"Alan Cameron" wrote in message
...
About to buy a new PC system to to used mainly for Flightsims, do these
perform as well at CRT monitors etc.... i.e. are frame rates & suchlike
effected. What advantage does a DVI input provide?

You'd have to define "perform".

Refresh rate isn't anywhere near that available in CRTs, but the response
time of a LCD monitors is approaching 60 Hz. Refresh rate for all LCD
monitors I'm aware of is 60 Hz, and the response time is close enough to the
refresh rate that for most displayed graphics (including those in a flight
sim), you'd be hard-pressed to notice the difference.

There are extreme situations where you'll notice blurring, or even seeing
scrolling text become almost invisible. But in those cases, you're not
really losing that much information. You wouldn't be able to read text
scrolling that fast anyway, and a little bit of blur in animation isn't
necessarily a bad thing.

Color reproduction is another area where LCD monitors lag behind. But as
with the refresh rates and response times, one may or may not actually
notice it. I know that I don't, not when I'm playing games (it's more
noticeable when doing image editing, but even there doesn't typically
interfere with getting good results if you know it's happening).

IMHO, you should not buy an LCD monitor without a DVI input, and should not
use an LCD monitor without a video card that has a DVI output. The LCD
display technology is inherently digital, and it makes no sense today (given
the availability) to convert a digital video signal to analog and then back
to digital at the other end. The image quality using a DVI input is MUCH
better.

Likewise, expect to run the LCD monitor in its "native" resolution most of
the time. I've run into a few games that don't support the native
resolution of my LCD monitor, and obviously for programs like that you don't
have a choice. But otherwise, the image is so much better when the graphics
are not being stretched to fit the LCD pixels. CRTs do a much better job of
handling a variety of resolutions, but the image displayed on an LCD monitor
at its native resolution will be much sharper than anything even the best
CRT can achieve.

There have been several other threads on LCD monitors in this newsgroup, and
probably many others. Google will help you fill in the blanks if the above
is not satisfactory.

Pete