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My monitor at home finaly bit the dust and I am looking for a new one. I am looking for the best 18-20" viewable monitor I can get for about $400. Anyone have any suggestions or monitors they really like?

You can't go wrong with Iiyama monitors. They're reasonably expensive but, like everything else, probably quite a bit cheaper in the United States than they are here in Great Britain. I bought a second hand one from a company bankruptcy sale and it's bloody marvellous. Cost me about £85 ($120 or thereabouts) for a 17".

Some people are a bit put off by the damping wires on the Diamondtron tube but, trust me, when gaming you won't notice them.

I've never found a lot of difference between the different name brands, but you might wait for Mr Flibble or Mr Sleep to show up and put their two bits in.

The two things you should look for are a low dot pitch and high refresh rate. After that, get the biggest one you can afford. If you like playing games with high frame rates, you should probably avoid LCD monitors and just get a CRT.

If you live in the United States or Canada, check out Pricewatch.com and click on monitors to get a low price.

Yep, he's absolutely right. If you're going to spend a lot of time gaming you want a CRT monitor that supports a refresh rate of say 100Hz at the resolution you use. Much more than that and it can result in ghosting. Much less and you will end up with strained eyes and some awful headaches.

The lower the dot pitch the better though this can make a monitor expensive. I would also recommend a monitor with a flat tube, eg a Mitsubishi diamondtron or a Sony trinitron or similar.

Like everything else in life, you get what you pay for.

I know it sounds ridiculous but you might also want to look for a black trim, for some reason it also improves the image.

I have heard good things about the build quality of Ilyama monitors, i would agree with Silver Knight HLD and Silver have covered whatever i was going to say

Most of the important factors have been covered. Something else to keep in mind is glare reduction coatings. Most major brands do this now, but you can still get cheapie monitors that don't have anything, and you WILL notice the difference!

My preference is for either Sony of Viewsonic.

Do you think that 85-90 Hz refresh rate is enough? Most of the Sony's top out @85 Hz no mater what resolution. Well, thats what the tech support guy said anyway. The viewsonic, on the other hand, has higher refresh rates. But, the tech guy for them said lowering the refresh was a bad idea (ie. and 800X600 it is 118 Hz, he said lowering it to 100 Hz wasn't recomended). Any Idea why this is true?

Anything above 72Hz I find acceptable. I've got a Viewsonic PS775 running at 1024x768 120Hz. In most instances you won't be able to tell the difference once you get over 80Hz anyway (depending on how good your monitor is).

However, some monitors are desinged to run at a certain range, but that's just for best performance and visual clarity. Unless you're really serious about exact numbers it's probably not worth worrying about.

I recommend a flat screen CRC monitor supporting 100+ Hz. Once you have had a flat screen monitor you don't want anything else and normal monitors look like a sphere to you. I'd prefer a 17" flat monitor over a normal 19" monitor everyday. The two small horizontal lines mentioned above only appear on light backgrounds and are a small price to pay and they have absolutely no impact on games.

I have a Samsung 17" (flat) at home and I am using a NEC 22" (flat) a NEC 15" TFT and a Samsung 19" (not flat) at work.

The Samsung 17" (700 NF) is definately the best one out of these four.