New monitor

[MP Guy]

Picked up a new Gateway 24" widescreen monitor. It blows the Apple one out of the water. It has a contrats ration of 1000:1 and a refresh of 6ms. Anyway, the best thing was with a 10% bestbuy discount it is $600.00 compared to the mega $$$ Apple charges.

If anyone is interested it is model FPD2485W Pictures look great on this baby!

 

[climbing_vine]

Picked up a new Gateway 24" widescreen monitor. It blows the Apple one out of the water. It has a contrats ration of 1000:1 and a refresh of 6ms. Anyway, the best thing was with a 10% bestbuy discount it is $600.00 compared to the mega $$$ Apple charges.

If anyone is interested it is model FPD2485W Pictures look great on this baby!

Historically, Gateway has very uneven quality and this display is no exception. Some are great (at first anyway); many others have banding problems, non-functional alleged HD support, various other defects and terminal failures. Lots of discussion of this in various online forums.

Apple's LCDs are supplied by Phillips and (iirc) Samsung, as are Dell's. Gateway is known to both cast a wider net, and pay much less attention to QC. While their numbers have rebounded among corporate customers due largely to actually being able to get a human being on the phone lately, they're still pretty consistently in the bottom-feeder category along with HP when it comes to consumer satisfaction.

As usual, you get what you pay for. FSU roulette and all that. 😉

 

[MadMan2k]

I don't know about the gateway QC thing, but I did check out that monitor in Best Buy a while ago and man was I impressed. 1920x1200 is sweet.

I'm still using this low end 17" CRT, which is completely ridiculous... using a probably 10 year old monitor that I got almost 3 years ago at a garage sale for 25 bucks, when I use it all the time I'm using the computer. I actually bought a 20" LCD last year, but it had some ghosting and lag problems and I couldn't justify paying 600 bucks for that thing, so I returned it after 2 days. Maybe I'll try one of the newer ones sometime...

 

[back alley]

i have a 19" dell crt that is on the old side now but it beats out the new 19" dell lcd i have at work.

 

[ghost]

i was looking at the 20'' acd, but it won't work on my computer. 🙁

 

[MP Guy]

hmmmm I better do some reading up on this bad boy. I only have a few days left to return it.

 

[Rico]

I'm a glass junkie from way back. In the late '70s, programmed the Motorola 6845 controller attached to a really nice portrait CRT (also from Motorola). With a slow green phosphor, you could tolerate a 30Hz field rate and enjoy a whole lot of on-screen text. Am currently enjoying an Eizo F980, once their flagship model: 21" Invar, 137kHZ hor refresh, .23mm diag pitch, inbuilt color calibration. When Hitachi shut down CRT production, I knew the era was over.

The current LCD displays are getting better, rez is increasing, and the price is plummeting. Will give it another year or two...

 

[nksyoon]

I've been looking at LCDs to replace my 6 year old 19" Dell CRT monitor.

Here is a good forum to learn more about LCDs:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=1745344

One thing I've seen mentioned on some sites is that contrast ratio is not that important for photo editing.

Here's a post about LCDs for graphics pros:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=231339

Regarding Gateway and Dell, it seems they source panels of different spec depending on current price, so a specific Dell 24" monitor would have a different LCD panel depending on when it was made.

Myself, I currently have a couple of models from NEC and Eizo shortlisted.