Shiny New Monitor

My 19" CRT monitor is coming up for its 6th birthday, and I've been thinking of replacing it for a while. After I'd been using it for a bit on Saturday, I thought 'hey, my eyes feel weird'. Then I looked at the edges of the screen, and saw that the picture was slowly shrinking and expanding. On top of the voltage regulation issue that it's suffered for years (where the brightness suddenly drops out), and the fact that at its very brightest I still can't make out dark greys, I decided that enough was enough.

I went for it and ordered a Dell 2407WFP - a 24" TFT with 1960x1200 of 6ms grey-to-grey goodness. Knowing how Dell are renowned for regularly offering discounts, I'd been watching the monitor pages for a while; although Saturday's 35% off with free shipping isn't the best price it has been this year, it is probably the cheapest I'm going to find it any time soon. So I ordered it on Saturday, it arrived today, and it's awesome.

I'm sure you'll understand that I had to give it a quick test of the, err, response time. Or something. I fired up DoD:Source, upped the resolution to 1960x1200, and it was good. It was better than good. And I was still getting 90fps - for a 3 year old machine, I don't think that's too shabby - if I didn't need Vista for software compatibility, I don't think I'd be upgrading that any time soon. Perhaps I'll just double the RAM.

At the end of the day though, good performance for games and films are a bonus - even if they were rubbish I wouldn't care, because being able to work without ruining my eyes makes it worth every penny.

Leave a comment