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Tips on How to Choose a Monitor

By Alex Austin

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The following article is based on years of experience. It is provided as a free service to our customers and visitors. However, Directron.com is not responsible for any damage as a result of following any of this advice.

What size to buy? 17" or 19" or 20" or 22" or 24"+ ??? There is an easy answer, the largest monitor will provide you with the best experience. However, you have to consider your desk space, will it fit? Also, if you have a weak video card, new native resolution the bigger monitor provides might make your games a slide-show experience (the games will run fine at non-native resolution but will not look as sharp). If you are a gamer, make sure your video card is fast enough to play at the native resolution of the new LCD for more enjoyment. It is not a bad idea to upgrade your video card with a purchase of a new monitor to run at new resolutions smoothly.

Nowadays TVs can work very well as monitors, especially the LCD kind. Therefore, your monitor size can be anything from 26", 37", 40", 42", 47", 50", 62", 65" and up. Most TVs can accept VGA, DVI, or simply HDMI connections. The HDMI connection can be run from DVI video card with a cheap adapter into HDMI.

What is a native resolution? Native resolution is the physical count of pixels on the monitor. Other resolutions become scaled to fit the physical pixels and it results in a more washed out and blurred image. Thus, on LCDs it is the best to run your display in native resolution for best image quality (sharper, more colorful). Usually, the native resolution is simply stated in the description of the item.

Widescreen 16:10 or 4:3 (square ratio)? It is more of a personal preference. Widescreen allows you to watch new widescreen movies without black bars. Thus, widescreens are majorly used for multimedia purposes. The square ratio kind is best to use in the office, unless you do Excel, the widescreen will not be of much use over the 4:3 ratio. If you are a gamer, note that older games will not work well with widescreen resolutions and the image might be horizontally stretched (depending on abilities of a monitor circuitry to provide 1:1 mapping). Also, take a note that older (2006 and older) video cards were not made to support widescreens and you might need a new video card to take advantage of new widescreen resolutions. However, one of the positive sides in wide screen resolution is that some premium LCD brands even have a physical rotation feature built in the stands of their monitors, it allows to rotate the screen 90 degrees to show webpages and word documents in their entirety naturally like on a page of a paper.

Most monitors on the back have screw holes compatible with VESA standard to allow use of thousand different mounting systems. Such mounting systems remove a need for a base of a monitor (the base usually can be removed) and support a monitor in a variety of ways. Most popular is an arm extension type of support that affixes to a table and allows to manipulate a monitor on all three axis. Other mounting systems can hold two or more monitors to produce and array of screens, usually used in advertisement, medical, and finance industries. Yet, nowadays the mounts are not priced only for the business, many home users rotate their widescreen monitors horizontally to view webpages in a more convenient manner with VESA compatible stands. Almost all recent ATI or nVidia chipsets allow to rotate the desktop or fit the image on any custom resolution. The VESA on the back of the monitors may come in 2 sizes, 90x90 and 100x100. Most stands come with adapters to fit any of these sizes.

DVI (digital) or VGA (analog)? This is an easy decision, it simply depends on what your video card supports. Analog is for the older and cheaper cards but DVI is strongly overtakes today's market share. Therefore, before buying a monitor for a VGA connection consider updating your video card to have an ability to utilize a DVI connector and buy a monitor with DVI connection. The DVI is a much better choice than VGA analog, it gives a more stable picture (no shaking) with more accurate and vivid colors, plus, no ghosting is produced. Analog VGA wire is subject to magnetic interference to a much higher degree than DVI. Thus, it is recommended to have a DVI setup to see colors as they were meant to. The larger monitors have higher native resolution and DVI often is the only choice to supply the needed bandwidth. The most cheap monitors still feature only VGA connector while next step up models have both DVI and VGA connectors for most compatibility. Be warned that value monitors often do not include a VGA or DVI cable to appear cheaper in price. Note that DVI video cards can be also connected to TVs or monitors with HDMI inputs using a few dollars adapter.

Depending on your DVI video card, you might be able to convert DVI signal to VGA with a very cheap adapter. If your video card has DVI-I then it carries in addition an analog signal which can be fed to VGA connector and run a monitor with only available VGA connection. On performance video cards it is somewhat likely that the DVI connector is DVI-D and is only digital without any analog signal added. Such cards are thought to be utilized only on expensive monitors with full DVI capability. It is rather not easy to find out if your card is DVI-I or DVI-D by physical inspection.

If you are using a VGA interface, please make sure you are using a quality cable. Many low grade or abused cables make a picture much worse than it should be. Common visual artifacts are a shift in color, blur, pulsating or a shaking picture. The cable is usually not included with value monitors to keep prices down. Be sure to have one on hands or to order a new cable.

The latest input for the monitors is a Display Port. It is a cheap, license free alternative to its more costly HDMI cousin with a few advantages over DVI. For now the Display Port is featured in the most new and ultra expensive screens and is expected to be the next popular standard for computer monitors.

