Not sure what to buy? Want 3 Screens

Soldato
Joined
30 Dec 2004
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Location
London
Hey all

Got a friend looking to buy 3 monitors and hes asked me to 'spec him up'.

However, as we all do, looking for the best value for money.

He is looking to spend around £150 per screen, and isn't too fussed on the panels dramatically - if he can get a better panel for a few £ more then fair enough but thats not his main priority.

He must have 24", which is of course 1920x1080 (if 1920x1200 can be found that would be great, but price jump for the extra 120 pixels is quite high!).

He was looking at getting 2x 27" (we saw the Iiyama, but also noticed the resolution is 1920x1080 so isn't bigger desktop real estate wise...) and the Dells are a bit expensive at £800 each.

I haven't seen any cheap versions of the 'dells' such as a cheap high res 27", anyone know of any?

I'd like to see your thoughts - they are mainly for 2D work, but if it can be a monitor which is good at gaming also that will be a bonus.

Thanks
 
3x Benq BL2400PT if he can stretch his budget by £20 a screen. They are VA panels and have a displayport which is a godsend if he is going to use a ATI card.
 
Out of curiousity, if you were going for the 1920x1200 option, what monitors would you recommend?
There aren't many affordable 1920x1200 monitors left on the market, unfortunately. Here's a few 24" monitors that I've been looking at:

There's the Samsung 2443DW 24" TN panel for about £220. Or you can pick up it's predecessor the 2443BW for about £200. They're basically the same except the DW has a DisplayPort.

I wrote some my thoughts on those 2 models previously here:
crackerbear said:
The 2443DW is too new and there are virtually no reviews or user feedback on it, however it's basically the same as the 2443BW which gets a lot of mixed reviews. The majority seem to like it (see here, here & here), but there are others that complain of appalling colour shifting (see here & here) - amplified by the fact it's so big that even viewing the screen dead on, you'll still see the colour shift. There are also a few reports of a defect where the monitor buzzes if the brightness is set any lower than 100. Whether they've fixed these issues or not in the 2443DW, I don't know. The colour shifting issue is just a limitation to TN panel technology.

There's the HP ZR24w 24" e-IPS panel (review here), which costs about £305. Decent all rounder for the price, it doesn't have any scaling options so 16:9 content will be stretched to 16:10, this isn't so much of a problem if you're only going to use the monitor on your PC as your graphics card can override the scaling. The black levels and contrast aren't the best, but it's not that bad.

There's the Dell U2410 24" H-IPS panel (review here), which costs about £460. High end monitor, uses wide gamut so you may have some colour issues (like over saturation) depending on the application. Has pretty much every input you can want for a monitor, but like the HP above, has mediocre black levels and contrast.

You'll have to start looking at 25"+ monitors in order to find more that use 1920x1200 natively.
 
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