LCD technology takes a small step forward with the advent of superfast 8ms. Darren Ellis looks at why your next screen will be LCD.

While the price of LCD screens drop to comparable pricing levels with CRTs and sales are on the rise, technologically they are held back because at the end of the day the picture delivered by an LCD limits its application compared to a CRT.

TFT screens are notoriously expensive to manufacture and even more expensive to purchase in comparison to their conventional CRT counterparts.

Offering a 16ms rise- and fall-timed TFT, Mitsubishi has developed a real winner here. The low redraw rate allows for performance that almost mirrors that of CRT, while maintaining the weight and size advantages of TFT screens.

After January's shenanigans with this system, it's nice to have it back in the testing Labs. My initial impressions haven't changed: this is one mean system that will handle anything you throw at it, and the benchmarks back that claim.

Why bother buying a big screen that takes up part of your wall, when you can buy a cheap projector and take up the entire wall?

Although a little lean on the feature side, and sitting just left of the middle of the pack overall, this monitor performed incredibly well for its cost.

This card was the second poorest performing X800 XT on show in 3DMark01SE's DirectX 8 tests, with roughly 400 3Dmarks between it and the Gigabyte RX80X256V. But DX8 testing certainly isn't everything these days, and ABIT's card put in a good showing to take fourth in the DirectX 9.0-based 3DMark05, putting it on par with the Labs winning PowerColor X800 XT and GeCube card.

I've predicted 2003 will be the year of the TFT, with massive price cuts on the way that will give CRTs a run for their money. The year is already looking good with these three models entering our testing Labs.