I have been reading up on 19' flat panel monitors in anticipation of buying one. I am a little confused by the native resolution thing. I am over 50 years old and a little worried about text and picture imge size as I do a lot of online reading and a fair amount of photo processing. If I understand correctly the native resolution for flat panels is higher so that images are sharper but smaller. I went to a local electronics store to ask about this and noticed that all the monitors had pretty large icons. The sales person I was talking to knew less about it than I did, and were obviously no help. I currently have a 17' KDS that is looking really weak. My son is hygiene challenged and sneezes all over the key board and screen (really pisses me off) and has to be cleaned all the time. Are flat panels cool with frequent cleaning?

ANY advice or manufacturer recommendations would be welcome before I decide.

As for the size of stuff on the screen, you won't see a big difference. Visible size of stuff will be determined by your settings: Display Resolution and Text Size.

Flat Panel screens are certainly not as "durable" as glass ones in CRTs, so you might consider something like this - to stop the snot 'fore it hits the screen :D

Although for the moment I prefer my CRT, an LCD screen does have some good advantages that make it worthwhile. The CNET article link below provides a pretty good comparison between CRT and LCD.

http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-10149-0...sageID=1605822

Yeah this is an issue.

If you get a 19" LCD, make sure its got at least 1440x900 resolution (widescreen). Ive got a CRT and an LCD and my LCD (a 24") is better than my CRT in everyway (but it should be because I paid over 10.7 times more than the CRT for it). I'd say mainly because of the glossy screen (which is actually a glass screen). It makes such a big difference (since it gives you a close to 'pure black' background which means far more realistic colors) , in fact LCD's without a glossy glass screen are quite bad.

This also solves your snot (frequent cleaning) situation. The best part of an LCD with a glossy glass surface is that the surface is in fact GLASS, so you can wipe it as much as you want (in fact if you poke at it, it doesn't ripple as much as a normal LCD screen - but remember the glass is still sensitive to cleaning liquid, so just use mild cleaning liquids on cloth or preferably just water on cloth) I very occasionally find that some dead pixels appear on the screen... if I press on it with my finger for about 10 seconds and turn it off and on it then becomes alive... but I've got a few old LCD's and the dead LCD's that appear are permanent no matter what I do).

Oh and by the way.. in the shop those guys are probably quite noobish and didn't set the resolution to the max (native) res of the monitor - this happens a lot.

Hi, wingnut,
I am 64 yrs old, wear trifocal glasses, and LOVE my 18" LCD monitor. I got it a Walmart, a Microtek brand, for less than $400. It is absolutely great.
Clear, sharp images, has great control over what resolution you want to use. Mine stays at 800x600, with 32 bit true color.
You can adjust the size of the fonts on the desktop, also adjust the size of webpage reading by using the View, Text Size, at the top of your screen while at a website.
I highly recommend an LCD monitor.
Best of luck.