Buying a new monitor has never been more challenging. Purchasing monitors online can save you serious bucks, but it also puts you at the mercy of legions of challenging numbers and uninformed reviews. Since manufacturer specs are decidedly cooked, it takes quite a bit of time to understand which specs are fluff and which are substantial. (Hint: always ignore “dynamic” contrast ratio.)
Unfortunately, store shopping isn’t much more revealing. Between the fluorescent lights, the uninformed salespeople, and the wall of monitors sharing a signal over a 16-way VGA splitter, the quality you see in stores may not be the quality you bring home.
That’s where this story comes in. We’ve done the meticulous research and testing needed to guarantee you’ll find a lovely new monitor that suits you perfectly. After all, today’s monitors are thinner, faster, and better than they’ve ever been. Apple’s own line of Cinema Displays is gorgeous, but if you’re looking for luxury, the cost of admission is substantially lower than Apple’s $799 entry-level display might lead you to believe--and the expansion of DVI as a standard ensures that nearly any monitor will work with your Mac.
So we chose monitors from some of the biggest names in the industry--and all rested right under the $300 mark. (For all the specs and details on our monitors, click to the last page.) At that price, the monitors come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and even technologies, but one thing remains constant: $300 is that magical number at which a substantial jump in quality occurs. If you want to find a luxury display at a terrific price, look no further.
With monitors, prioritizing a good design can sometimes lead you away from the best picture. But nobody wants to stare at an obnoxious hunk of plastic all day, either.
Often, the form and function of monitors don’t play nice together. In fact, if our tests were any indication, we’d argue the uglier the monitor, the more functional its design. After all, a monitor can only look so sexy if you have to stack it on piles of books to achieve a proper viewing angle. Thin or tough, sleek or spinnable--in our tests we were nearly always forced to choose one or the other.
The least stylish monitor in our group test is clearly the industrial NEC, but it also boasts the most ergonomic design. The HP, NEC, and Dell each allow for height adjustments, tilting, swiveling, and 90-degree pivoting, which lets users spin the monitors from the typical landscape mode to portrait mode, making them ideal as second displays.
Conversely, the stylish and über-thin Samsung and Acer only allow for slight tilting (the maximum angle forward for the Acer is a measly 5 degrees). The base of the Samsung clearly would not remain stable at greater angles, despite its paper-thin design, and it is a creaky mess to adjust. The Acer comes with a sturdier stand, which accommodates all the buttons in high style. The asymmetrical base looks futuristic, but may be an eyesore for some and adds quite a bit of weight to the display.
Most of the monitors are only several pounds more than the feather-light 9-pound Samsung display, but the NEC nearly doubles its weight at 17.4 pounds. The HP is the only monitor with less than 22 inches of screen real estate, but it is still 2.5 inches deep sans stand and almost as heavy as the NEC.
The Samsung is the only monitor that has its adjustment buttons on the back, and though they are easy to use and kept attractively out of sight, pushing them causes pressure points on the screen, which could lead to dark spots and broken LEDs.
Surprisingly, the no-frills monitors, like the HP and NEC, succeeded with the least setbacks. Though neither monitor boasts a stunning design, we appreciated their emphasis on strength and flexibility. With the Samsung, you’ll eventually stop being enamored of its good looks, but with the HP and NEC, you’ll always be thankful you have something practical and efficient on your desk.
Testing a display is an unholy mixture of science and technique. Unlike most hardware, monitors require significant fine-tuning before proper testing can even begin. The Design & Build rating represents our subjective evaluation of each monitor’s form and function; here’s how we evaluated the monitors’ technical performance:
We hooked up two monitors side by side using identical DVI cables and, for the DVI-less Acer only, a connection adapter. We used them for several hours before testing because certain monitors have out-of-the-box hiccups that tend to fix themselves with a little time. Next, we calibrated the monitors with Apple’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant running in Expert Mode. We then utilized low-saturation color tests (tests that reveal which monitors can’t display a full spectrum of lights to darks) to adjust the contrast and brightness to the right levels. After the monitors were (finally) well-calibrated, we put each monitor through a comprehensive 13-step test from the awesome (and free) www.lagom.nl.
Those tests revealed the majority of a display’s strengths and weaknesses, from gradient banding to subpixel layout. By doing side-by-side testing, monitor against monitor, we were able to determine where each display excelled and where each bombed. Take for instance, true response time tests. In them, squares flicker at 10Hz, and the slower the monitor, the darker the flickering appears. If the flashing for one row appears pale pink on one screen and darker on another, then the first monitor has a faster response time. There’s not a numerical value to assign to many of these tests, but by comparing display to display it becomes clear which monitors are performing the best.
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