Buying a monitor

minor threat

this may be more G&T, but i figured i'd start here and see where it gets me.

to make a long story short, i'm considering designing a new computer and don't want to get raped on a monitor that any site i might buy from would try and convince me to buy. in my search i found this and it appears to be about what i'm looking for.

basically i need two questions answered:

1. is that a good deal?
2. if not, what should i look for/avoid?

exoplasm

I don't know how good of a deal that is (I use my old CRT lol) but I would say that's a good monitor.

Here is a little breakdown on LCD shopping:

Samsung makes LCD panels, which many other manufacturers use in their monitors. Samsung apparently has the highest quality panels for monitors (or did anyway). Dell is one company that uses Samsung panels in their monitors.

Contrast ratio is important. This monitor is 700:1 which is pretty good. The higher the better.

Response time is MOST important for games and videos. Anything more than 12ms will look like crap when watching videos. Anything more than 16ms will make your games ghost. This one is 5ms, which is excellent. For response time, lower is better.

BenQ, Hanns-G, Dell all make great monitors, and of course Samsung does as well, but Samsung's monitors usually cost more.

robaal

I suggest you only buy a monitor that you've actually seen.

Things to look for are uniformity of the backlight - best seen on a competely black screen.
Smoothness of colour gradients - check them on different contrast settings.
If the monitor has very low response time (like 2ms) then look for artifacts trailing behind moving objects, like this whiter shadow after black text:

Septus

I've also been told a very important spec are display colors. They're usually 16.2 million(6 bit) or 16.7 million(8 bit), and supposedly the latter is much better.

vonPoonBurGer

exoplasm wrote:

Samsung makes LCD panels, which many other manufacturers use in their monitors. Samsung apparently has the highest quality panels for monitors (or did anyway). Dell is one company that uses Samsung panels in their monitors.

One would hope that the panel would be good then, but it looks like they may have skimped other parts of the unit. In particular, several of the reviews I've seen have mentioned backlight bleeding. The one I linked also mentioned some slight ghosting in games, which seems kind of surprising on a panel rated at 5ms refresh time. There's so much gamesmanship that goes on with those spec ratings, though (e.g. only measuring response times between certain colors / frequencies), they can't really be trusted. It might be wise to take robaal's advice and check it out in person if you're at all uncertain.

minor threat

went to best buy and circuit city, poked around, found something i think i want to purchase but i figured i'd give it a day to think it over and confer with people more knowledgeable than myself.

westinghouse?

this monitor was the best of the ones they had on display. great contrast, nice colors. and it's on sale for 189, which is always a plus. all the reviews i've found say it's a pretty good deal. is there anything i should know about westinghouse that no one is telling me?

iTunesIsEvil

Have you looked at Dell monitors yet? I personally love every monitor I've bought from them. Of course YMMV.

You may wanna check these out:

2007WFP Wide-Screen Black Flat Panel Monitor (20.1")
E207WFP 20-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor