Which Monitor

Read my flag ;)

why did I know you were going to reply to this :P

so.. you got yourself a pretty ownage pc, you want a crt monitor.. but lack of space makes you buy a tft, meaning you are stuck with an ownage machine and a crap monitor that will only allow you to see 75fps.. gg!

Let us assume 100 HZ for CRT and TFT for easier comparison. What this means is that every 10 msec the monitor asks the videocard for a picture to paint. The videocard either presents a new picture or the old picture. If it is a new picture (as in it is usefull for the gamer) depends on FPS & accuracy of the game. Note that if the darn videocard decides to change the picture half-way trough, you get a nice tear in your picture (on both CRT and TFT).

Now the difference between CRT and TFT is how they paint that picture.

With a CRT an electron cannon is used that goes over the screen. This electron cannon paints a frame every 10 msec. In between there is no picture painted and the screen is effectivelly black (there is a residual glow from the electrons tough). This is why with 60 HZ people tend to get headaches from the TV; there is a constant flashing from color -> black -> color -> black. With 100 HZ the screen gets repainted fast enough to not notice. This is also why you see an akward effect when a CRT is on TV.

Now a TFT paints the screen differently. A TFT doesn't paint; it crystalizes. A TFT is nothing more than a light-bulb shining trough a whole lot of crystals. These crystals are letting trough a specific color. Every 10 msec there is the potential for the crystals to change. Changing a crystal takes time, this is called latency. If changing a crystal takes too long, it becomes visible to the user. This is also why the latency time given by manufacturers is nonsense. The amount a crystal has to change has an impact on the actual latency.

So in recap:
A CRT can put out 200 NEW frames per second at 200 HZ. A CRT puts out 200 frames per second at 200 HZ. It takes virtually no time to paint a new frame (Technically this is not true, it takes time for the electron cannon to paint from top to bottom of the screen, but this is taken into account when specifying the HZ).

A TFT can put out 60 NEW frames per second at 60 HZ. A TFT puts out infinite frames per second at any HZ. It takes time to paint a new frame (latency), but a TFT does not wait on the completion of a frame before moving on to the next.

Note: a higher HZ and a low crystal change time makes ghosting even worse! The crystals need to change already before they are actually done with their last change, giving a very blurry picture.