1600 pixels wide, and the widescreen 1680, is the fullscreen almost as wide as the widescreen?

Try not to use the word "fullscreen" to describe aspect ratio. Strictly by the numbers, the 4:3 screen has 94-95% of the width of the widescreen. But there's more to it than this.

Yeah I was just reading elsewhere how not to really go by response times.

What about the panels? Does the TFT/PVA have better picture quality over TFT/TN?

Try not to use the word "fullscreen" to describe aspect ratio. Strictly by the numbers, the 4:3 screen has 94-95% of the width of the widescreen. But there's more to it than this.

Please continue...

???

Dude, you aren't seriously thinking of buying old 4:3 monitor, are you?

Widescreen is the way to go, maybe this way http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824001083

I checked this out:

PVA=Patterned Vertical Alignment

I couldn't find the other one.