Hi Diane,

Sometimes LCD panels take a little getting used to. You say it is too
bright, did you turn the brightness all the way down? Note that it will dim
slightly over the next couple months, but only  a little.

As to the text, it is important that you run an LCD at its native
resolution. Unlike a CRT which is more of an analog type device, and can
blend pixels among the phosphor on the screen as the electron beams scans
across, an LCD is a static pixel display, and each pixel is driven exactly
from the video image.

Having said that, most 19" LCD's have a native resolution of 1280 X 1024 @
60Hz (although the refresh isn't important other than to not exceed what
the monitor is capable of, since LCD's don't flicker like CRT's do at slow
refresh rates. Set your video card to that and see how it looks.

Another thing to try (if you can) is going with a DVI connection. It makes
little sense to take a digital image (stored in the video card memory)
convert it to analog, (for the VGA cable), then back to digital (inside the
LCD to present to the LCD pixels). Using a DVI connection (if your video
card and LCD support it) eliminates the distortion that can occur between
D/A and A/D conversions. If this is not possible, then your video card may
have poor VGA output signals, the LCD has to take the analog signal and
pick the digital pixels out of it, a poor quality signal makes it harder
for the LCD to do this cleanly, hence the suggestion to go DVI. I have seen
two different systems using the same LCD monitor, one looks better than the
other (the poorer one had a cheap onboard video adapter).

Russ Poffenberger
[log in to unmask]

At 08:21 PM 11/30/2005, you wrote:
>I just switched from a 15" CRT to a 19" LCD monitor.  I've tried two, a
>KDS and a Samsung.  Neither one looks as nice as the CRT.  They are both
>too bright.  And the text doesn't look crisp enough.  I've used Clear
>Type, but it hasn't helped.
>
>I'm using a year old HP computer running WinXP2.
>
>Should I spend more money.  Are there minimum settings I should be
>looking for?  Any ideas?
>
>Diane Kroeckel
>Wheeling, IL
>
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