New 24" monitor questions

[tilneford]

I'm in the market for a new monitor and so much has changed since the last time I bought one, my head is befuddled. I'm looking at 3 and would appreciate thoughts from anyone with personal experience with any of them or a suggestion as to a different one to consider. My usage is for a text oriented business, some web designing and just a little (cough) online movie viewing. The market seems to be moving toward 24" but the size of it is a little intimidating on my desk. I want the pivot feature, but realized that almost any monitor now provides that feature by adding a VESA desk stand with pivot capability. (Minor question, to pivot a 24" monitor, how high does the monitor have to be above the top of the desk to avoid having the corner of the monitor strike the desk while pivoting?) My options are:

1. the Lenovo L2440P. This one seems to have, by far, the lowest power usage of the others, 35W, though the brightness is only 300 nits. Considering how long monitors seems to last, the energy savings could really add up. Is this screen a matte finish? Can't find it in the specs. I definitely want a matter finish.

2. the HP ZR24w has an IPS screen and a lower price than the Dell, but it does not seem to have the internal capabilities of the Dell. Its power usage is also the highest.

3. the Dell Ultrasharp U2410. Like the HP, this one is 400 nits with an IPS and the power usage is 10W less than the HP, but still twice as much as the Lenovo. Is the extra power related to the different screen technology? What I like about the Dell are the plethora of connection options, but in particular its ability to display PiP or 2 inputs at the same time on the same monitor, sort of like a dual monitor setup. By attaching my laptop to this montior, as well as a desktop, and then using the extended desktop display feature on the laptop, I can have something similar to a triple monitor setup, using less office space. Does anyone know if either the Lenovo or HP have a similar ability which is simply omitted in the online descriptions?

All 3 monitors are 1920 x 1200, which I understand is 16:10. Due to aging eyes, I wonder if I should buy a 24 or 22" monitor with 1920 x 1080. The last time I bought good monitors, I opted for 19" instead of 17" due to them running the same native resolution and the 19" were easier on the eyes. Thank you in advance for any suggestions or thoughts.

[dr_st]

Is the extra power related to the different screen technology?

Yes. IPS requires more power than TN (mostly from the backlight - transmittance of an IPS panel is lower, so backlight needs to shine stronger).

All 3 monitors are 1920 x 1200, which I understand is 16:10. Due to aging eyes, I wonder if I should buy a 24 or 22" monitor with 1920 x 1080.

Not a big difference in dot pitch between 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 in 24" IMO. 22" with 1920x1080 is definitely much smaller dot pitch. Go for the 24" with the higher resolution.

[RealBlackStuff]

Why not try a much more pleasing 5:4 ratio 1280x1024 monitor.
Da*n those widescreen useless monitors...

[AMATX]

yes, go with 24", 1920x1200 res, as it's very noticeable -not- having this if you go with smaller monitors. Most <24" monitors these days can't go up to 1920x1200, so you pay one way or another(lower res, chopped off vertical).

[tilneford]

RealBlackStuff was heard to say

Why not try a much more pleasing 5:4 ratio 1280x1024 monitor.
Da*n those widescreen useless monitors...

I do not recall seeing that ratio for sale. Do you know where I could go to consider one?

When widescreen first started, I had sentiments as to its benefits similar to your comment. Now, many websites and applications I use are structured to utilize the wide format.Using the apps will be easier with a wide format monitor. As a text heavy user, the loss of height with a wide format has been an issue, but with the larger monitors:
1. I am optimistic that using the pivot will afford a text viewing experience that exceeds my current 4:3 format and
2. the height of a 24" is similar if not larger than my current 19" 4:3 format so that there is really no loss of height.

On the other hand, I will be quite sad when my x60s dies as a small wide screen format laptop just does not seem as useful. I may try a 4:3 aspect tablet instead.

[dr_st]

Your current 19" monitor is 5:4. 5:4 desktop monitors are only available in 17" and 19" sizes with 1280x1024 resolution.

[pianowizard]

Why not try a much more pleasing 5:4 ratio 1280x1024 monitor.
Da*n those widescreen useless monitors...

For people who work on one maximized window at a time, regardless of screen resolution or dimensions, I can see why 1280x1024 might be better than 1920x1200. But as soon as we try to view multiple documents at once, 1920x1200 will always be better than 1280x1024. Just yesterday, I was working on a desktop computer with just a 1680x1050 screen, and I had to copy lots of information from a web browser to an Excel spreadsheet. On a 1920x1200 or higher-res screen, this task would have been really easy because I would view the two windows side by side. But on that 1680x1050 screen, there was enough real estate to view just one window at a time and it was a pain to transfer info from the web site to the Excel doc. (Making it worse, it was an awfully crappy Acer monitor with terrible colors and viewing angles.)

but with the larger monitors:
1. I am optimistic that using the pivot will afford a text viewing experience that exceeds my current 4:3 format

Absolutely. 1920x1200 rotated into portrait mode provides the best possible text viewing experience. My main desktop computer is hooked up to three 1920x1200 PVA screens in portrait mode, plus a 30" 2560x1600 IPS screen in landscape. For 16:9 monitors, it would not be worth pivoting 1920x1080 because 1080 pixel columns would be too narrow.

