monitor revisited

[cellio]

Dani reported seeing a 19" LCD monitor (not a no-name) on sale for a good price, so I went and checked it out today. After confirming that I have 14 days to return it for a full refund even though they had to give me the display model, I brought it home and set it up. I had to do some playing with settings, of course, both monitor and OS, but it seems to be working well so far. And I have real estate! 1280x1024 is a lot bigger than 1024x768. :-) (And, of course, a 19" LCD is bigger than a 19" CRT.)

There were cascading effects. In order to accommodate the new resolution, I had to change the system from "small fonts" to "large fonts". (For some reason, this required consulting the Windows CD.) Then I had to change some application font settings, particularly (for now) SSH client and web browser. In the process of playing with Mozilla, I discovered some suboptimal things that LJ was doing that had previously been masked, so I had to fix them. (Who knew that my friends page had a style sheet with hard-coded font sizes that just happened to work ok at the lower resolution? You don't even see the style sheet unless you edit in "raw" mode, so I spent a while forcing size="+0" in various places only to have no apparent effect...)

But I've found color, brightness, and contrast settings that don't hurt my eyes, and there's no flicker, and the viewing angle is acceptable. I think this will be a keeper. And after sale price, rebate, discount for buying the floor model, and store frequent-customer credit, my final cost will be under $400, which doesn't suck. :-)

The installation guide is a thicker-than-expected book, but it turns out there are two pages of relevant text. Those two pages are then repeated in 14 (!) other languages, most of which I recognize. (There are four kanji-based ones, and there's a version in Arabic -- don't usually see that.) I also note that for all their apparent efforts to provide thorough documentation, they left out the location of the non-obvious power switch.

Comments

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

We have LCD monitors and find them much easier on the eyes than the regular type. Enjoy.

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Ummm. Where and for how much?

[cellio]

Office Depot. It's a Viewsonic 19" LCD; can't remember the exact model number (it's at home, I'm at work) right now. With the rebate/sale the price was listed as $459 ($100 rebate). If you have their store card (free) and spend $500 within 3 months (on anything) you get a $50 credit.

They told me this model has been discontinued; I got the last one in the store. (They asked if I wanted the floor model and I asked when they'd be getting more untouched ones in, which is how I found this out.) Taking the floor model at Office Depot is apparently worth 10%, by the way. (At least at this instance, but I'm guessing the stores don't get to make their own policies on pricing.)

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Fleh! Office Depot closed all it's Long Island Stores several years ago...

[cellio]

Bummer. Do you know anyone in a city that still has them?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Maybe they expect that as you start pushing random things looking for the power switch, at least you can't do any harm because the thing's not on...

[jducoeur]

There were cascading effects.

Oh, heck -- that's nothing. Three computers ago, we got a new monitor, and had to rearrange the entire living room for it.

(No, really. The room had previously been arranged with the monitor on a low windowsill, which was deep enough for the old 15" monitor but not for the new 17" one. The only place to put the new monitor was where the TV had been, which required swapping the cabinets to have something to put the TV on, which required moving the sofas to be able to see the TV, and by the time the dust had settled, we had essentially rotated the entire room 90 degrees...)

[cellio]

Oh, I've also been down the "rearrange the room because of the monitor" path, though not so severely as you have. I've gotten away with only moving desks and shelves. :-)

And now I have this extra space on my desk behind the monitor that I'm not sure of the best use for. Possibly I'll move the printer back there. (I have to have the monitor fairly close to my eyes to be able to see, so I can't take advantage of desk depth anyway.)