I’ve lost touch with developments in flat screen technology of late and I’m wondering if there have been changes in flat screen technology in the last few years. My powerbook G3 has an active matrix LCD screen with no ghosting and good colour but the one thing that bugs me is fixed resolution. Its 1024x768 and you can’t change to a higher resolution because of a fixed number of pixels. I find this really annoying and in order to display a resolution of say 800x600 it just created a big black border – even more annoying!

I assume this is still the case with both laptop and desktop flat screens and thus I’d be better with a 19-21” CRT so that I have full resolution control and the expense of desk space.

I've just bought a benq fp767 17" flat screen from http://www.overclockers.co.uk and have to say im pretty impressed.

I've had every res running from 640 up to 1280 (tho it was a bit small) but otherwise im very impressed.

how does it display smaller res? By creating a big black border? Does it have any dead pixels, is this still common place?

no black borders and no dead pixels .....

There are some very nice LCD screens out there now. My laptop, for example, has a 15" screen running at 1600x1200 - so text and icons are admittedly a bit small, but there's plenty of desktop area and it's great for photo editing (my main use besides Scoobynet!).

Although it's always better to run an LCD in its native resolution, the higher that native resolution is, the better able the screen is to display lower resolutions too - the ugly pixel doubling that occurs is much less visible. With a good LCD controller that filters the image in both directions, it really does look OK. It's certainly no worse than a decent CRT.

My NEC LCD1760NX doe s brilliant job in beautifying lower resolutions than the native 1280x1024. It also happens to be one of the very best 17" TFT screen on the market too.