I'm getting ready to buy a couple of 17" flat panel monitors. For those of you who have used flat panels and have seen them with both analog and digital inputs, can you tell the difference? Is digital that much better? Are they worth the cost difference? I'm using two 15" Samsung 570v (analog) now and they look fine to me, but maybe I don't know what I'm missing. Thanks for any feedback.
I have used both analog and digital.In my experience the digital gives a sharper image which is supposed to be easier on the eye but personally I can't appreciate that much of a difference between a quality analog and the digital. I currently use 18" NEC analogs. For me, it wasn't worth the extra money for the digital.By the way,PCWorld has an area on their website that gives you the techinals on various monitors and compares them within their group .It also information on there they can be purchased and compares prices.Hope this helps a little
I recently purchased a 19" KDS flat panel LCD at Comp USA. It can be used both analog or digital. My existing video card only supported analog, so I started using it that way. It was very good. After a few days, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I went and bought a new video card which supported both analog and digital. After screwing it up trying to install the card, I took it to Best Buy and had them put it in. Next day hooked it up with the supplied digital cord. Any difference? Just a little bit clearer when viewing web pages, and other typical stuff you look at on a computer. Not any huge difference by any stretch. The video card cost $120.00 and now supports two monitors if I want that. Oh yea, and 60 bucks to have it installed after I followed the directions and screwed it up. If you are like me and like to piss money away, go for the digital. Otherwise analog is probably just as good.
I can see a definite difference between analog and digital when viewing text and numbers (which is almost all I do). I am glad I got monitors that will accept both. In fairness though, my digital card is a better card than my analog card. I don't know how much of the difference may be due to this.
My "day" job is in the tech industry, I've tried a lot of different combinations. IMO it's all about the quality... Viewsonic PRO series, SGI, EIZO are all top notch. With DVI video card. I can defiantly tell the difference and would never go back to yucky analog video or consumer level displays.
I hear you say that you are going to buy a couple of them...will your video card support resolution beyond 1024 by 768....many flat panel monitors will only have a max resolution of 1024 by 768...so be careful and check to see what the maximum resolution is for your new monitors...I screwed up both ways...first the monitors themselves only have a max resolution of 1024 by 768.....next the matrox dual video card will only support up to 1024 by 768....major screw up as far as I am concerned...because for charting you can not have a smaller chart which means you can have more of them per square inch...the next thing is the color....nothing beats a good ole fashioned tube with 32 bit true color. I was looking at how cool the new lcd flat panel would look and how much desk space they would take up...in hind site I could have saved myself a lot of money and bought a couple of 19 inch or larger tube monitors...then I could of switched the resolution and the color....still though for dual screen my matrox dual monitor g450 will only allow 2048 by 768 max resolution for 2 screens...divide in half and your back at 1024...matrox or somebody else might have a video card that has greater capabilities...thought you would like to know
I've tried running my Samsung 770 on analog with a Matrox G450, and then running it analog with ATI Radeon 7500. Saw a huge difference just by virtue of the different cards. I don't know what it would look like running digital as that's not supported by the 770's. But on the ATI's, I did the one touch auto adjust on the monitor and everything is clear, something I couldn't achieve using the Matrox card. My other monitor is the Viewsonic VG191B, one year newer than my Sam 770, and running it digitally. Well, by virtue of being newer with better contrast etc... awesome picture quality. It appears newer LCD's and newer video cards have narrowed or eleminated the difference with their all digital counterpart. You will run into problems running digital higher than sxga resolution. The only card I know that will do 1600-1200 dual digital is the Matrox Parhelia on an AGP slot, coming out end of the month. It is limited to dual mode in that digital resolution and will set you back about $400.
I changed my analogs against 4 EIZO 17' Digital ( graphic card appian X) and the result is very nice. Very clear and sharp image ( both numbers and graphs)
My personal experience indicates that Digital is worth the money. Remember, that LCD natively only have one resolution (the Digital one). Everything else is sampled and converted up and down to match your analog resolution. So if you have an analog LCD, first the video card converts digital to analog, then your LCD analog back to digital for display. This conversion creates small fuzziness around sharp edges (text is best example) for instance. Slight color blurring is also a common sideeffect. Spend the extra few hundred $