Just after something for work, needs to be cheap.

Any reason I shouldn’t go into PC world and get one of their £80 Acer jobs?

FWIW the £100 24″ Samsungs I bought last year are brill, cheap as chips.

Unfortunately they’ve since changed the stand and they’re nowhere near as good.

fro PC world?

I had a cheapo Acer monitor from PC World and it was fine. Lasted a couple of years without a single problem.

Cheap ones can have bad colour reproduction and slow refresh, if you’re going to be something you’ll be looking at all day I’d recommend something better.

I’ve a Dell U2414H and it’s great, available for 200 quid. There’s numerous review sites online that can recommend a great monitor for a specific budget.

Why would colour reproduction and refresh make a difference when I’m writing code or word documents? Surley the days of flickering are gone?

If a monitor “for work” means one you’ll be staring at for 8 hours a day then personally I go for something high quality (e.g. IPS screen, no flicker backlight, large gamut, high contrast ratio, low blue light) and as high res and as large as the budget allows.

If it just a secondary monitor for the occasional glance then yeah, go cheap.

Dells! you’re eyes are worth it!

as large as the budget allows.

Budget is £80 🙂

Why do I need a large gamut when almost everything is black on white?*

Consensus seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with the basic ones, but I’m supposed to produce cash from somewhere to get the expensive ones. Perhaps if I get the maid to buy Waitrose’s own fna fna cheese this week I can redirect some funds?

Normal STW advice 😉

* can’t resist a dig, but that’s actually a real question.

Contrast ratio’s and brightness still play a factor! however if you do get a cheapy just turn the brightness down and you’ll be fine.

Go into PC world and look at a few. Buy one you like the look of.
Done.

The last time i looked AOC were selling half decent monitors for cheap, you should be able to get a 24 or 27″ height adjustable IPS monitor for £100-150. What is the point of spending many houra of many days ruining your neck/back because your monitor is too low, or looking at a crap image just for the sake of saving a few quid.

Flickering is mostly gone but really cheap monitors have noticeable lag when the screen changes, you’ll see a ghost of the pointer and anything else that moves.

For coding you can make a good argument for 24″ upwards, especially if you a toolbartastic IDE. At work our designers have 30″ monitors and developers start at 24″.

But if 80 quid if really the budget then go to a shop where you can see then in the flesh and use them for a minute.

Budget is £80

My work were stingy with budgets too. In the end I offered to pay the difference myself. It’s my eyes and my comfort level after all. (They saw sense and paid the full amount).

Why do I need a large gamut when almost everything is black on white?*

You don’t. And if you are on a budget then definitely skip that one (Though it can be a good marker of a decent monitor).

Full sRGB colour space can sometimes be useful if you are doing any UI work mind you. I’ve seen a few odd UX choices made by devs on crappy monitors (“Why have you made the button blue Dave?”, “Well it’s green on my monitor”, “Yeah but everything is green on your monitor!”) 🙂

Flickering is mostly gone

Not in my experience. There are two types of flickering though. In the bad old days a poor refresh rate and interlaced displays led to graphical flickering. That is a lot less common these days.

But the other kind is backlight flickering, caused by poor quality CFL tubes or a badly rectified power supply. It’s less immediately noticeable but on a monitor you are looking at all day it leads to eye strain and feeling tired.

For the record my current main monitor is a 27″ BenQ GW2765HT with a 2560X1440 IPS screen.
Cost £250 new but that was a couple of years ago so there may be better options now.
It meets all the criteria I listed and is really nice and clear.

Not-fussed

Currently looking into this myself as my home 24″ is just too small to work from. When I’m in the office I have dual 32″ which are great but dont need anything quite so big for home so a single 32″ would be fine. Is it worth thinking of a large TV screen to use a pseudo monitor? If so should I only consider 4k? Anything else perhaps? Cheers

I care more about being able to adjust the height to a sensible position if given the choice

Right, ordered this. Arrives tomorrow.

Coupled with what will hopefully turn out to be a nice wireless keyboard and mouse, it should be a significant improvement over the laptop.