im thinking of replacing my Cathode Ray tube monitor with one of these thin, TFT monitors, but some things are confusing.

1)first off, what does TFT stand for ?

2) contrast ratio's. i understand what a contrast ratio is, but i dont have a basis for comparason.
contrast ratio's tend to be between 300:1 and 500:1. what is he contrast ratio of the averate CRT monitor ? wiithout a base for comparason, its hard to know how important a good ratio is.

3) responce times. I know that poor responce times will give shadows... responce times tend to be between 7 and 24 nano seconds.
what confusing nme, is that the vertical scan speed is approx 50hz

so by my calculations, in one frame, at maximum frames per second is approxamatly 20000000 nano-seconds.

when a frame is 20 million nano seconds, a responce time of 20 nano seconds (the slower tft monitors) is still lightning fast, way too fast for the human eye.

whats going on here ???

4) my GForce FX 5700 LE has 3 video outputs (lost the manual)... the standard monitor output, which seems to have been used since the dawn of time... anouther one which looks the same shape, but is a bit wider, and a small round one which i assume is called s-video.

what connections do most TFT monitors use ? any chance i wi ll end up with an alien socket ?

question 1 really isnt too important, and im sure 2 and 4 can be answered by the sales-person.
but if i ask question 3 in my local computer shop, im gonna get some dirty looks, lol.

so... if anyone has an insight into question 3, i would be greatful.

thanks.

TFT stands for thin film transistor. These are commonly used in active matrix LCD screens. They are also being used in OLED display technology, which seems to be one of the more promising up-and-coming technologies. There is a ton of information on TFTs on the web because LCDs are poised to completely dominate the display market. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds, and it has the advantages of being relatively cheap and power efficient. Anyways, this is just off the top of my head. I can probably dig up some better researched information for you tomorrow, since the professor I work for specializes in displays and has a lot of technical papers and press releases and such lying around.

wow... im well impressed, just got my 17 inch Neovo F-417 plugged up.

the stand is tiny, it weighs nothing, the border around the screen is soo thin.
its like there is a 17inch desktop hovering on my... um, desktop.. lol.

the reaction time i got was 12ms. there is no shadow ffect porblem.
the fonts are perfectly crisp, yet perfectly ant-aliased.

its just a pleasure to look at.

testures in games look better, more crisp.

the only downside, is the whole perfect crispness of the display makes the staircase effect in non anti-aliased games much more viewable... but turning up the anti-alias setting fixed that right up.

works perfectly in linux (auto detected) i am having difficulty with WindowsXP, the fonts are a mess, barely readable.

i assume its because windows doesnt anti-alias fonts ???

im off to read the instruction manual.

everyone.... go dump your 14inch crt, and get a 17inch tft...
(i almost got the 19 inch.... now that definatly would have had me drueling... but i cant bring myself to pay an extra £50 for 2 inches.)