I am using two of these as my monitors:
Don’t mind how cheap they are - they make great monitors. 1920x1080, very sharp. They do have to be hooked up through VGA and have to be set to “Pixel for Pixel” (I think that is what it is called) mode.
If you’re going for only one monitor, get one that can rotate. Landscape mode is great for games and portrait is great for browsing and the Dope.
Aaaaah, gotcha, thanks! Now I know what to look for and how to calculate it. I went to a PPI generator and apparently a 27" at 1080p is 81.6ppi. That’s lower than my current 900p monitor (89.37ppi).
Wanting to see for myself, I took a field trip today to Best Buy. They only had 1920x1080 monitors at a variety of sizes, from 21 - 27.
What I learned first of all is that OMG all of these monitors look awesomely huge! Which was awesome because I was beginning to think I wouldn’t notice much of an improvement by going to 24". Wrong!
Second, I learned that glossy sucks. I can’t imagine why anyone would want it–I wasn’t even in direct light and I could see myself on even light-colored windows. Sure, it looks nice when the monitor’s off, but what a distraction if you’re trying to do something with it!
Third, the only brands they had were Samsung (in a 27" glossy 1080p edition; not impressed since a huge-sized block of text looked jagged to me standing about 18 inches from the monitor), LG (awful), Dell (24" and much better thanks to its matte screen) and… um… Acer, I think? That was the smallest at 21" so I didn’t pay it much mind.
I wasn’t even that impressed with the 1080p 24" screens’ sharpness. I must be super-sensitive or something. The pictures (they altered between some wildlife footage and promotional text) just never looked all that sharp.
So, long story short, I’m deffo going for the 1200p, since I can’t afford the 1440p 27" models (and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to run it now without my graphics card turning to cinders).
That’s understandable! A tablet’s rarely even an arm’s length away from your face, while some people sit relatively far from their monitor (like moi–too far, that’s my problem).
Yes to both! 
I am very psyched. I’d be happy to hear more recs if anyone has 'em, but right now I’ve got those three as finalists, plus the likely purchase of the graphics card (I want to hear from drachillix to make sure it’ll fit in my rig). Definitely a helpful thread, thanks so much!
It’s been a while since I’ve been to Best Buy, but in the past they tended to overcompress their video streams such that most of the televisions looked horrible. That has nothing to do with resolution, but rather the insufficient quality they’re using for their in-store broadcast. Kinda like watching YouTube on a dialup connection. If your’e seeing big blurry blocks instead of individual pixels, that’s compression at work and not low resolution.
Not trying to dissuade you from the vertical pixels if you want them, but they won’t help with videos because – as you pointed out before – the movies would either have to be stretched or letterboxed. It wouldn’t make a 1080p movie sharper.
And actually, the further you away you sit, the less RESOLUTION and the more SIZE you need. Imagine if you were watching your 24" TV from a football field away – it wouldn’t matter if it was a 1080p display or a 480p, you could barely see the thing to begin with. The human eye has limited optical powers, so unless you have exceptionally good vision, use that chart to estimate what the average person can resolve at X size and Y distance.
Stop trying to confuse me with half-truths and gorilla dust! 
But seriously, wouldn’t the tigers have looked fuzzy (I mean, less sharp–all tigers are fuzzy!) on all the monitors, not just the Samsung 27" and the LG 24" screens? It wasn’t blocky the way JPGs have artifacts or super-low-res videos on YT. Just… out of focus. Like wearing a very slightly incorrect pair of glasses.
Except you totally are.
Right, I’m less concerned with videos than I am with working w/graphics and text, which is primarily my bread and butter.
True, but WAAAH you’re confusing me again! And here I was so happy I was closer to a decision! I thought you recommended forgoing the 27" size and sticking with a 24" monitor considering the money and so on? I dunno, if I can’t get a 27" with 1440p or even 1200p (I don’t think any 27s come at that resolution), I’d rather sacrifice the size for more pixels.
In the end what’s leaning me to the 1200p is the simple fact that I’ve grown used to 16:10 (1440x900) for the past, what, seven years? Going to 16:9 would feel like I’m compromising on vertical space, even though the screen would be bigger than the one I have now.
Thanks for helping me so much, Reply. I’m joking when I tut-tut your advice–I hope you know I really do appreciate it.
Bumping this thread just for an update. I’m now looking at the SDMB through my brand new ASUS PA248Q, 24" screen, 1920x1200, pivot/tilt/rotate monitor. This was the 2nd of the 3 last options I posted, for $272 with the rebate. And it is AWESOME.
I kept dithering between a 24" vs. 27", but now that I’m looking at the 24" I am very glad I didn’t go for the larger screen, because this one is just ridiculously huge, I already don’t know what I’ll do with all the extra space! 
Well, that’s not true: the first thing I did to check out the screen’s capabilities was pop in my DVD of The Two Towers and, yowsa, Helm’s Deep looked glorious. Of course since my resolution is 16:10, it was letterboxed, but I don’t care about that when there’s so much size going on! Even better was doing a quick test of playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which fills the screen beautifully and in a dark room was incredibly immersive. With the monitor about… oh, two feet away, right now? …the action still seemed to surround me. If I’d pulled the screen closer it would’ve been even better.
