DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Daniel Gibson" <metalcaedes at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:igtq08$2m1c$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Am 16.01.2011 04:33, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
>> On Saturday 15 January 2011 19:11:26 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Andrei Alexandrescu"<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>  wrote in message
>>> news:igt2pl$2u6e$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>>> On 1/15/11 2:23 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> I still use CRTs (one big reason being that I hate the idea of only
>>>>> being able to use one resolution)
>>>>
>>>> I'd read some post of Nick and think "hmm, now that's a guy who follows
>>>> only his own beat" but this has to take the cake. From here on, I
>>>> wouldn't be surprised if you found good reasons to use whale fat 
>>>> powered
>>>> candles instead of lightbulbs.
>>>
>>> Heh :)  Well, I can spend no money and stick with my current 21" CRT 
>>> that
>>> already suits my needs (that I only paid $25 for in the first place), or 
>>> I
>>> can spend a hundred or so dollars to lose the ability to have a decent
>>> looking picture at more than one resolution and then say "Gee golly 
>>> whiz!
>>> That sure is a really flat panel!!". Whoop-dee-doo. And popularity and
>>> trendyness are just non-issues.
>>
>> Why would you _want_ more than one resolution? What's the use case? I'd 
>> expect
>> that you'd want the highest resolution that you could get and be done 
>> with it.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> Maybe for games (if your PC isn't fast enough for full resolution or the 
> game doesn't support it).. but that is no problem at all: flatscreens can 
> interpolate other resolutions and while the picture may not be good enough 
> for text (like when programming) and stuff it *is* good enough for games 
> on decent flatscreens.
>


There's two reasons it's good for games:

1. Like you indicated, to get a better framerate. Framerate is more 
important in most games than resolution.

2. For games that aren't really designed for multiple resolutions, 
particularly many 2D ones, and especially older games (which are often some 
of the best, but they look like shit on an LCD).


> For non-games-usage I never had the urge to change the resolution of my 
> flatscreens. And I really prefer them to any CRT I've ever used.
>

For non-games, just off-the-top-of-my-head:

Bumping up to a higher resolution can be good when dealing with images, or 
whenever you're doing anything that could use more screen real-estate at the 
cost of smaller UI elements. And CRTs are more likely to go up to really 
high resolutions than non-CRTs. For instance, 1600x1200 is common on even 
the low-end CRT monitors (and that was true even *before* televisions 
started going HD - which is *still* lower-rez than 1600x1200).

Yea, you can get super high resolution non-CRTs, but they're much more 
expensive. And even then, you lose the ability to do any real desktop work 
at a more typical resolution. Which is bad because for many things I do want 
to limit my resolution so the UI isn't overly-small. And yea, there are 
certian things you can do to scale up the UI, but I've never seen an OS, 
Win/Lin/Mac, that actually handled that sort of thing reasonably well. So 
CRTs give you all that flexibility at a sensible price.

And if I'm doing some work on the computer, and it *is* set at a sensible 
resolution that works for both the given monitor and the task at hand, I've 
never noticed a real impromevent with LCD versus CRT. Yea, it is a *little* 
bit better, but I've never noticed any difference while actually *doing* 
anything on a computer: only when I stop and actually look for differences.

Also, it can be good when mirroring the display to TV-out or, better yet, 
using the "cinema mode" where any video-playback is sent fullscreen to the 
TV (which I'll often do), because those things tend to not work very well 
when the monitor isn't reduced to the same resolution as the TV.


> OTOH when he has a good CRT (high resolution, good refresh rate) there may 
> be little reason to replace it, as long as it's working.. apart from the 
> high power consumption and the size maybe.
>

I've actually compared the rated power consumpsion between CRTs and LCDs of 
similar size and was actually surprised to find that there was little, if 
any, real difference at all on the sets I compared.