Two weeks have passed since the last time I wrote anything long enough to bore you. So now I’m doing it again.

Lately, I have been saving money to buy myself a nice monitor. My old monitor, an IBM G74, is already showing its age (it was made in 1999, I’m actually surprised it’s still working).

It does not have any apparent problem, though, the colour is still fine, the picture is still sharp, nothing nasty that I noticed. But when I said it showed its age, I actually mean it. The first problem is that if the analogue VGA cable is moved, the monitor will turn somewhat blue-ish, which means that its solder is dried out.

The second is that the pictures would vibrate sometimes. This happens randomly, but each time it happened, I hate every second of it.

Now, I don’t really want to fiddle with the insides of a CRT monitor for my own good, It’s pretty dangerous, you know.

Which leaves me questioning: which monitor should I buy as a replacement?

I have already decided that I would buy an LCD instead of another CRT, Not because I don’t like CRTs. But I just think that LCDs are now rather cheap, compared to a few years ago. Besides, LCD technology now are much more advanced than before. Ghosting problems are minimised, few to no dead pixel on any given monitor, and again, it’s much cheaper now. So for the next few paragraph, I’ll only be talking about LCDs.

Next, let’s talk about the size. It does matter, I am not going to buy anything smaller than what I am already using. Since I’m currently using a “17-inch” monitor with 15,9-inch viewable diagonal, I’m going to rule out every 15-inch monitors available in this world. Which leaves me with either a 17 incher or a 19 incher, which is the hard limit for my budget.

Which one should I choose? Good question, but let’s take a look at the prices first. a 17 incher will cost me around IDR 1.700.000, which will get me a either Samsung, LG, or Viewsonic. Don’t mind the price, I only put those links for the specifications. While a 19 incher will set me back around IDR 2.200.000, that will get me another Viewsonic or a Philips, maybe an LG. All widescreen (16:10), of course.

Now, for the money, which of those two options will give me the most screen area? with a little calculation using the homemade formula:

Sqroot((16x)^2+(10x)^2)=screen diagonal

Okay, it is Pythagorean theorem, I know. Anyway, with the formula above, I understand that a 17 incher has 129,6 square inches of screen area, while a 19 incher has 163,2 inches of screen area. This means that a 19 incher have more than 25% more screen area than a 17 incher, while costing around 29% more.

This means that a 17 incher has more screen area for the money, so I’ll choose one of it. Unless, of course, I somehow enter impulse-buying-mode and buy a 19 incher instead.

With that matter settled, let’s move to brand selection. I only listed Viewsonic and Philips above, that’s because they are the only two that have a widescreen 19 inchers for reasonable price. I have heard good things about Viewsonic monitors, and experienced a good memory with a Philips. So I’m pretty comfortable with any of those two, though I think the Philips one is a little more to my preference.

The problem i’m facing right now is holding back myself from buying anything else. When you have some money handy, you would want to spend it. That happens to me too. I can hardly resist the urge of buying a 9600GSO or a 3850. Though I might buy one of them anyway in the future to accompany my gaming needs along with a new power supply.