It was a hoot to read the monitor’s guide PDF in portrait mode. My God, it’s a revelation to have a document’s whole page so easily readable, rather scrunched down at 50% the way I used to read them. Editing will be so much more efficient.
I do have to figure out how to make use of all this real estate. Using my browser full-screen makes pages (at least flexible-width pages like the SDMB) almost comically wide.
The only ‘down side’ (and it’s a minor one) is that the four USB connectors that the monitor offers–a nice feature to be sure–are situated on the left-hand side. This works well for my headphones, but anything I’d use with my right hand (such as my wired mouse) crosses the monitor and gets in the way. Strange choice if you ask me. But I guess since this pivots 90 degrees clockwise, they needed to have the USB ports on the top rather the bottom. Obviously the ports are best-used for Bluetooth products.
Another cool feature–gosh, am I sounding like a spammer? I don’t mean to!–is that it is extremely easy to change the height of the monitor. Just lift it up and it stays where it is without the slightest effort; same with lowering it to any level. I’m not sure how that works, but I like that it’s not a pain to adjust.
Some people have complained about backlight bleeding, but I don’t notice it much. I don’t use a screensaver and have a black background, and unless I’m looking at the screen from a very sharp angle, it looks very dark indeed. If I didn’t have my taskbar it’s 98% as if the monitor were off altogether.
The only other negative beside the USB thing is that it didn’t come with an HDMI cable; only DisplayPort, DVI, VGA and USB 3.0 cables. (Although I don’t have USB 3.0 on my computer so it’s kinda moot.) Since I’d like to see stuff in HD for the first time ever–I don’t have a TV–I’ll have to buy that. Not a biggie.
But first I also picked up some decent speakers & a subwoofer, which should arrive in the next couple of days. I’m rather tempted to look for a Blu-Ray player too, but that’ll be a whole 'nother thread. (Sucks that most of them don’t come with software that lets you play the movies–what’s that about?)
Oh and as for the graphics card… since I have yet to hear back from the guy here on the SDMB who built and sold me my PC on what he’d recommend, I’m putting that purchase on hold. Just not sure what will fit best. In any event I suspect I’d be better off getting a superior card than the 750ti. I’m kind of a big advocate of buying hardware that’s slightly more advanced than I actually need; this way I save myself having to upgrade in two years. I think a 760 might be a better option and if I wait a few months it’ll probably come down enough in price to be a worthwhile purchase.
(I had a big disagreement about this with my brother-in-law, who advocates looking on these things as disposable commodities. He couldn’t believe I’d pay nearly $300 on a monitor when you can pick one up for $100. I’m like… why should I do that when I can afford something better now and it’ll last me longer? Why buy something I’ll only have to throw or give away? Seems like a waste to me.)
Anyhoo that’s the rather lengthy happy ending to my monitor angst. Many many thanks to all who helped!
Cool! I love the stand on my Asus too. It just WORKS. It’s like magic. I had a LG before that, and the stand sagged from the moment I opened up and only got worse over time. That monitor basically had one position: Too low and slightly tilted the wrong way. The Asus’s stand is a dream by comparison. The monitor is nice too I kinda wish I went with a 24" 1080p too. The 27" hurts my eyes because of its brightness and size.
If you have a DVI cable, that should work too (as long as your graphics card supports HDCP, and most modern ones do.) HDMI’s main advantage is that it’s easier to plug in and it supports audio too, but if you’re using a separate speaker set anyway it doesn’t much matter.
Concur. So stupid that it’s still so ridiculously hard to play Blu-Ray on a PC.
If you’re going to seriously start gaming, sure, a better card would be good. But they do lose value very quickly. Spending $300 or so on a card every 2 years might be reasonable, but above that, it’s often more economically effective to upgrade every few years than to buy the best card you can at any given time, because the technology changes so rapidly even a $1000 card is rapidly obsoleted two generations/years later.
Now is a good time to be a PC gamer, though, because Origin, Uplay, and Greenmangaming are all having their summer sales. Steam’s summer sale, the biggest of the bunch, is expected to happen next week or so. What you splurge on a graphics card, you can quickly make up in cheap games in one summer
And also, the new generation of consoles just came out – with rather lackluster specs – and so PC games will probably be designed for them (as the lowest common denominator) for the next 5-8 years, so hopefully an upgrade won’t be needed again for a while.
Oh, I forgot the primary point I wanted to make :smack:
It’s expected that Nvidia will release their new 800 series of graphics cards either early next year or perhaps late this year. If you can hold off long enough, the new series will be faster, cheaper, and much more power-efficient (meaning you won’t need as a big a power supply, for one thing). The 750 is the first one in this new series (despite its numbering), and that’s why it hits a price/performance/power sweet spot due to the new technology that’s not implemented in the other 7xx cards. The 8xx cards will be similar to the 750, just faster.