Widescreeeeeeeeen

2006/04/20 16:26:00

A couple of weeks ago I finally gave in and brought a new monitor. Having already dropped the resolution on my old 19″ CRT to 1024×768 because the picture was a bit fuzzy I was now starting to bump up the font size and so I decided enough was enough.

After doing some reading and looking at what was available I had decided on a good 17″ LCD being the thing to get. This would give me a decent dot pitch and still be cheap. So off we went to PCWorld to do some research.

We stopped off at the apple store so that I could lust over the £2000 30″ display before getting back to real life! Then at PCworld we had the usual problems with getting staff who know what a DVI input is and having a spec sheet that is in some way related to the monitor it is next to. My favoriate was the fact that all the PC were setup to show really bad resolutions so that no matter what monitor you looked at they all looked really poor. So after a little tweaking and loading in some test photos from Sarahs USB memory stick I was totally confused. I still liked the idea of a 17″ with the option of adding a second later, 19″ were just to big for the 1280×1024 resolution, but now some of the widescreen ones were tempting me.
Off to Smiths for some research, copies of a couple of PC magazines that were doing specials on monitors and then it was back home for some serious research.

Some time later and a lot of reading and I had the following

• Philips Brilliance 200W6 - 20″ Widescreen - 1680×1050 - £330
• Dell 2405FP - 24″ Widescreen - 1920 x 1200 - £600
• Philips 170B6 - 17″ - 1024×768 - £170
• Apple 30″ Cinema - 2560 x 1600- £1800!!!

So as usual a full range, there were also a number of others, sony ?ExtraBright and Acer. I also looked at Eizo range as well because they have the best colour or so I am told but they were just too expensive.
In the end I went for the Philips wide screen, it was a little more than I had wanted to spend (like that is the first time that has happend) but I think it’s worth it. It has the higher dot pitch like the 17″ but gives me an extra half a screen on the side. Clear and bright and the brightness is consistant from all angles which is good for photos. It is taking me some time to get used to having all this desktop space but photo editing and programming where I need a lot of windows on the screen are a lot easier. Well worth the spend.
To top it all off I brought it from PCWorld because they were £30 cheaper than anybody else then when I got there the only one they had was a return that was working fine and so they knocked another 5% off.

To try and justify this in some way it does use a lot more power than the old CRT, 33W as opposed to over 80. And it is Lead free!

Anybody want a slightly fuzzy 19″ CRT monitor? Free to a good ( or any ) home.

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