[RealBlackStuff]

dr_st already said it.
My HP LP1965 desktop monitor is indeed a 19" 5:4 1280x1024.
Best monitor I ever bought (and cheap as well: $145.- incl. shipping for a brand new item), and I have wasted small fortunes on similar sized Eizo and Sony monitors, that weren't half as nice!
I don't want/need anything bigger.
If I want to watch a movie, I switch on the telly.

[pianowizard]

Not a big difference in dot pitch between 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 in 24" IMO. 22" with 1920x1080 is definitely much smaller dot pitch. Go for the 24" with the higher resolution.

I have an Excel spreadsheet that lists the DPI of all laptop and desktop LCD panels. The DPI values for the size range the OP is considering are listed below:

24.6" 1920x1080, 89.55
24" 1920x1080, 91.79
23.6" 1920x1080, 93.34
24.1" 1920x1200, 93.95
24" 1920x1200, 94.34
23" 1920x1080, 95.78
23" 1920x1200, 98.44
21.5" 1920x1080, 102.46
22" 1920x1200, 102.92

[dr_st]

There is also this:
JavaScript DPI/PPI Calculator
http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html

[khtse]

Brightness should not be a big factor when deciding between these displays, unless you are going to use it outdoor (really?) or you put it next to your window with bright sunlight shinning down on it.

I've been using my Dell 2407-HC for a few years now. Its brightness spec is 450 cd/m², and even with brightness set to 50 (out of 100) which is the default setting I still find it too bright. I set the brightness on mine between 35-40 most of the time.

Personally I would pick the Dell one. Their monitors are excellent, and they now have 0 bad pixel guarantee. Their monitors accept all sort of inputs, which I find to be extremely convenient a lot of the time. Also, if you are buying the Dell, extend the warranty to 5 years. It's rather inexpensive. I bought the 2407 about 5 years ago, and then in the 2nd year the USB-hub on it didn't work properly. Called Dell, they ship me a 2407-HC (newer model!) next day, together with a prepaid shipping label so that I could just put my old monitor into that box and had it shipped back. The 2407-HC has been working perfectly since then, but I'm hoping that it would fail before warranty runs out so that they would replace it with a newer model for me

[dr_st]

Personally I would pick the Dell one. Their monitors are excellent, and they now have 0 bad pixel guarantee.

I like DELL monitors myself, and have about 4 of them in various places at this point. Just a small refinement: their 0 bad pixels guarantee is valid only for bright pixels. However, it is the bright ones that can be intrusive and annoying. Dark ones are typically not noticeable unless you go looking for them.

[miamicanes]

Regardless of which monitor you buy, download & install WinSplit Revolution the moment you get your new monitor. It's free, open source, and makes window-management several orders of magnitude more convenient.

The main problem is that with Windows, the "one-maximized-window" paradigm has been so overwhelmingly and completely dominant for so long, it literally never even occurred to Microsoft's development team that Windows desperately needs a better way to deal with windows that aren't either maximized or minimized to the taskbar. With a 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 monitor, you'll (almost) NEVER use maximized windows unless it's something like Netbeans, Eclipse, Photoshop, Visual Studio, or some other app where that one window itself encapsulates and organizes several dozen smaller windows. For web pages in particular, 1920x1080/1200 on a 24" monitor is so wide, it's actually awkward and unpleasant to read unless you narrow the window (or enjoy turning your head from side to side, and trying to follow wrapping text with rows that are almost one and a half feet wide)

Here's a quick example of what WinSplit Revolution does. Suppose you want to resize the current window so it's the full height of the display, exactly half the width, and aligned with the left edge of the monitor. You can spend 20-30 seconds dragging window edges around until you achieve approximately what you want... or, if you have WSR installed, you can hit ctrl-alt-keypad4.

It gets even better if you have two monitors. Want to throw the current window over to the other monitor? ctrl-alt-cursorRight or ctrl-alt-cursorLeft. It even nicely handles asymmetric extended desktops that aren't the same resolution. Let me put it this way... when I got my new SSD and installed Windows7, WSR was literally the first program that got installed, because Windows now seems completely intolerable without it.

[dr_st]

Some of this functionality (maximizing windows to 1/2 half the screen, left or right) is already built into Windows 7 (you drag the window to the left edge of the screen). But if you want some more advanced things (like remembering exact window positions and restoring them), a third party program may be the only way.