Advice on buying a monitor

[afre]

I'm looking to replace a dying hand-me-down monitor (Samsung 906BW). After 4 months, I'm still using it. Might go blind if I don't do anything about it soon . The cheaper the better but good enough to play Wesnoth, of course, and colour-accurate enough to edit photos.

[Midnight_Carnival]

Well, if you're not fussy then you should be easilly satisfied, I'd offer to sell you one of mine but shipping it across 5 continents to get to you would not work so well, neither would the monitor by the time you got it.
Often you'll find schools or other institutions, even some companies, have their entire computer network upgraded and every computer replaced, when they do they will sell off the surplus hardware really, really cheap, but don't expect to find too many of these advertised, it helps to know people in these institutions. I got a monitor from an idiot who lives upstairs from me for free, he was telling me about how I'd need to check every capacitor and change them, etc... all that was wrong was that the on/off switch was broken, it now works.

Good luck.

[zookeeper]

I'd suggest you narrow it down by first deciding how much money you'll be willing to spend on it.

[ancestral]

Craigslist, pawn shops and the like are great sources for cheap, good-enough monitors. Otherwise, if you're looking for decent quality and are okay spending $200+, you can find very, very good monitors. The usual suspects of CNET, ConsumerReports and PC Magazine all have reviews.

[afre]

Ended up getting a LG 22MP67HQ-P, which was on sale today, from a retail store. Might return it for the reasons below but don't have an alternative in mind.

First impressions:

1. First thing I noticed was that the power cable is very short and looks more like a power adapter for a small peripheral. Is that a thing nowadays? Don't know why it didn't come with a standard power slot/cable.
2. Second, I can't control the tilt: it either goes upright or back. Maybe it's partly due to my pc being vesa-mounted in the back... but it's completely loose when I attempt to reposition it.
3. Third, the text is very thin and hard to read. Maybe that's just the side effect of the higher resolution. However, at some presets, text can be even less legible and even have color (fringing?) in its antialiasing.

Maybe my eyes need to get used to the monitor, being my first LED IPS, but right now it isn't a very convincing product and makes me wonder whether I need eyeglasses.

[Iris]

Third, the text is very thin and hard to read. Maybe that's just the side effect of the higher resolution. However, at some presets, text can be even less legible and even have color (fringing?) in its antialiasing.

If you are running Windows, you might want to change the ClearType settings to be more adequate for your new monitor. On Windows 7 and later, going into Control Panel and typing “ClearType” into the search box will reveal the “Adjust ClearType text” option; for Windows XP and Vista, you’ll need to download this app from Microsoft.

If you are on Linux, check your desktop environment’s font rendering options and try playing with the hinting (none, slight, medium, full) and subpixel hinting (between grayscale/none, RGB, etc.) modes.

I’ve never used OS X so I can’t suggest anything for that myself.

[afre]

Thanks, I totally forgot about ClearType - haha. It's a little more legible now. Maybe I'll install/update some drivers later and see how it goes.