monitors

ASUS VW246H 24-Inch Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black
$229.90
This is an absolutely great monitor for the price. It's very big, clear and crisp. I play a lot of video games and the monitor keeps up perfectly. It was an easy setup, no problem.

The speakers don't really add to the package. I tried them out and they sounded hollow and nothing special.

The one downside is the vertical viewing angle. Just by adjusting the height on my chair a little bit the brightness will change severely near the top and bottom of my monitor. With this kind of change depending on the vertical viewing angle, a more adjustable stand would have been nice. Instead I find myself adjusting my chair to get the right brightness. That's the only thing that stops this from getting 5 Stars.

ACER ET.BV3RP.001 17-Inch LCD Monitor
$129.99
Monitor arrive well packed and on a timely schedule. Works fine and easy to install.

HP 2009M 20-Inch HD LCD Monitor
$179.00
prior computer was an iMac G5. current one is an HP Pavilion Elite e9220y

monitor is adequate for the price. wish monitors were cheaper/included anyway but compared to others it's probably a decent value. nothing to write home about but not terrible

what i didn't like:
1. power cord kept disconnecting. had to return it & replacement monitor was fine (but found other user complaints about this). problem is, because of power cord's placement, if you use wired keyboard and mouse, sometimes just moving the wire inadvertently disconnected the power cord and turned the monitor off, as did placement of the on/off switch on the bottom right of the monitor or even moving the monitor over a bit to adjust your view. considering how long power cords/cables have existed. can't understand how they screwed that up.
2. speakers are not great. bad bass, and just not enuf sound even jacked up for some videos online. you'll probably want to pay more for external speakers to amp up the sound
3. resolution/picture quality not very good compared to my old imac. really surprised at how much worse the picture quality was. using the same background photo for my desktop, it was sharp on the imac and is fuzzy and slightly distorted (noisy) on the HP (as are other picture files stored on photobucket/shutterfly). i'll have to do more tweaking to see if i can improve this at all

what i liked:
1. monitor looks nice and is decently thin.
2. appreciate being able to tilt the screen up or down a little (tho that mechanism is a bit stiff)
3. considering how absolutely expensive monitors are, this is reasonable.

if you love digital photography/videography and really care about picture quality, tho, you'll probably want a better monitor. you're sacrificing much desired picture quality in favor of lower cost. i'm an amateur photog yet i noticed the quality issues, so a more advanced photog would probably be disappointed.

Hanns.G HG281DPB 28" Widescreen LCD Monitor
$806.45
I love the size and performance of this monitor. But be warned that to do a simple thing like switch input requires at least 6 menu selections using invisible buttons. My previous monitor had one button on the front to switch input between two sources. I don't know if I will be able to stand going through the menu every time as I do this a lot.