As of last weekend I finally made the jump from oldschool CRT monitor goodness to a more modern-day TFT screen. I had always held off on the purchase, because my godly 19″ CRT delivered awesome image quality… and to be honest, the TFT screens I had seen my friends use looked horrid in comparison, or displayed a lot of ghosting and tearing. However, in recent years TFT screens have improved a lot, which prompted me to get one anyway - alongside recommendations from a few of my colleagues.

So say hello to my new 22″ monster, the wellknown HP W2207 TFT Widescreen monitor, well… once I upload some pictures that is. Anyway, the difference with my old iiyama CRT monitor is immediately noticeable. Not only is it lighter and thinner, but it seems about twice as big because it takes up so much horizontal space… which is great! The widescreen format feels much more natural than the regular old square blob and the visual quality is beyond a shadow of a doubt completely superior to my previous CRT monitor.

If you thought my soundcard upgrade two months ago was amazing, then you’ve seen nothing yet. Now you’d be hard-pressed not to mistake my PC for a fullblown home cinema set! So by all means, scroll through for my experience with visual (near-)perfection!

After connecting my new monitor, installing the drivers and running the color correction tool; the image quality was nothing short of amazing. Not only did both games and movies not show any sign of tearing or ghosting, but there was hardly any backlight bleeding and, thus far, zero dead pixels. More impressive of course was the image quality itself: watching the exact same videos and playing the exact same games with the exact same settings, everything was sharper, more realistic and simply better-looking. Plus it’s a huge widescreen monitor so I can sit back, relax and watch from a distance too!

As if that wasn’t enough, the monitor comes attached with a nifty arm that allows you to turn and tilt it any way you want; heck you could even look at it top-down if you’d like to. And this arm grants quite a bit of room beneath the monitor itself, which is a perfect location for the front speakers in your surround set! Well, much better than on top of my monitor where it stood previously anyway. The buttons on the monitor are conveniently located on the bottom,

Firing up the Crysis demo was the true indicator of this monitors’ superior image quality. The introductory scene with Dr. Rosenthal’s voiceover was actually visible as a cave, whereas my previous monitor displayed a near-black screen. Fast forward to in-game action and I’m admiring incredibly vivid colours and sharp visuals, that make my old CRT monitor look very outdated indeed - and this while I’m playing in a lower resolution (1680×1050 versus my old 1600×1200). Supreme visual quality indeed!

There is one aspect that leaves much to be desired of many TFT screens however, and this is the viewing angle. Most TFTs will leave you with a screen perfectly usable when you’re sitting straight in front of it, but if you move even an inch the colors will go haywire. Not so on the w2207, which might as well have been a living-room LCD-TV, it’s that good! Watching movies with your friends is perfectly possible with this screen; and if people want to watch your game as you’re playing: they can, with little to no loss in image quality.

I tried looking at it from the sides and above, and only in extreme angles that would make watching anything on screen an impossibility in the first place do you start to truly notice discoloration. Of course the bottom viewing angle leaves a lot to be desired, but this is true for all TN-panel (a.k.a.: affordable) TFT screens and it’s not like you’d ordinarily be watching your screen from below anyway. Honestly I had expected something horrible, but these viewing angles convinced me that CRT monitors are most certainly obsolete.

So is there absolutely nothing my old CRT monitor has over this new state-of-the-art TFT screen? Well, just the one obvious bit: light reflection. While the w2207 still looks perfecly crystal clear in a well-lit room, it tends to reflect quite a bit too. The screen will be perfectly visible, but it’s easy to start noticing your own reflection in there, which wasn’t quite so much the case with my old CRT monitor. Yet strangely it was less annoying than reflections in my previous monitor, perhaps because of the much higher image quality regardless of lighting.

Lastly the switch to a TFT monitor means the elimination of my greatest annoyance with CRT screens: having to re-adjust the screen. Constantly having to adjust screen positions was terribly annoying on my 19″ CRT - and this TFT simply auto-adjusts itself, leaving the screen perfectly balanced in the center of the screen at all times. So hassle-free, what a relief!

So what’s the verdict on TFT screens? Well, the HP w2207 certainly proves that they can be entirely superior to the famed CRT screens of old, even for hardcore gamers wishing only for perfect image quality and zero ghosting or tearing. That said, you’ll have to spend some money and time to find a proper TFT screen, because there are still plenty of them out there with excessive backlight bleeding, ghosting, horrible colors and pathetic viewing angles. Once you find the right screen however… well, you’ll find yourself wishing you made the jump sooner.

Keep posted for pictures and screenshots - and if you suddenly notice better image quality in them: that’s my new monitor at work!

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