A few questions about monitor choice

[mato]

Hi all

Looking to buy a monitor to use for both my PC and laptop and have a few of questions:

Some of the monitors I've been looking at buying don't have HDMI input - not a problem for the PC, but my laptop only outputs HDMI or VGA.
Now I don't know much in this area, but I'm presuming that I'd be missing out on something if I used VGA, am I right?
So I've been told one can get HDMI->DVI converters - am I missing out on anything by using one of these?

The second question is about using the laptop and PC - is there some sort of box I can buy to switch between laptop and PC so I don't have to plug the cables in and out each time I want to swap?

Thirdly, I love Dell monitors and have been looking at the UltraSharp 23" and was wondering about the resolution - 1920x1080 instead of 1920x1200 - I've read some reviews saying that the extra pixels can make a lot of difference?

What are people's views? As well as general PC use, I watch lots of movies and do a bit of fps gaming here and there, but not an awful lot.

Thanks in advance for your help

Tom

 

[Emphacy]

Hello.

There are 3 types of Monitor connection. D-Sub (VGA), DVI and HDMI. VGA is an analogue connection and thus quality is reduced particularly on high resolution monitors such as a 23" monitor.
Both DVI and HDMI are digital and carry over full high quality data, the difference being is that HDMI can also carry over audio for a monitor with speakers or an Audio Out Jack.

Through my experience, using VGA (Analogue) causes a serious decrease in quality. I recently bought a 24" monitor and noticed flickering in grey areas. Also with most graphics cards now using DVI and HDMI, VGA is becoming obsolete.

If you buy a monitor, I'd say choose a 1920x1080 (1080p) monitor as the resolution is most suitable for HD movies and works well with games.
With larger monitors tearing can occur in games, thus you would need to enable V-Sync which will sync the game frame rate with your monitor refresh rate (usually 60Hz).

I recently bought a 24" BenQ G2420HD monitor, it's one of the cheapest out there and has HDMI, DVI and VGA input.
You can buy a DVI to VGA converter but the quality is still reduced as I found out. For the best quality on your monitor buy a good DVI or HDMI cable.

 

[mato]

Thanks, very helpful advice. Any other opinions?