Last Tuesday my dad called the office telling us (my mom and I) that his monitor had broken down on him. Things like that happen, it wasn’t a new monitor by far, but it’s always annoying. As he’s keeping himself busy by scanning photos for my aunt and making programs for the choir he’s in, he really needed a new monitor.
Unfortunately, a new monitor isn’t something his “work” calls for. So, instead I put mine (a 19″ LCD) on his desk and decided to simply bring one from work in the evenings and bring it back in the morning. While that works for a few days, it’s far from ideal and destined to go wrong.
Friday I had had enough and decided I’d just get myself a new monitor. The quite difficult task at hand was to find the right one, at the right price.
I knew it’d be a wide-screen monitor, but what size and resolution (1920×1080 or 1900×1200)? 19″ would be too small, anything over 22″ looked like it would be too expensive, as would 1900×1200 PPI screens be.
Luckily I know a very good site to find tech deals on, and so I went there looking for just the right monitor. It turned out Iiyama had some very nice ones, including a 22″ multitouch one, and its 24″ ‘regular’ brother. Both were within my price range, but I wanted a large enough screen so I wouldn’t be stuck with a wide but low screen.
My choice was, in the end, a lot easier than it was when I started out: the Iiyama ProLite E2407HDSD sounded perfect, at €200 it’s a 16:9 full 1920×1080 monitor with built-in speakers (not necessary, but nice) in a sleek shell. And of course Iiyama has a very good reputation along with my own experience from back in the day when 21″ monitors were the size of a small car…
Yesterday I picked it up, hooked it up and was more than pleasantly surprised. The screen looks amazingly sharp and vibrant and the shell is just as in the pictures, with the power and OSD buttons, along with an input switch button (to switch between VGA and DVI inputs) at the bottom right of the screen. The power light is an unobtrusive, not too bright blue square right above the power button.
I almost wish I’d known about the joys of wide-screen monitors earlier on. Then again, I think this is a very good first step into that world. It’s a great monitor for the money. If I’d had a larger budget, I’d still have gone for an Iiyama from the same line, only then I’d have picked one from the B-line (this is an E-line) so it’d be height adjustable, and possibly the 27″ version to get a bit of a higher screen.
