polymania

OK, I'm going to demonstrate some ignorance here, but I don't get what the difference is between an LCD monitor (like the one I recently bought) for use with a desktop PC, and an LCD TV that seems to show a much sharper picture and better resolution. Maybe I just haven't looked super-closely at the LCD TV's, but I can say that when I'm standing there in the showroom of Circuit City, I'm pretty damn impressed with the image quality on, say, the Sony 23" LCD. But when I'm sitting at home with my machine plugged into my 17" LCD monitor, the image is, well, underwhelming.

I mean, I do like the fact that there's no flicker, which is good for my eyes to be sure. But the screen resolution is noticeably less than my old 17" CRT, and when I'm viewing my digital photos on it, I definitely can see a "stair-step" effect in the photos when I've taken pictures that have very straight lines in them.

And what about my laptop? My laptop screen looks really nice. Why is that? That's LCD too, right? Does it have to do with "native" resolution? I don't know. All I want is to see a really pretty picture, and not get a headache looking at it.