At long last

At long last

We finally have a new monitor! Hurrah!

I was looking around for CRT monitors because I still wasn’t convinced that the ever-cheapening LCD variety would serve our home computer well. PC Magazine Philippines wrote in their “Monitors LCD vs. CRT” piece last year that LCD monitors don’t work very well outside their “native resolution,” or the actual count of the pixels of the display. That means games and video playback tend to suffer from “ghosting.” It doesn’t help that response times at 8-16ms aren’t as instantaneous as CRTs. Besides, the price is still rather high in my view. I could get a decent 15” CRT for PhP5,000.

My parents thought differently though: since this is effectively an upgrade, we might as well trade up to the best we could afford. So they were all sold on the merits of LCD monitors, such as the low power consumption and the space savings.

When I got home two days ago with the CD-Rs my dad wanted, he casually asked me “Have you seen the new monitor?” I was surprised.

Sitting on the desk was a silver-bezel Samsung SyncMaster 940BW monitor: a 19” LCD beast of a monitor. The thing’s got an aspect ratio of 16:10, significantly wider than the 4:3 of usual monitors. But it was still an LCD and I had my doubts. This called for some testing.

I booted up my games and played a few minutes of “Turn-A Gundam,” both at full screen and at various resolutions. Not bad! There was barely any shimmer or ghosting, and it wasn’t enough to be an annoyance. I found out from the promotional decal of the monitor that it sported a fast response time of 4ms from gray to gray. If anything, the Samsung is ridiculously bright.

In my spare time I researched the Samsung 940BW online. My parents made a very good choice, it seems. It’s reportedly one of the best monitors around at this price range (PhP14,000). Although it’s not ideal for graphics work and Photoshop, it’ll cover home PC duties very well, or so the reviews say.

What can I say...I’m actually pleased I was wrong.

The monitor had an unexpected extra with it. My folks threw in a new keyboard, the A4Tech kL-5. This thing has no numeric keypad, which saves space, but seems to jam all the keys in a small footprint, which means the auxiliary keys I’ve learned to use on a full-size keyboard are in new places I’m not so familar with. It’s also a quiet unit which purportedly reduces RSI (repetitive strain injury), but I’ve never been a fan of shallow laptop keyboards, which this one feels like.

Oh well. At least it matches the monitor.