How To Buy A Monitor

Chris Pirillo teachs the basics of monitor purchasing.

So, Moo, from the chat room decided to submit a top five list, top five tips for buying a new monitor. Should be good, what do you think? Number one, know what you want. Your choice of monitor should depend on what you are doing. While LCD monitors tend to be larger and thinner, obviously, they sometimes lack response time and overall quality of image. If you are a gamer, you may have to dish out a few extra bucks to get a monitor that is big but can also suit your graphical and speed needs. If you are just a regular user and you do not do all the graphical stuff, then you can sacrifice some resolution and speed. Although, I would not recommend dropping off too much quality in your choice as you may wind up liking your old CRT monitor better. He is talking about response time. If you ever noticed how an image make ghost as it moves across and LCD monitor. That is a slower response time or if it tears, response time may be slower. And certainly, LCD’s are coming down in response time and in some cases matching those that you might find response times in old CRT’s. However, despite that shortcoming with LCD’s, I could never consider using CRT ever again. They hurt my eyes compared to LCD’s for a lot of reasons. Number two, bigger is not always better. You may think that when buying a monitor nowadays is all about size, but you are wrong. The bigger you go the more graphical power you are going to need in terms of a video card and sometimes, the resolution suffers. Find a balance between size and resolution that works best for you and your style. So just because you have, let us say, 17-inch LCD, the size of the monitor, it does not mean that you are going to have a very high resolution. The resolution for that monitor may only be rated at 1024 x 768, that is the number of pixels across by the numbers of pixels vertically. And that is just not that good. Some monitor should sport at least, I would say, 1280 x 1024 if it is not a wide screen monitor, of course. So, you got to watch resolution, not just physical size. There is a big difference between the two. Number three, brand names are not always the way to go. When buying things like computers and accessories, people tend to stay with a big name which is not always necessary. Small name companies usually have cheaper equipment and it is not far below brand name qualities. You can get larger, nicer generic monitors for the same price as smaller slightly higher resolution monitors from a brand name company. For instance, I got 30-inch monitor sitting behind me. They have got Dell stamp on the front of them but Dell does not actually manufacture the actual monitors. They have just got their name stamped upon them. And the difference between these monitors and let us says the 30 inches offered by Apples. Well Apples are more expensive at a different color on the outside and the different logo, and that is about it. For all intents and purposes, they are the same thing. They are all boiling down to brand. So, you do the math. Number four make sure your graphics cards can support the monitor. This is probably the most important thing to do before you go out and make a purchase. As if you have lower quality graphics cards, larger monitors may not get up to the full resolution allowed. I made this mistake and now have a 22-inch monitor on second best settings which is not bad but it could be better. You want to get the best resolution set for your computer so you are stuck with blurry text and pixilated images. It is also very important to know. For example, these 30-inch monitors need a dual DBI port of the back of my video card. Well luckily enough, my video card has dual DBI so I can run 30-inch monitors. There are also some cases that you may have a monitor that only supports VGA, that particular connection. And if your video card does have VGA in, well then, you are in need to get a converter, VGA to DBI converter. So doing your homework before running out on shopping is very important. Point well taken. Number five, pre search before you buy. Before you got on honk a couple of dollars on your new screen, honk, okay, that is what the kids are calling that these days. Read reviews submitted by people who have brought it before you. These reviews can have vital information on glitches in the product or problems that have happened with them. You can find these reviews on many of the sites you can purchase these from like best buyers circuit city who might have personally seen to let costumers write their own reviews on their websites. If you cannot find it on any of those sites, use your google foo and there is sure to be someone to have written a review about it. It is true but I would say with the monitors and screens, seeing is believing. I took a leap of faith when getting these particular monitors as sent to me by Dell because I did not know how images would look. I did not know how good text would appear on the screens. This is much homework because I possibly could do but ultimately I kept my fingers crossed and these have been very, very nice monitors. I am very, very pleases with them. I do not have a dead pixel yet and a dead pixel would certainly annoy me it does happen with LCD’s. It is certainly is not the reason to return a monitor unless of course you are perfectionist because in some cases, certain amount of dead pixels on an LCD are acceptable by the manufacturer. You should check that, too when reading and researching your reviews. You are welcome to email me and ask me what I think but I am likely going to turn you back to the community because honestly, I do not have a review shop here. I do not review a lot of hardware because I just cannot afford it. I mean I do not have that much space here and besides, I am not made of money. You know what I am saying? So I do my own research and hopefully, if you want to bout your research and feedback of other members in our chat room, you are welcome to do that.