What else to look for when purchasing an LCD monitor? Well, a contrast ratio is one thing. 700:1 (seven hundred to one) or higher will give you much better blacks and vivid colors than 400:1 ratio. Also note, more expensive monitor with 500:1 ratio might actually give you a better image than a cheaper one with 700:1 (inflated and unsubstantiated ratio). A contrast ratio tells you black are the black colors on the monitor. Many cheap monitors have the most black colors of about dark gray color, these are the ones with lower contrast ratio and on them a picture seems washed out due to inability to represent sharpness well (which is an optical illusion of contrast between light and dark shades). It is also advisable to purchase premium brands for outmost satisfying picture quality and long life.

There is a growing trend, a technology that offers dynamic contrast ratios in monitors. Be ware of this one since it is a mostly a marketing scheme to show a blown up number for contrast ratio than the monitor can physically deliver. A dynamic contrast ratio tries to fool a human eye into seeing more contrast but it only barely works when watching movies. Overall, it is gives no useful advantage, thus, be careful when comparing contrast ratio numbers between a monitor that supports a dynamic contrast ratio and the one that doesn't. Higher number in this case does not make it better.

Moreover, a response rate in milliseconds is an important feature if you are a gamer. When first LCD monitors came out, their response time was about 24ms. Scrolling or gaming, even fast movie scenes could trigger blurring ghosting effect. However, nowadays this is eliminated with most monitors manufactured today have 8ms or even quicker response time that no longer produces the undesired motion blur effect. Gaming monitors nowadays advertise 2 or 3 ms response time, cheaper brands overclock their LCD response times, such a practice may cause artifacts to appear on a screen during fast movements of a picture as a result. Therefore, we recommend premium brands for gaming use.

A viewing angle is the maximum angle a display can be viewed at with an acceptable visual performance. If you are standing directly before the monitor and looking right in the center, you witness the best picture. However, if you are to move either way sideways, you would see that the image becomes darker and at some point even it inverts the colors... The LCD technology is not perfect and does suffer from viewing angle problem where any viewing at an angle gives you a worse picture depending how far you have deviated from the center. How badly the viewing angle can affect can differ from horizontal and vertical angles of the same screen.

Damaged pixels: More premium brands also have a lesser degree of damaged pixels on their panels than cheaper brands that have lesser quality control. During manufacturing some low percentage of LCD screens come with one or a few pixels that do not light up or are stuck with a specific color. While the manufacturers could in fact throw away these marked screens, they would be operating at a loss. Thus, the damaged pixels now is standard in LCD market until the manufacturing method improves or another technology will overtake LCD. When you buy an LCD monitor there is a low chance (1-2%) that your monitor will have any kind of damage pixels. The dead pixels are less visible since they are simply black but stuck (colored) pixels are most visible on black backgrounds and are a sore during movie watching. Unfortunately, the manufacturers have their own rules on how many damaged pixels is too excessive to warrant a replacement. Fortunately, Directron.com offers a service which gives you a perfect screen.

As a rule, speakers on LCD monitors never provide a good enough sound due to their small size (bass gets mostly left out). It is recommended to buy a separate stand-alone set of speakers with a subwoofer for a fuller sound. Any cheap stand-alone set of speakers will sound better than monitor built-in speakers in most cases. The monitors that don't feature speakers have a more attractive thinner bezel. Some larger monitors may even feature a USB hub to bring connection closer for such devices as input, webcameras, and sound.

Probably it has gone mostly unnoticed but the beige color is no longer popular or produced. There are only black and silver (or combination of) monitors available on the market now. These colors do not turn yellow overtime and are simply more stylish. If you are using your monitor mostly in dark environment then it would be advisable to buy a black frame LCD for lesser distractions through the possible reflections on the silver frames.

There is a new technology in LCDs monitors. It is a special back lighting that is using LEDs. Overall, this new technology allows for better contrast, truer and wider range of colors, plus monitors require less energy to operate. In addition, it is believed that this new LED backlight will help avoid current common backlight failures that are a result of the current cold cathode fluorescent lamp technology.

The power supply is the most common culprit for failing monitors. During early days of LCD market the LCD monitors were coming with external power supply and all it took is a new "power brick" to heal your monitor. Nowadays the power supply is internal and because of this the LCD monitors are more often discarded and dangerous chemicals are poisoning the landfills. If you are an environment conscious person, LCDs are two fold. While needing much less energy to operate, the LCD screen is poisonous and there are only a few places that truly recycle LCD screens. Please, do recycle your old LCDs properly.

LCD monitors are EXTREMELY easy to scratch verses their older CRT counterparts, plastic vs. glass. Do take care when moving or wiping your new LCD monitors. Do not use any solvents or alcohol based cleaning solutions since they may permanently react with the screen.

Why there is such a price difference among monitors? For one, it is the quality of the monitor plus any included support, warranty. There are different grades of LCD panels: A-B-C-lower. The cheaper the monitor, lesser grade LCD panel is used, shorter the warranty is offered. Higher grade LCD panels are more sharp, brighter colors, no bleeding (mixing) of neighboring colors, quicker response, truer whites and blacks that make up contrast, a solid non-shaking picture, no pulsating colors, no bshift in color presentation. It is remotely possible that low grade panels may negatively affect your vision if used for an extended amount of time. That is why we recommend to invest additional $20-$50 for a more quality monitor, in the end personal health matters.

If you find this article useful, please create a link to it from your website or tell a friend about it. If you have any comments or suggestions about this article, please email information@directron.us

Last updated: 07/09/08

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