Saturday, December 30, 2006

New monitor

Picked up a new monitor as my OLD 19" CRT was really on its last legs. (Lots of issues with consistent brightness and other elements on the same scan line would throw shadows across the rest of the scan line.)

I've been thinking about going widescreen for a while. And switching to LCD was pretty much a given (less weight and bulk to deal with). The only downside with widescreen is that older 4:3 aspect ratio games don't work as well (or you run them in windowed mode).

Price have also dropped quite a bit on the LCDs.

XGA - 1024x768 (15" $155-$190)
SXGA - 1280x1024 (17" to 19" $150-$200)
UXGA - 1600x1200 (20" to 22" $355-$480)

WXGA - 1440x900 (19" $180-$270)
WSXGA - 1680x1050 (20" to 22" $240-$340)
WUXGA - 1920x1200 (24" to 26" $640-$800)

The sweet spot right now is either the SXGA or the WXGA. I ended up going with a 20" WSXGA, but now wish I could've found the 22" WSXGA size (larger pixels). Still, the 20" WSXGA is nothing to sneeze at. Place (2) 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper side by side and you'll see how big this display is. The price on it wasn't bad either.

The model I picked is the Asus MW201U. Which is one of the few widescreen monitors (maybe the only) that includes a headphone jack in the monitor. The speakers are tiny 1W and sound a bit tinny, but it's nice not to have to deal with external speakers. Plus I can hook in my headphones directly.

The main downer of this display is that it's not part of the Asus Zero Bright Dot (ZBD) plan. So I'll have to live with a bright blue pixel that is stuck. It's really only noticeable with black backgrounds and almost vanishes if you're over 1 meter away. So if you're really worried, makes sure you pick one of the Asus displays marked as "ZBD" (and double-check it).

OTOH, this is the first LCD (out of 6 that I've used) that has a stuck pixel.

The question for work is whether we outfit people with a single 16:10 ratio display or a pair of 4:3 displays. Most people in the office are still using 17" CRTs, which is something that I've wanted to address for a few years now. We may start addressing that at the end of 2007 and into 2008. Maybe by then the WSXGA displays will have dropped another $50-$100 and they'll be in the sweet spot.

I bet that if I dropped one of these on the desk of someone who does a lot of document work, they'll be the envy of the entire office. So there's going to be a little politicking involved. And until the 17" CRTs start dying, I won't have much of a business case for switching to the widescreen LCDs.

However... one thing I don't like about the Asus is that there's no way to tell it *not* to stretch the image to fill the screen. Which makes it nigh impossible to run 4:3 games in full-screen. I have yet to figure out whether the NVIDIA card can be setup to side step this issue. (Like outputting a 1680x1050 image to the card, but only showing 1280x1024 to the game.)

What I may do is use my el-cheapo 1280x1024 LCD to play 4:3 games. Or maybe I need to switch to DVI inputs.

Labels: 2006, Monitors

posted by Wuphon's at 6:33 AM