PC Monitor Advice Please

james00744

Looking for a new monitor for my PC as the current one is on its way out.. it's from 2007 so had good innings!

Main purpose is off/business use, with a budget of around £100-120.

Currently thinking between these unless anybody can find better ones?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-1920x1080-Monitor-DisplayPort-Warranty/dp/B096JVGP6S/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/BenQ-EX240N-1920x1080-Supports-Bezel-less/dp/B0B797ZPF5/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-S2421NX-1920x1080-FreeSync-Ultrathin/dp/B09VTP21F8/

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They are pretty much the same at this price point, out of those 3 I'd personally go for the Dell P2422H, as it has the "comfort view" and 4 USB ports that you can use to charge your phone etc.

The Benq claims to have great sound, but don't believe a word of it, sub £500 the sound is dire- really truly absolutely dire, think 1970s transistor radio off the market inside a biscuit tin full of sand at the bottom of a well dire. Your laptop sounds like a £200,000 HiFi setup in comparison.

Budget for some decent stand alone speakers, or one of those sound bars that they sell to gamers if you want any more than squeaks & bings.

On a 24" 1080 is fine- you won't want 4k unless you have eyes like microscopes- you will never read any text without magnification.

I spent days researching my latest monitor, a Phillips 34" curved screen, and chose it because the review in PCPRO praised the sound quality above all the others on test. I can only conclude that the reviewer has even more hearing damage than me, and if the others are not even as good, they must be unbelievably really truly absolutely excruciatingly dire.

victor2

I have an older model BenQ 24" monitor and use it as part of a dual monitor display. It's connected by HDMI to drive the built-in speakers and they are fine for all I need, which is watching the odd Youtube video clip or a video taken on my smartphone. Dedicated speakers would sound much better, but it does the job and keeps the hardware and connections down.

Image quality is great. It was purchased in 2016 and is still as good as new.

james00744

facade said:

They are pretty much the same at this price point, out of those 3 I'd personally go for the Dell P2422H, as it has the "comfort view" and 4 USB ports that you can use to charge your phone etc.

On a 24" 1080 is fine- you won't want 4k unless you have eyes like microscopes- you will never read any text without magnification.

Yeah - the Dell P2422H also has height adjustment. I sometimes like to alter the height of my office chair, so I'm sometimes changing the height of the monitor I have. Ergonomically, it's a good feature to have.

Somebody on another forum said, FHD (1920) is a joke of a resolution in 2024 for a desktop monitor? And that 24" is too small and I should go 27" up?

IvanOpinion

james00744 said:

Somebody on another forum said, FHD (1920) is a joke of a resolution in 2024 for a desktop monitor? And that 24" is too small and I should go 27" up?

It depends on what you want to use it for.  If all you want to do is word processing, spreadsheets, internet browsing and some basic gaming then a 24" FHD monitor will be fine. If you want to do some serious gaming or CAD/design work then 27" 4K would be at the lower end of adequate.

My set up has 2 x 27" (used for the main body of my job) and 1 x 24 " screen (used for colour accuracy), all FHD and at a glance very few people realise that one of the screens is smaller than the others.

The problem with the internet is that people can be very good at spending other people's money, especially when it comes to tech. Those whose 'reasoning' is based on it 'is a joke' should be ignored and treated with the contempt they deserve.

james00744

IvanOpinion said:

The problem with the internet is that people can be very good at spending other people's money, especially when it comes to tech. Those whose 'reasoning' is based on it 'is a joke' should be ignored and treated with the contempt they deserve.

The irony is, they recommended a 27" and then gave me 2 links to Ebay where they are Used and have scratches all over them. Needless to say I've disregarded their advice.

facade

james00744 said:

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Somebody on another forum said, FHD (1920) is a joke of a resolution in 2024 for a desktop monitor? And that 24" is too small and I should go 27" up?

I'm OLD and my eyes are dim.

I had a 27" 4k monitor and I couldn't read any text on it without squinting, so I had to run it at 1080.

(Windows actually has a display mode where it magnifies everything by 150,200 or 300%, but this basically reduces the resolution of the display to 1080 anyway)

My 34" ultra-wide curved monitor is about 12.5" tall (pretty much the same as the 27" display), and I run it at 1080 vertical (and 100% windows scaling), which works out to be about 90 dots per inch, and it is fine. It is supposed to be 1440  vertical resolution, which would be about 115dpi, but text is just that bit too small to be comfortable.

For 4K I'd need a 55" monitor, but that is no good as I'd have to move around to see different parts of it, or sit so far back that I might as well have a 32" one- and then I'd need bigger text! (I've tried it with my TV, and I have to get so close to read text that I have to physically move about to see the other side of the screen)

Rather rambly I admit, but the bottom line is that a 4k computer monitor is useless to me, it might show crisper images in games, but for everything that I actually do on the PC 1080 (FHD as they call it) is perfect.

I'd go for a 27" 1080 (FHD) monitor if you can afford it, a little bit bigger is nicer. Actually, a lot of 27" monitors are 4K and they aren't much more than the 1080 ones, you might have much better eyes than mine, and you can always run them in 1080 resolution if you haven't.

The ultra-wide is nice now I'm used to it, but has pros & cons

Pros- you can actually have two documents open at once and be able to read them, or a small window alongside your working space.

Cons- 

graphics tablets are 16:9, so circles become elipses, if you apply correction the bottom 3rd of the tablet isn't used.

You get RSI as you are forever flinging the mouse from one side to the other, or scrabbling at the trackball (why are the boxes you select always on the extreme left, and the action button on the extreme right? I tried setting mouse speed to max, but I just lose sight of the cursor immediately)