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Editorial - DR. Mac 
Dr. Mac - Ditch that CRT - Flat Baby Flat !!
By Bob LeVitus
I SAID in a recent review that Apple's 23-inch Cinema HD display was
by far the best monitor I've ever used and wished I could afford one.
However, I bought the 22-inch NEC tube-type display and used it until
this week. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
At 66 pounds, the NEC weighs three times as much as an Apple Cinema.
And once I had wrestled the behemoth from its gigantic box onto my
desk, I learned that it was also more than twice as deep.
The Cinema left room behind it on my desk for a subwoofer, battery
charger, cable modem, USB hub and Ethernet switch. The NEC hung over
the back edge of the desk by an inch or two. It may be big, heavy and
kind of ugly, but it was also $1,500 cheaper.
Setup was a breeze. The monitor's VGA connector slipped into my G4's
video card without additional cables or adapters, and the display
fired up bright and strong as soon as I started up my Mac. Except for
its bulk and loss of desk space, I was still relatively happy with my
decision to go with the "poor man's Cinema display."
It turned out that was the last time I was happy.
The first issue was resolution. NEC promotes this monitor as having a
maximum resolution of 1,920 pixels by 1,440 pixels, slightly higher
than the $3,499 Apple Cinema HD's 1,920 pixels by 1,200 pixels. It is
a lot more than the $2,499 Apple Cinema display at 1,600 pixels by
1,024 pixels. What they don't mention is that you can only use that
resolution at a refresh rate of 60 hertz, which makes it flicker so
badly that text is nearly unreadable. It wasn't so bad when I reduced
the resolution to 1,600 by 1,200, but it wasn't what I thought I was
getting. And it wasn't what I wanted.
It got worse. No matter how much I played with the on-screen controls,
the image was never as sharp as the flat-screen Cinema display's.
Worst of all, text was hard to read at the sizes I was used to on the
Cinema display. While it looked OK when I bumped the size up by two or
three points, increasing the text size to make it readable defeats the
purpose of a big screen.
Last, but definitely not least, the NEC generated much more heat than
any flat-panel monitor I've used. The NEC warmed my office by several
degrees over the course of a day. The Cinema displays never raised the
temperature a bit, even running 24/7.
And so, in the end, I returned the NEC and got a slightly used Cinema
display. I think of it as putting my money where my mouth is. The used
Cinema display cost twice as much as the new NEC, but after a month of
torture by cathode ray tube, I'm convinced it's worth every penny.
Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS X and the author of 39 books,
including Mac OS X For Dummies and Dr. Mac - The OS X Files, (or, "How to Become
a Mac OS X Power User").
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