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No matter what anyone tells you, size does matter. All the more so when you’re talking about monitors; where the biggest, baddest monitors usually give you the best gaming and work experience. That’s why the 14”, then the 15” monitors gave way so quickly to their larger brethren: Bigger is Better. With advances in technology, and decreases in production costs, even the largest monitors are now becoming affordable for the everyday household, and the office work environment. Who wants to work in 800x600 resolution when the kid next door is pushing polygons in 1280x1024? Especially if 19inch monitors are now fast approaching the point where we found 17inchers only a year or two ago. A pimped up system, with oodles of RAM, a Ghz CPU, and a shiny GeForce 3 isn’t going to impress much when you don’t have enough screen real estate. So isn’t it time for an upgrade?

There’s always a balance between price and performance in every peripheral – monitors are no exception. Here we decided to gun for those monitors that won’t have your eyes bleeding in agony from low refresh rates and sappy colors. And at street prices below $550 each, they won’t dry up 2 months rent either. In this first round, we took a look at bad boys from Samsung, Viewsonic, and Philips. All of them are Professional grade monitors, all of them are flat screen with 18.0” of beautiful viewable area, and they all pimp out rock solid 1600x1200 resolutions at 80Hz plus resolutions for images like you wouldn’t believe.

How we tested

When it comes to monitors, it’s really only possible to do mostly subjective tests, though there are some objective tests that we performed in order to get a good idea of the technical capabilities of the monitors. For calibration and objective testing we used DisplayMate video calibration and testing software. For our subjective testing we used a variety of high resolution, high quality images of various styles and subjects, as well as still frame captures from popular games like Quake 3, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Rune, and Heavy Metal FAKK.

In testing the monitors, we looked for things that would most concern the office professional and hardcore gamer. Such things as color saturation, color reproduction, screen geometry, convergence, text legibility, ease of use, and overall quality were most important to us. We’re not CAD designers, and neither are most of you, so you will be purchasing these monitors for use in the very environments that we are testing in.

Specs