Got a high end Dell laptop for work for 3D CAD stuff, the cheapy £90 monitor we have cannot handle it, the picture is crap. so time to spalsh out.

had a look on the web and 99% of monitors are bloody widescreen which we don't want.

checked amazon, dabs and dell any other good websites?

out of interest, why would you not want widescreen?

have a look at ebuyer.com

ebuyer, scan.co.uk, aria.co.uk, ebay.., pcworld if you must, etc…

was just gonna ask the same thing ref widescreen!

it's resolution that dictates how much you'll see rather than screen size of course… so if you get a widescreen with the same vertical resolution as a 'normal' monitor, then it will just be wider 🙂 You may have to go bigger than 21inch though, but they're so cheap these days is that really a problem?

and stuff like SolidWorks works better on a widescreen – with your feature tree and tool bars on the left hand side, it leaves you with a pretty much square work area… whereas on a 'normal' monitor, it leaves you with a rectangular work area, with the long side on the vertical.

cheers all.

ive told the CAD guy in work about widescreen etc, but he is totally old school and stuck in 70's

I have one of these sat on my desk, running dual off my laptop, we also use these on our CAD systems, they are spot on, only 1680×1050 though so if you need 1900×1200 you will have to spend a little bit more:

http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&sku=198660

Sorry, couldnt resist. 😀

Chap behind me has a Dell laptop running Inventor,ACAD etc.
He has nothing but problems when he plugs it into the docking station because the screen attached is a conventional non-wide-screen jobbie.
Apparently the only cure is to attach a wide-screen monitor also.
Me…I have no laptop, but two non-wide-screen TFT's. Works better.

Go tell your oldey-worldey CAD bloke.

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ is always a good reference, especially if you are worried about colour reproduction at all.

Most 21" monitors are only 1680 x 1050, though a few higher res ones are creeping through.

I suggest your CAD guy is against widescreen because he has used an incorrectly set up widescreen that stretched the image horizontally, making it unusable for CAD (as all the circle would look like ellipses etc). This isn't an issue if you make sure your display card is outputting the same resolution as the monitor.

(e.g. if Display->Properties in Windows is set to output 1024×768 to a 1680×1050 monitor then the result is horrible, blurry and distorted – but it is amazing how many people don't realise this and soldier on).

Bit like the huge number of people that either don't know about or don't properly tune ClearType on Windows and soldier on with horrible jaggy text.

takisawa2: that's definitely not HDMI-compatible.