LCD monitors

LCD Monitors have gotten cheap. I'm regularly seeing 17" 1280x1024 monitors for $149 to $169 and 19" 1280x1024 for $249 to $279. Most of these are off-brand, but sometimes they are name-brand (Planar, Sceptre, Acer, even occasionally Samsung). The best sources are Tiger Direct (www.tigerdirect.com) and www.ecost.com. Both have relatively large quantities of "inexpensive" monitors (17" under $199 and 19" under $299). I've bought quite a few of them, and they have been ok. None have had more than 3 bad pixels (none have been "perfect", either). They are not "great" monitors, but they are not junk either, they are perfectly useable. My biggest complaint is that they don't have DVI inputs, but you can find monitors in the "cheap" price range (under $199 and 19" under $299) that do. My second biggest complaint is short or poor quality cables, which causes "ghosting" and "ringing" in the image. Cable quality is VERY important. You can almost judge this by the thickness of the cable. You want a cable that's like a garden hose, not like a (thin) soda straw. If you are going to use an analog LCD monitor, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't get the test pattern generator available at: http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?500000030936 And use it to properly set the dot clock. After installation, select the leftmost of the 3 functions in the "Test" group and then check both check-boxes. This is a very old Windows 3.1 program written in visual basic. It runs under XP just fine. You need VBRUN300.DLL (the Visual basic version 3 runtime DLL library), which it may or may not come with it depending on where you download it from. This program is non-invasive, it's "installation" makes no changes to your registry or to any system components or files. In fact, if you just unzip the program and double click the exe file, it will run fine without actual "installation" (the program and the help file need to be in the same directory, and VBRUN300.DLL needs to be available). When you display this pattern, you should see an absolutely perfect and uniform field of alternating (but very, very fine) black and white vertical bars each only one single pixel wide. If you see "moir?" distortion, or smearing, your display isn't adjusted correctly. Digital monitors (with DVI interfaces) will always be "perfect". Analog monitors will usually show an initial moir? distortion pattern until they are adjusted (dot clock frequency and phase). In most cases, perfect adjustment can be achieved (and is "remembered" by the display), but in some cases you can't achieve this. Note that the "auto" (auto-adjust) function on almost all analog LCD monitors gets "close" but usually does not get to the best possible adjustment. The average life of the CCFT lamps used in monitors is about 25,000 hours. They can be replaced with varying degrees of difficulty (ranging from trivial to impossible). Newark Electronics carries a good selection of generic lamps (you need to know the diameter and length in mm). However, the usual failure mode is the inverter, not the lamp, and getting an exact replacement inverter is often difficult or impossible. The problem isn't cost ($30 to $80), it's pure availability, as many of these are custom parts only available from the manufacturer. It may be cheaper to buy a new monitor and sell the old one for parts on E-Bay (the LCD panel, which may still be good, may be worth more as a part than the cost of a new monitor).