A monitor is an output device. Its size is expressed as the diagonal length of its front. The most common sizes are 14, 15, 17, and 21 inches. The 17-inch monitor offers a good compromise between suitable size and cost. The viewing area (screen) is normally about 1.5 inch less in diagonal length than the monitor size. The monitor screen can be seen as a rectangle made of adjacent picture elements (pixels). The rectangle dimensions n and m are the number of pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively (matrix of n x m pixels). Monitor resolution is the amount of detail its screen can provide and it is expressed as n x m. The higher the monitor resolution, the more detailed the images displayed. Typical resolutions are 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768. Based upon its internal operation, a monitor can be classified as cathode-ray tube (CRT) or liquid-crystal display (LCD). |
