For a while there the LCD industry was in a state of high agitation. Prices were dropping by huge amounts; sales were going through the roof; many were predicting the final demise of the CRT. While CRT monitors are not selling as well as they used to, and in some markets have been surpassed by LCD sales, the entire LCD market has started to settle.

Sales are still strong, and we've seen transitions from 25 to 16 to 12ms response times in the past year, but there's still no reason for the CRT to be truly afraid.

Until now.

These new 8ms monitors come closer to CRTs than any other LCD before it, so close in fact that you might not readily see the difference, nor even care about the difference. There has never been a better time to upgrade your monitor to an LCD, especially if you're a gamer of movie junkie.

There aren't many of these screens available at the time of writing, but we've grabbed every single one on the market and tested them in the Labs. But before we get to the reviews, let's take an in depth look at the differences between CRTs and LCDs.

CRT vs LCD

Is there a way to compare the response times of LCDs and the refresh rates of CRTs? To put things in perspective, a CRT monitor running at 60Hz can make 60 changes per second, which in gaming terms means that a maximum framerate of 60 frames per second (fps) is displayable.

By this reasoning, those 25ms LCDs we went ga-ga over a couple of years ago are roughly better than a TV, but worse than a 60Hz CRT. Ouch. Artifacting such as motion blur, jaggies and general blurring are apparent on these screens. When they dropped to 16ms the blurring had almost faded although there was still some artifacting. This reduced further when screens dropped to 12ms, and now we're approaching the CRT standard with 8ms.

We should point out here that CRTs actually have a comparable response time of 6ms (167fps or 167Hz). The reason why current CRT screens don't report such high refresh rates is that systems and graphics cards usually limit it to a fundamental and perfectly usable 100Hz.

There's a great deal of debate about the Hz that the human eye can actually perceive. It used to be accepted as fact that the eye could only discern around 30-40Hz, but this has been well and truly debunked. Current medical estimates range from 60-85Hz, and some crazy estimates range as hight as 200Hz. Personally I believe I can notice the smoothing out of 85Hz to 100Hz, although I've yet to take the Pepsi challenge on it.