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As with television, several different hardware technologies exist for displaying the actual image :
A modern CRT display has considerable flexibility: it can often handle all resolutions from 640 by 480 pixels (640x480) up to 2048 by 1536 pixels (2048x1536) with 32-bit colour and a variety of refresh rateThe refresh rate (or "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate") is the maximum number of frames that can be displayed on a monitor in a second, expressed in Hertz. The scan rate is controlled by the vertical sync signal generated by the video controlls.
The sharpness of a display is described by its dot pitchDot pitch (sometimes called line pitch is a specification for a computer display that describes the distance between phosphor dots ( sub-pixels) or LCD cells of the same color on the inside of a display screen. Thus, dot pitch is a measure of the size of. In general, the lower the dot pitch, (ie. .24), the sharper the picture will be.
Some technical circles prefer the name "display" to the word "monitor" (perceived as ambiguous alongside the other senses of "monitor" meaning "machine-level debugger" or "thread synchronization mechanism"). Computer displays have also been known as visual display units or VDUs.
Early CRT-based VDUs without graphicsComputer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. The first major advance in computer gr capabilities gained the label 'glass teletypes', because of the similarity to their electromechanical predecessors.
Black-White displays can only display one colour either as on or off. Monochrome displays can show only levels of a single colour. In both cases the display usually uses greenGreenscreen" is a video and film compositing technique, better known as bluescreen. Green screen was the common name for a monochrome CRT computer display using a green phosphor based coating. They succeeded teletype terminals and preceded colour CRTs as, orange (amber) or gray (white).Colour monitors may show either digital colour (each of the red, green and blue signals may be either on or off, giving eight possible colours: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow) or analog colour (red, green and blue signals are continuously variable allowing the display of any combination). Digital monitors are sometimes known as TTL because the voltages on the red, green and blue inputs are compatible with TTLTransistor-transistor logic TTL is a class of digital circuits built from bipolar junction transistors (BJT), and resistors; it is notable for being the base for the first widespread semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) technology. TTL gained almost univ logic chips.
Most modern computertower of a personal computer. A computer is a device for making calculations or controlling operations that are expressible in numerical or logical terms. While factually accurate, this definition and those found in other dictionaries are so broad that th displays can show thousands or millions of different colours in the RGB colour space by combining red, green, and blue dots in varying intensities.
Some display technologies (especially LCD) have an inherent misregistration of the colour planes, that is, the centers of the red, green, and blue dots do not line up perfectly. In 2001, software designers began to exploit the misregistration to produce sharper images: Microsoft's ClearType™ provides an example.
Moving texts can appear in italics, even when the display resolution is too low to show static italics: a fractional time delay causes an apparent corresponding shift of a fraction of a pixel.
See also: gamut, multisync , display device, graphical output device, screenshot, XFree86.