Last Friday my monitor screen suddenly went blank. Dam! I thought. My monitor blew out. So, having a spare, I swapped it out. Nada. After 5 days of trying various stuff, including testing a new video card, taking it to CompUSA where they said there was a short, and a bad fan, getting a new fan from Dell, seeing the thing working fine in the store, we plugged everything back in and started it up. Nada. Still nada. Swapped monitors. Nada. Asked my daughter to borrow HER monitor. Works. TWO monitors go bad, including one that was definitely working last year but has been sitting in a back room since then. We found another even older monitor, and this one works too, but it’s a bit out of focus. And it’s old, so I’m sure it’s about to blow up, too.
Which leads me to my question: Anyone got an opinion on what’s a reasonably priced monitor with staying power? I haven’t bought a monitor in, like way over 5 years. I will probably go for a flat screen, but am not set on it.
Rather depends on what you use it for. Research shows that the larger the screen size the higher the productivity, so if you use this for any kind of office work or graphical work then the largest you can afford is the way to go. And that means flat, large CRTs are huge front-to-back these days.
Both my husband and I just went to flat panel widescreen LCDs last week. Pretty damn nice.
He went with a 21 or 22 inch, mainly for gaming (I am a WOW widow), I went with a 19 inch, just for the hell of it.
I have to admit, it took me a couple of days to get used to it, but I have, and just, wow. I’ll never go back. Overall I still think the fonts could be a bit crisper, but I went with a pretty lowbrow model. The lovely xjetgirlx suggested Cleartype (if your running Windows XP) and said it helped a lot with font clarity, but I’m currently running 2000 on this machine and haven’t found something similar. Anyway, like I said, it could have been just me getting used to the monitor. It seems fine to me now, and I just bought the thing over the weekend.
I am so in love with it, I put in a request at work for one since my boss actually told me to order myself a larger monitor a year ago or so and I never bothered. When he saw the cost (we apparently have to buy from Dell and they are still in the $400-$500 range) he kind of backed off and said he’d look into it. I am so convinced that my productivity will increase with a widescreen at work I simply told him to let me know ASAP whether or not the company could provide one for me, because if they couldn’t, I’ll be buying myself another one and bringing it in.
I hear nothing but rave reviews about the Dell 2007WFP, a 20" flat panel wide screen monitor. I think it’s $459 right now, but they’ve had sales on it a couple of times over the last few months which brought it down around $370. It might be worth keeping an eye on if you’re in the market for something like that. I have a 19" Viewsonic widescreen which I’m happy with, but if I were in the market right now I’d definitely go with the Dell.
I’ll second the recommendation for ClearType Font Smoothing if you’re running Windows XP on a flat panel – it really makes a world of difference in font readability. (Sucks to hear they don’t have something similar for Windows 2000, psycat90.)
Mostly what I do when I go monitor shopping is I go to Newegg, go into the monitor section and then plug in a search for my requirements (monitor size, etc). Then I order the one with the highest number of good reviews. I figure if 200 geeks that are far more anal-retentive than I am about monitor quality like a monitor enough to give it a 5 star rating, then it’s good enough for me. Never fails.
My current home monitor is this model. I’m insanely happy with it–it has a pretty awesome response time, no ghosting that I’ve noticed, it’s sharp, has vivid color and it’s Inexpensive, too.
My only caveat is to get dvi if your video card supports it. It’s nice.
Thanks, all. Of course, while I was away at work today, my beloved husband went out & bought a ViewSonic 19" VA902b, and my dear daughter hooked it up.
But they promise they’ll return or exchange if I hate it. Right now I’m not sure.