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By Neil Randall

When you're watching "Touched by an Angel" or "Little House on the Prairie," the fuzzies are good. In fact, we call them warm fuzzies, because they make you feel all--well, warm and fuzzy. But when you're working on an Excel spreadsheet or scanning through page after page of text on the Web, the fuzzies aren't good at all. These fuzzies don't make you feel good inside, they make your eyes hurt like hell. These fuzzies are monitor fuzzies, blurry letters or shapes that make you think that a visit to your optometrist can't be far off.

A long time ago, I met a person who had just bought a PC but couldn't afford a monitor. He explained that he didn't think the monitor would be necessary if he just spent more time being careful on the keyboard. For at least 99.999 percent of the rest of the population, however, a monitor is essential to our computing needs. What becomes obvious, sometimes too late, is that monitors differ vastly in quality. That good deal you got on the monitor that came with the system might quickly become, quite literally, an eyesore.

One thing you'll discover about monitor quality is that one person's fuzzies are another person's perfect display. To a degree, display clarity has to do with individual differences in eyesight, but it has much more to do with what people use the computer for and what they're willing to accept. The same holds true for audio equipment, of course: One person hears every bit of distortion on the system, while others may not detect any problems at all. For monitors, if you think your display is fuzzy, or imprecise, or aggravating in any other way, then the display is a problem. You owe it to both your eyes and your sanity to try to get a better one.

What makes a display fuzzy, distorted, or otherwise bad in the first place? The manufacturer of the monitor will probably tell you that the problem is the video card, and vice versa. And certainly the video card determines display quality to a degree, as we'll see in the next Tutor column. But the lion's share of the problem usually lies with the monitor itself, a complex device in which any number of things can go wrong. Worse still, what's "wrong" might in fact be designed right in. In this column and the next we'll look at some potential causes of fuzziness and distortion in your PC's display.

This time around, we'll look at the cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor, the oldest type of display and still the most common. The CRT is essentially a vacuum tube whose face, the glass front, is coated with phosphor compounds. In the CRT, negatively charged electrons are shot by a cathode toward the face of the tube, where they collide with the phosphor coating. The coating converts the enormous energy of the electrons into light, creating the image you see on your screen. The electron guns are one of the four main elements that determine the quality of the image. The others are the shadow mask (replaced in some monitors by an aperture grill), the phosphors that make up the coating on the face of the tube, and the face itself.

Neil Randall is the author of The Soul of the Internet (ITCP) and Special Edition Using Microsoft FrontPage 98 (Que).

Next: Electron Guns and Phosphors

Test Your Own Monitor PC Magazine and Sonera Technologies, publisher of the DisplayMate Video Utilities, have collaborated to provide you with some of the same test patterns that PC Magazine Labs uses during the qualitative phase of our monitor evaluations. Now you can test, evaluate, and adjust your own monitor right here on the Web.

Published as Tutor in the 4/7/98 issue of PC Magazine.