It's not a preferred resolution, but a native resolution. LCDs have a fixed number of elements of a fixed size. A CRT on the other hand has the cabability to re-focus to produce a variable number of pixels (how blurry will depend on your dot or trio pitch). An LCD has to have its display scaled to produce alternate resolutions. Theis is accomplished in a number of ways: biult-in scaler hardwae in the panel (some are better than others), built-in scaling hardware on the graphics chip (ATI chips have a built-in ratiometric scaler) or by using a software scaler (we're doing this on the Mac right now for Apple displays at certain resolutions).

The quality of the scaled image will depend on the scaler as well as the resolution you're switching to. Resolutions that don't divide evenly into the native resolution are the easiest to scale. There will always be an even number of panel pixels to represent a scaled pixel. To add to the effects (good or bad) of scaling, you'll also have to contend with font-smoothing on Windows and Mac desktops. This sometimes makes a world of difference - without smoothing you'd have completely unacceptable text for most scaled resolutions, however, becaus the scalers will do their own smoothing, the OS' text smoothing can really muddy things up.

The best looking smoothing IMO, is using a software scaler like we're doing on Apple panels. It has a small performance impact of course. Built into our drivers, the scaling code will use the chip's 3D hardware to scale the display data which is then sent to the LCD at its native resolution. On Apple panels external scaling is a necessity, as they lack any such hardware themselves (one of the reasons their LCDs are priced relatively low).

When buying an LCD, buy it for its native resolution. Don't buy a 1600x1200 panel if you always want to run 1280x1024. In that case you can save yourself plenty of money by going with a 17 or 18" display. Going to lower resolutions will require going with smaller displays, however you would not be happy running those lower resolutions on a very large screen anyway (the pixels would be far too crisp and enormous).

I don' generally change the resolution of my primary monitor unless I am testing something. When playing a game, the scalers mentioned above are tolerable, so it's not an issue.

Bruno