iGary said:
What she said.
Says the man who works on an LCD
CRT vs. LCD is worse than Mac vs. PC or Red Sox vs. Yankees, I think. They both have pros and cons that you need to consider.
CRTs, while generally less expensive and having a much better black point, tend to be (obviously) bulkier, more prone to calibration issues related to movement and/or placement, and are not as bright or consistent over time.
LCDs, while having nice brightness levels and a smaller footprint, tend to still have issues with color variation within the display and can't give as good of a deep black.
We've done some significant testing on the Apple ACDs and have found the 30" to be the most consistent, strangely enough, in terms of overall color consistency, measuring a variance of ±50-100K across the monitor, which is pretty much measurement device noise.
Another choice are the Eizo monitors, but they're significantly more expensive.
The hard part with any of this is finding the appropriate calibration targets. Most applications allow you to choose only white point, vs. use CIE xy coordinates. There are many xy coordinates that will map to a given white point, and the variations in apparent color of that white point can be fairly significant.
There's a lot more to getting good, consistent, calibration than simply hooking up an OptixXR device and running a calibration.