Chris Upgrades His Monitor

I figured I had lived in the world of yesteryear for far too long – it was time to retire the CRT monitor that had served me faithfully for so long. It was an LG Flatron T910B (19″ flat screen CRT) which cost around $380 brand new. A fine monitor indeed. I think I finally decided to upgrade because my sister recently got a LG Flatron L194WT (19″ widescreen LCD) which almost had be drooling. Plus 22″ LCD widescreen monitors are roughly the same price now as my CRT so it seemed a good time to buy.

The model I intended to buy was a BenQ FP222W, which MSY is selling for $365. A great price. However, when I got there they were out of those so I ended up buying a Philips 220WS for $60 more. This is one damn fine looking screen people. It's black and has a rather thin-ish (~1cm) bezel. Like most (all?) 22″ widescreens the monitor has a native resolution of 1680×1050, which makes for a lot of screen real estate. Thanks to my laptop, which uses 1280×800, I've gotten used to widescreen resolutions so there hasn't been too much of an adjustment. I've been collecting widescreen wallpapers for a while now so I've already got a nice collection to use. (Incidentally, I'm using

this wallpaper as my current background.)

One of the reasons I waited for a 22″ was because I knew that it would actually be larger than my old monitor. Widescreen resolutions tend to through direct comparisons out of whack. From what I've read, a 20″ widescreen LCD would be roughly the same height as a 19″ CRT, with a few extra centimetres in width. The 22″ is significantly larger in both dimensions.

Here are some pictures I took with my camera. Sorry for the fish eye effect – taking close up pictures isn't very effective with my camera.

22″ LCD vs 19″ CRT comparison (Horizontal)

![22″ LCD vs 19″ CRT comparison (Vertical)][3]

So far I haven't noticed any dead pixels and the picture quality seems really good. One interesting thing is that the default brightness was set to 100%, which was quite a bit too bright for my tastes. I currently have it set to 45%.

The one really glaring problem is that all my videos look worse in the higher resolution! I can now easily see a lot more blocking than I used to. Being an LCD, I can't just turn down the resolution temporarily to compensate either. Oh well, you learn to live with these things.

[3]: http://www.chnorton.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/monitor-comparison-vert.jpg