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Monitor Buyer's Guide

If you are a home user looking to get a better monitor, you need to look for good color performance, sharp text and, of course, the price. The price is your biggest factor. You can give up some features and go with a more affordable monitor that will still fulfill your needs without compromising a lot in the process. On the other hand, if you are a professional, you have other needs. Some of the features you need to look for are color calibration, large display area and resolution. A large display area has always been a weakness of LCDs, as the farther you get away from the monitor, the less of the image you will see. Keeping in mind what you need, by reading over this buyer's guide you can walk away making a better decision regarding your next monitor.

LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays) have all but replaced CRTs because of their smaller footprint, portability and low power consumption. CRTs might be down, but they are not out. You can still see many professionals using CRTs, as they have an advantage over LCDs in true color reproduction. However, production of high-end consumer CRTs came to a halt in 2000. Consumers drive this market, and their demands for CRTs have all but dried up. CRT monitors also have a much wider viewing angle compared to an LCD monitor. The bigger the LCD screen, the better the viewing angle will be. Choosing between an LCD and a CRT monitor will come down to how much space you have and how important proper color reproduction is. It is not unusual to see professionals using both a CRT monitor and an LCD monitor.

IBM first introduced Video Graphics Array - better known to all of us as VGA - in 1987. VGA is the forefather to such standards as XGA, SVGA and SXGA. These new standards went on to improve in both color and resolution, when compared to VGA. VGA might be old, but it is not gone. You can still see support for the VGA standard in modern monitors. VGA is an analog connection, and its digital successor is DVI.

Digital Visual Interface is a completely digital signal from output to input. DVI does away with the digital-to-analog conversion and keeps the signal digital at all times. This yields a very clear and crisp picture, with almost no tweaking needed. If you are going to use DVI connectors, make sure your LCD monitor has an input for DVI. Your computer will probably not come equipped with a DVI out port, so you will need to purchase a DVI video card.

One feature you want to look for in an LCD VGA or DVI monitor is a wide viewing angle (120 degrees is minimum). A CRT monitor inherently has a wider viewing angle than an LCD monitor does. You will also want to purchase the largest-sized monitor with the highest resolution you can afford.