I do a lot of work from home. My office has a huge picture window, a desk and my laptop. As a system administrator, I often read long log files or wade through large amounts of data; sometimes I need to work from an online reference as I’m tweaking system settings on my servers. A big monitor really helps with this, so last weekend I went off in search of the Right One for my office.
I started with some online searches to establish a baseline price for my budget. I really don’t like buying monitors online, though, because the picture quality from model to model can vary widely and it’s something that I like to see firsthand. So, wife in tow (to tell me when I’m going overboard – I do get excited about new hardware at times), we head to the local shopping extravaganza to look for monitors.
I settled on a few things I was looking for: size (the bigger, the better), resolution and contrast ratio. I do enough image editing for website tasks that picture quality matters, but not enough that I care about color correctness, so I just want a good, solid, clear picture. I’m not gaming, so I don’t care about super-fast update times, just a clear picture that makes log files and code easy to read. I’ve found that by clearly stating your priorities, it’s a lot easier to compare similar products and make a satisfying decision on which thing it is you’re going to buy. With these goals in mind, I found a few possible candidates:
I settled on the 26″ Samsung. The price was fair. Although more than I had originally wanted to spend, it was a great deal – and even better if the rebate comes through. The picture was superb, and it sure does make working at home even nicer than before.
Comments Off