Best Monitor Ever.

When Dell announced they'd be releasing a 24" widescreen LCD monitor for under $1200 early this year, I counted the days until it was available and bought one soon after their release. Thanks to an initial sales push, I got it for $120 off with free shipping, so $1079 total (no tax).

Since it runs at 1900x1200, you need a pretty good video card and I had to also pick up a $100 ATI card with DVI inputs, but now that I've had it running for about a month and a half, I have to say it's my favorite monitor ever, surpassing the old SGI widescreen I loved back at UCLA. 1900 pixels is a lot to work with, I keep Homesite running constantly and a firefox window or two. I usually overlap them still, but when I need to read two documents at once, I can easily do that. Photshop is also a dream to work with, as I still have a good 600 free pixels off to the side while I work on comps and photos. The color, gamma, brightness are all great though you have to use your graphics card's software controls as the monitor offers little in terms of adjustments. I no longer have any CRT on my desk, relying on the color reproduction of this monitor for graphics production. Here's a full-sized capture of my desktop, and here it is on my desk.

Soon after I bought one, they pushed the price back up to $1199, but as I was searching for something tonight I see that they have taken $200 off, selling it for $999.

It's now the same price as an Apple 20" monitor, but bigger than Apple's 23" monitor, which sells for nearly double the price. Heck if you've got the extra money around, for $1998, you can buy two dells and have FOUR FEET of screen space, still a full thousand cheaper than Apple's top flight 30" display.

Anyway, I don't get any kickback and Dell doesn't have an affiliate program, I just love this monitor and now that it's less than a thousand bucks, I can heartily recommend it to everyone. It's a tax write-off for computer business work anyway, right?