A New Monitor: CRT or LCD?

[mwfanelli]

Well, my 25+ year-old NEC 17-inch CRT (I paid over $800 back in the day!) has finally gotten a little too fuzzy for my bad eyes. The color is still great, however. Even at that price, it was a fantastic bargain!

I am very tempted to replace the CRT with a Dell UltraSharp 19-inch LCD panel that we use here at the college. I've put several images on it, looked at it at a bunch of different angles, and tried various editing techniques to exaggerate color, brightness, color, etc. It works a lot better than the LCD on my low-end laptop.

Now, I have always been a CRT guy for photos. But the LCD looks fine to me. I'm worried by the prospect of some rude LCD surprise down the line. The Visual Arts department uses LCDs, the head guy claims that current good-quality LCDs have more contrast and a larger color gamut than most images (this Dell has a 600:1 contrast ratio compared to the 500:1 of some others I looked at: good? bad? common?). I am very tempted to go the LCD route.

Am I kidding myself about the current equality or lack thereof of LCDs vs CRTs? What are y'all using, any bad experiences? There is about a $75 difference between a CRT and the Dell LCD (with Dell discount) with a 12 lb vs 48 lb difference in weight.

Thanks!