Ok, my faithful 17" CRT monitor is finally giving up the ghost. It randomly displays a yellowish color.

Anyway, the world of monitors has changed over the last million years since I had to get a new one. I guess everything is either LCD or LED.

I need whatever is necessary for gaming and web surfing. Gaming is my main concern.

Size? Price range?

I was worried when I went from CRT to LCD. I made sure to get one with a low response time and I've been happy with it. The old ones used to ghost horribly but I haven't noticed that in any recent monitor, even the crappy one that came bundled with my wife's $500 costco hp special.

The space is only big enough for about a 20" and the price... well, the cheaper the better. I'm hoping for some sales right after Christmas.

@Brian - yes, fear of moving away from CRT...

I guess widescreen or 16:9 is the standard nowadays?

I prefer 16:10, but I guess you have to take what you can get. If viewing angle is important to you, you'll need an IPS, otherwise, after a low end crt, a 22" LCD should be great.

Go 1080p or go home.

If you can swing a 22", my HP W2207 is the best looking monitor I have ever seen. Colors are absolutely fantastic and it is very sharp and clear.

I am going to pick on you and use you as an example of someone who doesn't know anything about LCDs. Just because I see things like this everywhere and they don't really tell you anything useful about the product.


In what way? This seems to be a TN film panel, which means that the color is probably relatively bad by any objective standard. If it's the best LCD you've ever seen, then you've never seen a really good LCD.


ALL LCDs are sharp and clear. The pixels are discrete. The only way an LCD CAN'T be sharp is if there's some kind of awful bleeding from adjacent pixels, but that should be immediately obvious. I have old TN film monitors from around 2004 and they are just as "sharp and clear" as my S-IPS Dell 2007FP, yet my Dell is better in every measurable fashion.

Also don't be too worried about response time. My Dells have a 16 ms response time and they're fine. Yes, there is some ghosting, but you get used to it about 30 minutes in and never notice it again. Your brain is good at that whole sensory adaptation thing.

I literally only have room for a 20" max. :/

And yes, Brian and Newegg both have me seriously considering the response time. I find it odd and interesting that you, Emon, would say otherwise.

I only mean that you don't need 2ms response time. Even IPS panels, which are usually higher, are down to 8 these days, which is fine.

Yeah, there's a point where it doesn't matter. I'd easily take my IPS monitor with a 7 ms response time or my older one with a 12 ms response time over a 2 ms response time TN monitor.

Blah blah blah, all I'm saying it is looks amazing and the colors are rich and vibrant over other lcds I have seen which look dull and washed out.

I know your emon and you will argue anything and everything into oblivion so that's all I'm saying about that.

I'm not trying to argue anything for the sake of argument nor I am trying to insult you. A lot of people make really subjective comments about LCDs and they're pretty much worthless and do nothing to help people out.

Most reviews are "A++ looks good dawg" without providing any quantitative measure of image quality. bit-tech.net does a good job of LCD reviews because they measure things like ghosting, color gamut, black levels and backlight bleeding in a more objective manner. Or at least provide good photos that expose problems with image quality.

Ok, I can see where your coming from when putting it like that, sorry for the generalized review of the screen. I know a TN panel is only going to be so good when compared to other types of monitors, I just enjoy the display on the HP.

I don't know if this will make any sense, but maybe you can take my lame-mans description and translate it into factual information, this is something I noticed right away with all HP displays:

When looking at fonts on most monitors you can see the pixes in the curvature of the lettering, especially letters like "S" etc. With the HP its almost like it uses, for lack of a better term, Anti-Aliasing. Its not that characters are blurred to lessen the pixel noise(?) they just seem to display sharper, which is I guess why I said "sharp" when I describe the monitor, compared to other LCD's I have seen (Acer for example).

I don't know if that makes any sense but there you go.

As for the color of the monitor, I guess I could describe it like phone screens.. most monitors are like the phone screens we see every day, but the HP's is something like Samsung's AMOLED display or Apple's Retina display when it comes to the warmth and richness of the color.

Were you viewing the other displays in a store setup? Maybe they didn't have ClearType turned on. More likely they were using the VGA input and were misadjusted. If the width/height aren't correct, the image will be blurry.

I noticed it mostly at my workplace where they used Acer monitors. I always had mine on maximum resolution, must have just been a terrible monitor.

That's almost certainly clear type being turned off. You can probably make any monitor look similarly "good" by just running the windows color calibration wizard and tweaking the contrast, brightness and saturation settings to your liking.

I have an Acer tn that looks really bad out of the box, but with a little tweaking, it looks better than most store display's which are essentially luck of the draw when it comes to calibration. I used a hardware calibrator, but with a tn, Window's guesstimate calibration is probably good enough.

Could be screen dimensions being set wrong. If the monitor has auto adjust, use that and it should be pretty much perfect. If it doesn't, you have to set the width and height by hand. I have a really really old LCD from around 2000 and it's impossible to set the dimensions such that the entire screen isn't blurry. You can get the pixels to line up with the input on one half, but not the other.