Buying new 22 to 24 inch monitor for gaming. Budget: £300

Death Zebra

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The image on my current monitor (Samsung P2370HD) recently got darker and the monitor itself is noticeably hotter. Last night it suddenly got even darker and smelled like it was on fire so I probably need to get a new one.

Since it's more than 4 years since I purchased my last one I need help choosing a new one since I haven't the faintest idea what's going on with the market. I can hardly find any recent monitor reviews or monitors in the £200-300 range even though one review claims that there is plenty of competition therein.

My requirements as follows:

  • 1080p native resolution. Any higher is pointless as I don't play newer PC games or intend to buy a computer powerful enough for higher resolutions.
  • A VGA and DVI socket for my DVI-D cable. Sound is irrelevant.
  • Same or better specs as my previous monitor. Namely, brightness of 300cd/m2 (that was dark enough even at full brightness), Contrast ratio of 1:1000 static and 1:50000 dynamic, and response time of 5ms.
 
I can hardly find any recent monitor reviews or monitors in the £200-300 range even though one review claims that there is plenty of competition therein.

The popular computer components site Ebuyer lists 21 models currently selling between £200 and £300 at circa 23" so I'm not sure why you're having trouble. Admittedly it's something of a strange price range at that size with the majority of screens being cheaper and the high end screens being more expensive. Of the 49 23" screens ebuyer sells 39 of them are cheaper, 6 of them in your budget, and 5 are more expensive. There are no screens currently for sale on ebuyer between £250 and £300.

[*]1080p native resolution. Any higher is pointless as I don't play newer PC games or intend to buy a computer powerful enough for higher resolutions.

Higher resolutions mean more space, it makes more difference outside games than it does in them. Having said that, high resolution monitors haven't reached your budget yet so at the size you want you're mainly going to see 1920x1080 (1080p in TV terminolgy) and 1920x1200 screens. The latter gives you a little more vertical space and will work on any computer, but if you're a big film buff (or console gamer) you may want to stick to 1920x1080 to avoid black borders

[*]A VGA and DVI socket for my DVI-D cable. Sound is irrelevant.

Given your high budget I'd also include a DisplayPort input on the wishlist for future compatibility (and potentially an output as well for daisy chaining). This one will hopefully last longer than your current short lived Samsung.

[*]Same or better specs as my previous monitor. Namely, brightness of 300cd/m2 (that was dark enough even at full brightness), Contrast ratio of 1:1000 static and 1:50000 dynamic, and response time of 5ms.
[/LIST]

If you actually use dynamic contrast you'd be a rare exception and I doubt you're getting that much range (a fifty fold change in brightness in different scenes would probably be quite disturbing in practice). As a rule it's badly implemented and turned off by default, it's generally just a function to allow advertising departments to write in silly figures to help sell the monitors.

Response time is similarly misleading and doesn't have much correspondance to ghosting amount (a 1ms screen isn't half as much ghosting as a 1ms one, in practice they're very similar). Especially with other functions like black frame insertion and higher refresh rates reducing ghosting. I'd ignore this figure entirely as well and if you are sensitive to ghosting buy based on actual testing.


Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the current ranges myself so I can't really recommend a specific model. As LCD is a mature technology there isn't that much difference between the more general screens, but you should be able to find reviews of the more expensive and cutting edge screens on sites like TFTCentral, Prad.de and FlatPanels HD
 
Thanks for the advice. I'd never thought to check out ebuyer as I tend to be wary of unfamiliar websites these days. I only looked at CNET and some other site I can't remember. I found the Asus VG248QE on ebuyer, chose it on the basis of reviews from Tom's Hardware and somewhere else I can't remember and then bought it from amazon because it was £20 cheaper.

This one will hopefully last longer than your current short lived Samsung.
In fairness, it lasted 4 years and 2 months and was used for an average of about 12 hours a day.
 

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