[hudson1]

I'm not much of a video expert so I'm looking for some basic help should I go ahead and buy a mini. A couple of questions...

1) Is a digital-in LCD monitor significantly better than analogue-only?

2) With LCDs, is the resolution capability the resolution that the monitor should be used at or is stepping down to a lower resolution still going to give a sharp image? I doubt this is all that important as I'm guessing that no LCD's pixel density is going to be "too high". Maybe that's not a good assumption?

[Cory Bauer]

Originally posted by hudson1:
I'm not much of a video expert so I'm looking for some basic help should I go ahead and buy a mini. A couple of questions...

1) Is a digital-in LCD monitor significantly better than analogue-only?

2) With LCDs, is the resolution capability the resolution that the monitor should be used at or is stepping down to a lower resolution still going to give a sharp image? I doubt this is all that important as I'm guessing that no LCD's pixel density is going to be "too high". Maybe that's not a good assumption?

1. In my experience, yes digital LCD monitors are much better than analogue. LCDs that connect with a VGA connector look as if they have something wrong with them - they're fuzzy and the image looks as if it's falling apart.

2. LCDs should only be ran at their native resolution, which is always the highest resolution they are capable of. All resolutions below that will look really bad. The only time you would lower the resolution would be to run a game that may not run well at your LCDs native resolution. Good luck!

Cory

[Commodus]

1. DVI DVI DVI. It's not necessarily night-and-day, but there's a difference in clarity and quality.

2. Some LCDs scale down better than others. It's best to read a review of an LCD that features scaling if that'll be important to you. That said, if you're only worried about scaling for reasons of viewing distance and/or eyesight, you can often find an LCD panel which is a bit bigger but at the same resolution. A 19" LCD has the same resolution as a 17" LCD, for example, and a 21" has the same resolution as a 20" model.

[nyarlaho]

The Dell 1905FP seems to be a nice one. It got good reviews on CNET and can be gotten for 400 buckaroos. My mini should arrive any day now so I can hook it up.

[tooki]

Please see the peripherals forum.

tooki