By Verena Wolff
Berlin - The age of enormous, heavy tube monitors on the desktop appears to be drawing to a close.
Flat-screen monitors with liquid crystal displays, known as LCDs, have stepped into their place.
"The monitors are better and cheaper than before," says Dirk Lorenz, an expert on computer displays at the German consumer testing organisation Stiftung Warentest in Berlin.
He performed a test on the skinny displays for the 2005 edition of the organisation's "test" magazine.
One reason that the flat monitors have grown in popularity in recent years is because their price has dropped dramatically. When the monitors first hit the market, 15 inches diagonal was the standard. Seventeen or even 19-inch models are now the norm.
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"You can now get yourself a 19-inch model for under $550," says Sascha Faber, who heads the test laboratory for the computer magazine PC Professionell. Yet price should not be the only factor when picking a size.
"Seventeen and 19-inch displays have the same physical resolutions," says Lorenz. This means that both monitors offer the same number of pixels for creating images - 1280 by 1024, or around 1.3-million. This higher resolution means that symbols and letters are small on the 17 inch screen. "That is not a particularly ergonomic size," says Philips' Georg Wilde.
Armin Collong, product manager for the Japanese manufacturer Eizo, agrees.
"You shouldn't be scared off by the investment needed for the bigger screen, because monitors will often outlive several different CPUs."
Lorenz from Warentest frames the advantage of the bigger monitors in a different way. "High-quality components are usually used, which leads to better image quality," Lorenz says.
In addition to lower energy use, reduced heat production, and better ergonomics, the monitors have drawn praise for the sharpness of their picture quality.
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