Interesting you should make the comment about Trinitrons.

Trinitron (the technology, not the brand-name) refers to a
non-shadow-mask screen where the different color phosphors
are laid down in vertical stripes, rather that staggered dots.

This is also how tft flat-screens are set up.

I have aways felt that flat screens don't look as good as a
crt (shadow mask) of equivalent resolution.  (Haven't seen
a Trinitron in a while.)

I read an interesting article in the microsoft developers'
journal (or whatever it's called) about special flat-screen
fonts they were developing.  It turns out that the vertical
stripes produce more disruptive aliasing artifacts (the
jaggies) than the shadow-mask pattern.  (That's why
Mark finds it most apparent with text and cad.)

Microsoft's project was to develop fonts that are anti-aliased
not with respect to pixels, but with respect to the flat-panel
three-color subpixels.  I believe one key to the idea was to
have black-and-white fonts with colored pixels at their
edges.

I've never seen this in practice, but the whole story makes
perfect sense, and I bet it works really well.

(I'm not sure that this approach would work as well, or even
at all with the Trinitrons.  On a tft flat-panel screen, driven
by a digital signal, you know the exact mapping between
pixels in your video buffer and the three-color 'triad' pixels
on the screen.  On an analog crt, a specific video-buffer
pixel won't necessarily land on a single triad, be it a
Trinitron or a shadow mask.

The devil is in the details...


Mark Rode <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ...
> Color, sharpness and what looks good is very subjective when comparing good
> quality monitors. Trinitron monitors are widely accepted as the sharpest
> picture but I personally think that text on a Trinitron (Sony, NanoFlex)
> picture tube looks ragged and hard to read. When viewing text or CAD I much
> prefer a shadow mask (ViewSonic, Samsung, Hitachi, etc) or my favorite a
> Diamondtron (Mitsubishi or IIyama ).

     Frank R.Brown
     Frank.R.Brown@MailAndNews

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