Monitor Options

Dan7

Dan7

Dan7

Soldato
Joined
11 Dec 2003
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Location
Milton Keynes
Finally decided to upgrade my setup, I currently have a 17" Iiyama E435S, which has been a superb monitor, but I feel it's a little dated now!

Realistically I have about £350 to spend, but I'm not quite sure what I want (that's where you lot come in ;) )

Having a look around I have the following options:

2 x 19" Standard Screens
2 x 19" Widescreens (HannsG or Belinea ? )
1 x 20" Widescreen (Haven't got a clue which one to go for)

Although two 19" widescreens would be nice, I'm thinking it might be a little overkill, and I'm not too sure about the quality of the budget screens? (I would consider getting a 20" widescreen and using my current 17" as a 2nd monitor).

Main uses would be playing Warcraft 3 and First Person Shootemups, and general IRCing and MSNing - so it needs to be a bit of an all rounder.

Are my requirements too high (for the price), I'm so not clued up when it comes to TFTs (The last one I bought was £270 for a 17"!)

Any help would be appreciated!


[edit : DVI would be nice but not essential, the graphics card I am using is a 7800GT ]
 
I think personally i would stick with a single 20" screen and get a really nice one. Gaming is not really very easy across multi monitors, and like you say, might well be overkill. Would be nice to have a single bigger screen, possibly a WS model which would really be nice for gaming.

Good news is, you have plenty of excellent models to choose from. You might want to try running through The TFT Selector which recommends all the best and most popular models. The Belinea 102035W, Viewsonic VX2025WM and Dell 2007WFP are all very well priced at <£300 and all offer very good all round performance. Thanks to their P-MVA or S-IPS panel technology they all offer good all round performance including wide viewing angles, good black depth, good colour depth and thanks to overdrive application; a good response time and gaming performance. The Dell is a bargain at the price, and has loads of nice extra features like tilt, pivot, rotate, and loads of video inputs. A very hot screen right now.

Perhaps the most talked about 20"WS at the moment is the NEC LCD20WGX2, which is admittedly a little over budget. However, this offers arguably some of the most responsive performance from any panel in the market and so for a gamer, this is an excellent choice. If you want to strecth the budget a little, this is a very popular and impressive screen. If not, the other models listed above are all very good as well

hth
 
Cheers for the detailed response!

Leaning towards the Belinea (Dell kit doesn't normally agree with me ;) ), however I've been told that the Samsung SyncMaster 940 19" widescreen is a great monitor for around the £150 mark?


Although I'd love to get the Belinea, if there are cheaper decent 19" alternatives it might be a better option (Don't want to eat into my bank balance too much just before I leave for uni!)

However I've also been told that 20"'s are the way to go due to the resolution of the 19" panels being pretty poor (compared to the size!), am i misinformed?

sorry if its coming across a bit jumbled, its all going whoosh over my head ;)
 
no worries :)

The reason some people say the 19" size is a little "wasted" is because they only have the same maximum resolution (1280 x 1024) as a 17" model. The 20" models have a nice jump up from that, with the WS displays being 1680 x 1050 resolution. There are some nice 19"WS models around but res is still low (1440 x 900). One main thing to consider is that the 19" models in the WS market are all using TN Film panel technology which is inferior in many ways to technologies used more widely in the 20" market.

The Samsung 940W uses TN Film which as compared with the Belinea's Premium MVA panel technology has much more restrictive vieiwng angles, noiser movie playback, lower black depth and only a 6 bit colour depth instead of 8 bit. The Belinea is certainly a much more all round screen than a TN Film panel can offer. More info on panel types here which should help you (along with pretty much everything else you might need to know! :p) However, if you wanted to save money the 19"WS market is pretty good and well priced certainly.
 
no worries, hope you enjoy it. One note, the Viewsonic VX2025WM uses the exact same panel, but colours are more accurate out of the box. Depends whether you like the design or not, but worth noting as a possible option
 
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