COMPUTER MONITOR

Monitor

Also called a video display terminal (VDT) a monitor is a video display screen and the hard shell that holds it. In its most common usage, monitor refers only to devices that contain no electronic equipment other than what is essentially needed to display and adjust the characteristics of an image.

Types of Monitor

CRT Monitor

This one is heavy and thick and has a normal tube. Because of this normal tube you could get a glare on the tube from light sources within the room. That could be irritating so that’s why they developed the flat CRT screen which has a flat tube.

Flat

This one is also heavy and thick but this one has a flat tube. Flat CRT screens are designed to reduce the glare and distortion created by conventional CRT screens. The flat tube increases image clarity while reducing glare from light sources within the room.

LCD

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens are most commonly used for laptop screens but are becoming increasingly popular and more affordable for desktop users. These screens use a TFT (thin film transmitter) to produce a more secure picture with a relatively wide angle of view. TFT provides the best resolution of all of the flat panel technologies. These are the most expensive screens on the market. Also these are available in several sizes

There are currently three types of monitors: CRT, LCD, and Plasma.

How can you tell what type of monitor your computer has? CRT and Plasma monitors

are used only on desktops. Laptops always use LCD monitors. Desktops can use

CRT, LCD, or Plasma monitors. CRT monitors are the largest. They are usually a

cube in shape and take up the most space. Also, the screen is usually curved on a

CRT monitor; if you run your finger across it it’ll go up and down. However, the

screen is not always curved on a CRT monitor. LCD monitors are a lot smaller.

Modern LCD monitors are usually less than in inch in thickness. That’s why

they’re called “flat-screened.” Plasma monitors are also flat-screened, however,

they cost tons more money then LCD monitors do, since they can display the

clearest images. Plasma monitors are very new and expensive, and very few people

have them – most people have CRT or LCD monitors.

CRT monitors are the oldest types of monitors, they have been around for decades,

but they are still made today. CRT stands for “Catho-RayTube”. The screen on a

CRT monitor is literately a screen, just like a window screen. It is divided into

millions of tiny squares. In fact, you can even see each square if you look

closely, especially on older monitors that only support low resolutions. These

tiny squares are called “pixels.” To display an image, each pixel changes color.

The monitor isn’t really displaying the image as a whole; it’s displaying

thousands or millions of tiny dots of color, that together, look likes the image.

It’s sort of like print dots on a piece of paper printed form an inkjet printer.

To display a video or animation, the colors of the pixels rapidly change. In CRT

monitors, a device called the “cathoraytube,” located inside the monitor, fires

different color light, sort of like a laser, into each pixel of the monitor. The

light stays there in that pixel for maybe a thousandth of a second, so the

cathoraytube has to keep firing more light into each and every pixel extremely

fast. The cathoraytube goes one pixel at a time, usually working its way left to

right across each row then going down to the next row until it reaches the bottom

of the screen. Then it starts over again with the top left pixel on the screen.

It might sound like it would take a long time to fire a light beam into each and

every pixel on the screen; however, the cathoraytube is extremely fast. So fast,

in fact, that it fires a light beam into every pixel on the screen 60-120 times

every second! The number of times per second that the cathoraytube fires a beam

of light into every pixel on the screen is called the monitors “refresh rate.”

LCD monitors have no “cathoraytube”, but they still have a refresh rate. The

refresh rate for LCD monitors is how many times each pixel on the screen changes

per second. Most LCD monitors refresh at a rate of 100 Hz, that’s 100 times a

second. For more info on LCD monitors, scroll down two paragraphs.

With CRT monitors, especially older CRT monitors, if the same image is fired by

the cathoraytube over and over again over a period of several hours, the image can

get “burned” into the pixels, so the pixels only show that image and cannot show

any other images. This can be a major problem. That’s why screen-savers were

invented! Screen-savers literately save the screen from freezing from

“cathoraytube burn.” However, if you have a LCD or Plasma monitor, or if your

monitor is set to automatically turn of after so many minutes without use, then

you don’t need a screen-saver. You can still have one, but it is not necessary.

LCD stands for “Liquid-Crystal Display” or “Liquid Crystal Diode.” Sometimes LCD

displays are also called LED displays. LED stands for “Light Emitting Diode.”

Like CRT monitors, LCD monitors are divided into millions of tiny squares called

“pixels.” In LCD monitors, each pixel has a tiny LCD (a Liquid Crystal Diode) in

it. LCDs, also known as LEDs (although there are some slight differences between

LCDs and LEDs) are basically tiny light bulbs that can light up as any color. In

this way, each pixel can change color to display an image, similar to the way CRT

monitors display images, except that the pixels change colors from the LCDs in

them changing colors, not because a cathoraytube fires a different color into the

pixel. LCD monitors have no cathoraytube.

All monitors, no matter what type of monitor it is, gets the information on what

image to display from a video card (also known as a “graphics card”), located in

one of the expansion slots of the motherboard