And Boy Are My Arms Tired!

I used to have three Sony G500 monitors, great big 21" CRTs.  In fact, I think I still have them, lurking at the bottom of my garage.  They work just fine except for the fact that they are horribly over-bright, a fate to which the G500 seems prone.

When they all went nova in rapid succession a few years back, I replaced them with a single 19" LCD, a Samsung 930MP, which I have been using happily ever since.  Slightly less happily since last Christmas, when the DVI input was incinerated under suspicious circumstances, but even with just the VGA input it's still a damn nice monitor.

Today I replaced it with a pair of Samsung 214T monitors.  In many ways these are the successors to the 930MP.  They're 21" 1600x1200 screens instead of 19" 1280x1024, which is nice, and they have a similar range of video inputs.  Not quite as extensive - there's no actual TV tuner in there - and they don't have built-in speakers.  (But the speakers on the 930MP aren't crash hot, and I use a small Logitech 2.1 speaker system now.) 

Like the 930MP they're high-quality S-PVA panels, rather than the typical basic TN that cheap monitors have, which means that the colour doesn't shift every time you move your head.  (Also means that the response time is somewhat slower, and they're not as good for games.  But even the 930MP works fine for the games I play.  Which doesn't include Counterstrike.)

The thing is, I had to carry these monitors about half a mile from the store back to the station.  No problem, I thought.  They're LCDs.  Light.  Compact.  I carried my 27" LCD television home from the store without too much drama.  It's not like the old days of the G500s, which weighed in at 70 pounds apiece.

Not quite.

In their boxes, these beasties still weigh 25 pounds each.  That's twice what a typical 22" widescreen LCD weighs.  As I said, I lugged two of them half a mile, and the boxes are too bulky to just stack them up and carry them that way, so I had to use the awkward little inset carry handles - you know, the sort where there's just a flap of cardboard that folds inwards.

The tendons in my left hand seem to have gone on strike in protest.

These had better be really good monitors!

Hmm.  Maybe now I should buy a video card.

Update:  Good grief.  I have one of the monitors home now and set up in portrait mode.  The screen pivots, so you can run it in 1600x1200 or 1200x1600, as you choose.

That...  Will take a little getting used to.

Update: I think one of these would have done, actually.  I'm sure I'll manage to find a use for the second one though.

Update: Takes a little getting used to indeed.  I just switched to using my notebook, which like pretty much all notebooks these days has a basic TN panel with a glossy finish.

When it comes to colour reproduction, there's simply no contest.  The Samsung 214T kicks my HP notebook into the middle of next week.  Photos that look kind of nice on the notebook screen look downright amazing on the monitor.

Of course, I can get an entire notebook, complete with Windows, for the price of one of those monitors.  But right now, I have no regrets at all over today's purchase.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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