Finally my cashback arrived in the mail today. Acer was giving $29 cashbacks on their monitors, so I wasn't going to knock that back. So that brings my monitor down to $195 (from $224). Of course the cashback wasn't the sole reason I chose this monitor, the price was good, and it seemed to get pretty good reviews on the shop's site and the specifications seemed decent too.
I find it an OK-good monitor, good brightness, I guess the colour is OK, I haven't done comparisons yet... Anyway, anything I design probably won't be important enough to require super-accurate colour reproduction, it would only be personal projects or small time projects that I would have complete control over. Which was one of the considerations when I was looking for one, but I figured it's not that important, so I concentrated on other features...
Like pixel response time which was a big factor because I'll be (and am) playing games and watching movies on it.
As much as 22inch would have been really nice, I felt that the cost wasn't worth it, and a discovered another reason why I wasn't too concerned about not getting 22inch. All of the 22" had native resolutions of 1680x1050 which admittedly is really nice, I also felt that higher resolutions would just push games even further down the track so a smaller one is fine (yeah, I know in three or four years a new graphics card will solve that, running at a higher res... but truly it was more of a price saving justification than really caring about the graphics performance at higher resolutions (oh, apart from Crysis))
And it came with a piece of marketing clear plastic (with words) stuck to the front, which doubles as a handy dust cover, if I remember to flip it back over each night. Actually it'd be really great if I could get a clear piece, because then I could just leave on the front all the time and still see through it normally. (If you look closely on the 2nd-last photo on My New Computer Part 2 - Pictures posting you can just see the tape and the top of the plastic. Anyway, so that's it. Maybe I'll put a photo up of the "cover" and some wattage measurements later.
