24" 1920x1200 $299

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
OfficeMax.

linky

I bought one yesterday. It's very nice for the money. The stand is a little on the crappy side, no height adjustment. Otherwise no complaints.

[/ QUOTE ]

Costco has a Samsung 245BW that size for about $460 (in most stores I think). That just has to be worth the extra $160.

They also some off brands at $360 or so online, might be a similar panel.

~ Rick

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
OfficeMax.

linky

I bought one yesterday. It's very nice for the money. The stand is a little on the crappy side, no height adjustment. Otherwise no complaints.

[/ QUOTE ]

Costco has a Samsung 245BW that size for about $460 (in most stores I think). That just has to be worth the extra $160.

They also some off brands at $360 or so online, might be a similar panel.

~ Rick

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, I think the samsung may be considerably worse for most people on this forum. The 245BW is a 6-bit TN panel. It will have better response time, which I think is important to people who play fast-action 3D games, but the color reproduction and viewing angle will be noticibly worse than with a S-PVA (or other VA-type) panel like this one.

[pvn]

BTW, here are two pages that will let you test whether you have an 8-bit or a 6-bit LCD panel:

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00GkGu

http://www.leppik.net/david/blog/?p=58

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
do u need soemthing special with yr computer like u do with the 30 inch dells?

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No. Any graphics adapter with DVI should be able to drive this display fine. It also has regular VGA input, but some VGA adapters may not be able to drive it all the way at the max resolution.

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
OfficeMax.

linky

I bought one yesterday. It's very nice for the money. The stand is a little on the crappy side, no height adjustment. Otherwise no complaints.

[/ QUOTE ]

Costco has a Samsung 245BW that size for about $460 (in most stores I think). That just has to be worth the extra $160.

They also some off brands at $360 or so online, might be a similar panel.

~ Rick

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, I think the samsung may be considerably worse for most people on this forum. The 245BW is a 6-bit TN panel. It will have better response time, which I think is important to people who play fast-action 3D games, but the color reproduction and viewing angle will be noticibly worse than with a S-PVA (or other VA-type) panel like this one.

[/ QUOTE ]

Even though I'm not multi-tabling online anymore I love having two monitors for everyday computing. Right now I have a failing 21" Viewsonic CRT and a beautiful 22" Samsung 213T LCD. The Samsung set me back about a grand a few years back but it's really nice; not a dead pixel and it looks just great.

I never play video games (unless it's Pong, I'm 53 [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ) but would anticipate using the 24" display for viewing streaming movies or TV shows via Netflix (in addition to general web browsing). Would you recommend a TN or PVA type panel for my type of use? Note that my mid-level Nvidea GeForce 7900 GS has dual DVI outputs.

As an aside I drove by an OfficeMax on Saturday and decided to take a quick peek. They didn't have the 24" from your OP in stock and the 22" was about the same price. Still it's great to see deals like this forcing prices down.

~ Rick

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
I never play video games (unless it's Pong, I'm 53 [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ) but would anticipate using the 24" display for viewing streaming movies or TV shows via Netflix (in addition to general web browsing). Would you recommend a TN or PVA type panel for my type of use? Note that my mid-level Nvidea GeForce 7900 GS has dual DVI outputs.

[/ QUOTE ]

I *believe* the consensus is that VA-type panels are better for movies than TN panels, mostly because they have better color rendition, blacker blacks, and MUCH better viewing angles (from across the room even a slight move can be a big difference in viewing angle, so if your screen has a small angle you can be quite restricted in where you can sit and still see the movie). The higher response time on TN panels isn't that big of a deal since movie frame rates are only 24 or 30 frames per second. I'm not an expert on these differences, though.

[teddyFBI]

Consumer alert: i bought this Soyo monitor last week...at first i loved the picture (better than the also-cheap Acer right next to it), but 3 days after I bought it, the entire lower 2/3 of the screen started flickering from complete black back to 'normal' very rapidly. I tried both the VGA and DVI cables, and it flickered like that with both. I hooked it up to 2 different computers to make sure it wasn't a cpu issue. Nope: definitely the monitor. I was also really pissed b/c the box that it had come in was really banged up...looked like i either got a refurbished model or it had clearly been opened before by someone. Anyway, silver lining is that the officemax.com CS rep i talked to was VERY nice and i am apparently getting a new one shipped to me priority and they're picking up the old one.

Hopefully the new one doesn't give me the same headaches as this one.

[Kos13]

Can someone tell me what your Soyo's "screen options" are at (if you had to tinker with the monitor buttons at all)? I still can't get it to fill out the entire screen.

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
OfficeMax.

linky

I bought one yesterday. It's very nice for the money. The stand is a little on the crappy side, no height adjustment. Otherwise no complaints.

[/ QUOTE ]

This one is up on Newegg for $369. Only three reviews so far but they seem positive.

Edit to add another group of reviews from Anandtech


As an aside I searched for reviews of the Samsung I mentioned elsewhere in this thread. The more technical reviews (e.g., overclockers forum) agreed with your assessment. Thanks for the info.

~ Rick

[teddyFBI]

UPDATE:

So after I wrote above that this Soyo monitor had gone completely haywire on me, Officemax.com very nicely had a replacement shipped to me the very next day, and picked up the old one.

But I set it up, and immediately noticed something I had noticed on the old one: there is a faint flicker of horizontal lines that seem to be moving upward on the screen. I know that's not all that great a description, but basically every one or two seconds, a batch of horizontal lines flicker onto the screen. It's very faint, but when I'm looking at my dark-grey desktop or a dark-background webpage, it's definitely noticeable (although still quite faint). Anyway, I had noticed this on the old one too...but then 2 days later, the old one went completely nutso and started flashing black as described in my post above...hopefully that doesn't happen to this one too.

Because both models that were sent to me have this same faint flickering horizontal line thing, I started to think that perhpas it's because I placed the monitor too close to some other piece of electronics...that probably doesn't even make sense, but i thought i vaguely remembered something about how u shouldn't do that, and I do have 2 laptops, 2 24" monitors, and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo in operation rather close to each other...but i really doubt that has anything to do with it.

Anyway, I'm not all that impressed with this Soyo because of these issues...but if nothing else, this great price should signal that prices on monitors are dropping fast...hopefully we'll be able to pick up the Dell 30" for < $750 soon enough.

EDIT: edited to say that it seems that the VGA port on the laptop was the cause of the horizontal lines as i don't notice them when using DVI...so perhaps the monitor itself is OK (the first one still did go haywire on me though and had to be returned)