After I wrote an article about the bandwidth bottleneck of DVI the other day, a number
of people wrote to me.
Put simply, what they said was that unlike CRTs, a relatively low refresh rate on an LCD isn’t too big a deal because LCD are not subject to flicker like a CRT.
This is true, and if you look at stationary images, this shouldn’t be a problem.
I guess I was vague in the initial article, but if you’re gaming, a low refresh rate on a monitor essentially lowers the FPS you can get out of a monitor in a game. Whether the difference between a CRT and an LCD is noticeable to you depends on the games you play, the moves you make, and the eyes you have.
Fortunately, the consumer electronics industry has realized the problem for moving objects and is now planning to transition from DVI to something called HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). HDMI will offer bandwidth of up to 5 gigabits per second, which certainly is more than enough to handle any gaming for a long time to come.
HDMI should start showing up the second half of the year. You can read more about HDMI here.
If I were going to spend big time on a big LCD device, this is a standard I’d want to have in my monitor.
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