The days when flat panel TFT monitors were an expensive luxury are well and truly over .Prices have come down dramativally in the past couple of years , and flat panel monitors now outnumber their bulky brothers in the high street stores .The space saving design of flat panel monitors makes them deal for home users who don’t want a hulking freat CST monitor over their bed room or home office .
Most TFT monitors use what is called DVI- digital video interface –to connect to your PC while the CRT monitors use VGA interface

Difference between CRT and TFT monitors –
The main difference between TFT and CRT monitors is that TFT monitors are digital devices ,whereas CRT monitors (and televisions) are analogue devices .Its just like the difference between old vinyl records (which are analogue ) and modern audio CD’s (which are digital).
The socket at the back of an ordinary CRT monitor that you use to connect the unit to a PC is called VGA interface (‘Video Graphics Array’).At the back of your cabinet you ll find a corresponding VGA connector that is built onto the graphics card installed inside your Cabinet.You can then use a standard VGA cable to plug the monitor straight into your PC.Thats straight forward enough.all you need to remember is that the VGA interface can only handle an analogue signal.
There’s a problem here though. The graphics card inside your PC is a digital device, and the images it generates are digital .To display an image on an analogue CRT monitor the graphics card first has to convert its digital signal into analogue so it can then be transmitted alonge the VGA cable to the CRT monitor.There’s a risk of loosing image quality during this conversion process,although this isn’t really a problem for most modern CRT monitors and they generally produce excellent image quality.
But to get the best image quality that the monitor is capable of ,you will need to use the DVI interface rather than VGA.
The DVI interface sends a pure digital signal straight from the PC to the monitor with no conversion process to affect the quality of the image displayed on the screen .You will however need to have a DVI connector on both the TFT monitor and on the PC’s graphics card ,along with a DVI cable to connect the two.Its easy to see if there is a DVI connector on the monitor or at the back of your CPU as it looks completely different from a VGA connector.\The VGA socket on your PC’s grapics card has three rows of round pin holes and is trapezoidal in shape .A DVI socket is rectangular in shape ,usually white in colour and has three rows of square pin holes ,with a four square pin holes to the right.Graphics Cards for TFTs ………………..continued