Do Crt Monitors and Televisions loose image quality over time?

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by aidynphoenix

what about a flat pannel thats also useing the VGA cord? would it still suffer from the same flaws that you mentioned, the dot pitch, responce time, and possible convergence errors?
or does the VGA cords use both analog and digital signal?

A VGA cable carries analog signals, but it is "digital" in the sense that it also ultimately has specific pixel values for each of the three colors (R,G,B). A flat-panel monitor typically has an "auto-adjust" feature, and that circuitry is adjusting the timing of the panel's display and sync circuits to exactly match each pixel of the analog input signal to their matching pixels in the LCD panel.

Dot pitch, response time, and convergence will not be problems on an LCD panel even with an analog input connection, but if the resolution of that input signal is high enough and a long video cable is used, some smearing of the video may be seen on vertical edges on the screen. That smearing is because the high-frequency response in longer cables (or thinner ones) gets weaker.

All of these "exact pixel" comments, whether using a DVI/HDMI input or a VGA/RGB input, only apply if the computer's resolution is set to the same resolution of the LCD monitor, whether that is 1920x1200, 1920x1080, 1680x1050, 1440x900, 1366x768 or another number (check the specs of the monitor). Flat-panel monitors can accept different resolutions, but any other than the "native" resolution will be scaled by the monitor and will not be anywhere near as sharp.