Display Power Consumption: CRTs Versus TFT-LCDs
Table of contents
- 1. LCD Power Consumption Is In Your Hands!
- 2. Display Details And LCD Panel Types
- 3. Test Displays
- 4. Test CRT And Setup
An increasing number of flat panel displays are based on LED backlighting, and their manufacturers aren't shy about promoting the technology's benefits to power consumption. We checked the claims to see if the promised savings are worth emphasizing.
New LCD flat panel displays are constantly reaching record lows in power consumption: 50 W, 40 W, and even 30 W are sometimes achieved in displays as large as 24” these days. The most important variable in display power savings is the backlight technology. Today, we have fluorescent lighting transitioning to light-emitting diodes (LEDs). We grabbed all of our test lab's LCD monitors and two old CRTs, pitting them against each other in a power consumption shootout.
Display Power Becoming Important
As of late, we've written a lot about power consumption on the system side, where usage is most noticeable. Processors and graphics cards were particularly blatant consumers a few years ago. Nowadays, the trend (especially in Europe) is mostly toward more environmentally-friendly components.
Green computing has forced even the largest corporations to rethink and refocus. We have low-power processors, motherboards, memory modules, hard drives, and even high-efficiency power supplies. Many things have changed, but you still need to look at every product individually to decide whether or not it’s truly efficient.
Interestingly, displays were largely neglected in this "green refresh." Part of the reason was that, ever since LCDs displaced CRT displays, the typical PC utilizes more power than its attached monitor. However, this is changing rapidly. Enthusiast PCs, gaming systems, and workstations still often consume more than 100 W at idle and much more under load. But the majority of PCs sold are business and mainstream systems, and the average power consumption in this group is dropping fast thanks to aggressive optimization.
Display Power Higher Than System Power?
As a result, mainstream PCs that don’t sport discrete graphics and multi-core processors consume reasonable amounts of power. In the article Build a 25 W Performance PC Using Core i5, we proved that a system with above-average performance does not have to draw more than 25 W at idle. Since most 20" or higher flat panels consume 30 or 40 W, it's likely that your display will chew up more power than your nettop or mainstream system.
We decided to run a little analysis on the following displays from our test lab:
CRT:
- Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 (19”, 2003)
- Sony Multiscan G420 (19”, 2002)
LCDs:
- 19” Benq FP937S (2005)
- 20” Samsung SyncMaster 204B (2006)
- 24” Samsung SyncMaster 245B Plus (2008)
- 19” Philips 190BW9 (2009)
- 22” Acer P225HQL (2010)
- Hardware,
- lcd-backlight ,
- led ,
- cfl
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An interesting article and the facts of which surprised me, because I had always been led to believe that for some reason TFT's used more power than CRT's!
Another surprise came in the difference in power consumption between 22" and 24" Samsung displays! So much more power needed just for the extra 2 inches of display field!
A further comparison between the new larger 27" monitors from the likes of Illyama, LG, Dell and Samsung would also be interesting reading.
As far as LED displays go, their higher cost price still outweighs the power consumption savings, so until more LED driven screens come on the market and the price drops considerably, standard fluorescent backlit TFT's will remain the monitors of choice for most users I think?
I have recently been looking to replace my dieing Hanns G 28" monitor and research online shows that there is nothing else that can approach it's features, including DVI and HDMI connections, in the same price bracket!
I also see that a lot of bigger monitors seem to be made with the 1920-1080p resolution screens, something the manufacturers boast about. Why I don't know because my Hanns G has the 1920-1200 format, which must be better?
I think many manufacturers are just cutting costs by using their surplus tv screens in monitors, which to me is a bad thing. You might as well just buy a telly rather than a monitor, which is not much dearer and has the advantages of a tuner and better higher powered multimedia speakers of up to 10watt, much higher than the standard 2watt speakers used in most multimedia monitors! After all a telly with a DVI and HDMI socket at 1920- 1080p is going to give you the same resolution, or better, than a monitor?
You could also plug your PC into the DVI socket and your games console into the HDMI socket, so there is no need to change cables between them or have a separate telly for console gaming?
Plus larger sizes are available if you want them?
The high end monitors from Dell and NEC have good features, but cost from £900 upwards.
I would like to see a Tom's Hardware review and comparison of some of these larger monitors 27" and upwards, from Illyama, Phillips, LG, HannsG, Dell and BenQ, to see which is the best for features and which is worth buying? Is it worth spending so much money on a Dell or NEC monitor for your average gamer or home office user, or are they only worth it for CAD and graphics designers or business users?
All in all a good article, with for me some interesting surprises, which leads directly to my questions regarding possible follow up articles on the newer larger, but affordable models for the mainstream user.
After a lot of searching online, the only comparison articles on monitors I can find are from 2007, a lifetime ago as far as technology advances go, particularly in the field of monitors and tv.
Hopefully you can come up with something like that in the near future?