Dual monitor recomendation?

[george graves]

Soon it's going to be time to ditch the CRT's. Served me well as a video editor. I needed the color gamut for editing and flexible resolutions.

- Dual monitors a must(if the price is right I'll go triple)
- widescreen perfered
- Thin bezel would be nice - but no biggie
- I'm real, real comfortable with dell
- Would love a used/off-lease/b-stock/refurb (money is tight)
- Uses will be video editing and e-cad.

QUESTION: Since I'm going dual widescreen - will 22" be too much? Should I be looking for 20?

THX
gg

[kronus]

I'm not a fan of widescreen 20" - not enough vertical resolution. Get at least 1920x1200 for each monitor. I have a pair of real old 4:3 20" Dells, but they've been serving me fine for years.

Check ebay for Dell 2001FP, you can get them for less than a hundred per. They use a better screen technology than most modern LCD monitors.

[Kruzen]

If you are doing video editing you want something 24" or higher, supports 1920x1200, good contrast ratio, fast response rate, honestly I would try to get something LED backlit as that will have the truest color

[StereoInstaller1]

How do you do LED panels on a budget?

[Kruzen]

How do you do LED panels on a budget?

You don't. But honestly as a part-time designer i'd rather have high quality panels and go past my budget a bit for something you're going to spend thousands of hours looking at and relying on for accurate color portrayal.

Just like with any job, you want the best tools to get the best products. Mechanics have their tools, construction workers prefer good heavy machinery, artists want good pencils/pens, musicians good instruments, etc.

I do a lot of web and graphic design and the most important tools I have is my LCD's, my mouse, and my keyboard. If I was an audio engineer i'd want baller ass powered monitors.

Sometimes its good to splurge on something that you bench on for quality. I stuck with huge CRT's from SGI for like 6 years because LCD's weren't good enough to get the color depth that I needed, even now the only thing close is stupid expensive.

[z31maniac]

I have a pair of real old 4:3 20" Dells, but they've been serving me fine for years.

This is what I have at work. COnstantly looking/generating PDFs, messing with AutoCAD files, etc.

I had the option to get widescreens awhile back, looked at someone else who had them. Not enough vertical space for me.

[george graves]

I'm not a fan of widescreen 20" - not enough vertical resolution.

Didn't think of that. Thanks! I think I would have been upset if I got stuck with them.

Get at least 1920x1200 for each monitor.

Yea - thanks for that too. I was wondering why all the monitors were 1080 max res. That's awfully low.

Check ebay for Dell 2001FP, you can get them for less than a hundred per. They use a better screen technology than most modern LCD monitors.

This. Looks great. I hate the stand that it comes will - so I think I'll get a dual monitor stand. Exactly what I was looking for, but didn't know it yet! Awesome!

Just like with any job, you want the best tools to get the best products....

Yea, yea, yea - I have special video monitors for that.

(And if you really want to get technical, you not only want good monitors for color reproduction, and several consumer monitors hanging around to check what the final results will look like on 99.9% of your target audience monitor will look like. Been there - done that. I'll pick up some thing "pro" down the road - but I know enough that I can get away with it :) )

[matt]

I have 3 23" LCDs across my desk. Highly recommended.

[TexasTerp]

As a web designer, audio and video engineer (yeah I've done/still do them all) I custom built my desktop. I've worked with everything from 17" 4:3: LCDs to 42" widescreen LCDs (gotta love the recording studio!).

For my work station I running dual Acer 19" widescreen LCD's. I have zero problem whatsoever working with Pro Tools 7, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Audition and Adobe Premier Pro 2 on them. Native Resolution is on 1440x900 but in the 4 years I've had them I have no problems with quality.

I would highly recommend either an Acer or Samsung setup, I don't recommend getting two different monitors, just buy two of the same. If you're gonna be working on a normal desk, 19" is a good size, I would also recommend a 23" if it fits your budget. of course, higher the resolution and contrast the better. Also the faster the response time the better (<or = 5ms is best)

[Jean]

I have both 20 and 22/23, I really like my brothers 24. Native res for a 20 is 1680x1050, so I would go with a 22-24 honestly. Samsung has some really good ones that don't cost a bank.

[Hallen]

Whatever you do, get the same brand and model for all the monitors you get. Windows and graphics cards don't handle color profiles very easily. Matching colors between two different monitors is pretty much impossible unless you have the hardware tools (which you probably do). I still think it would be much easier with the same models though.

[george graves]

^of course. This will be my 3rd dual monitor set up - nothing new here, just the LCD part.

[StereoInstaller1]

Just like with any job, you want the best tools

Yeah, I always forget that part.

Virtually all of the tools in my box are SnapOn, in many categories they are the absolute best, and only 5X the cost of typical crap.

[daniel]

it's hard to beat dell for the price.

[george graves]

I guess there might be some updated models to that dell that I should look at since it fits my budget. I'll just leave my notes here:

Dell UltraSharp 2007FP - newer version - slower response?
I checked IBM/lenovo's site - nothing new on the site - all crap 1080 - will have to check older models.
2001FPW - s0urce likey