Instruction for choosing LCD

Instructions

1. 
   
   Step 1
   Consider the cost and your budget. While you should look at all of the technical carefully, pricing is important. This will help you eliminate various monitors right away.
   
2. 
   
   Step 2
   Choose a size. First and most obviously you need to consider your desk space and how much room you have. Second you need to consider your video card and the native resolution it can support. Native resolution is the physical count of pixels on the monitor. If you don't use the native resolution of the monitor it may have a washed out look.
   
3. 
   
   Step 3
   Decide on wide-screen or regular format. Wide-screen might be best for video or other multimedia purposes but beyond this it is probably just personal preference. You will need to consider that video cards such as those made before 2006 may not support wide-screen monitors.
   
4. 
   
   Step 4
   Choose a connection type. This depends on what kind of connection your video card accepts. The two most popular connections are DVI and VGA. VGA is the older type and DVI the newer. DVI gives a more stable picture.
   
5. 
   
   Step 5
   Find the best contract ratio. Contrast ratio is a number like 400:1. The bigger the first number the better contrast you will get and the better everything will look on the monitor.
   
6. 
   
   Step 6
   Look at the response rate. Response rates are in the milliseconds but they can make a huge difference. In the early days of LCD monitors the response rate was about 24ms and playing games or watching a movie had a blur effect. Be aware that some monitors overclock their response rates and that can cause artifacts to show up on the screen.
   
7. 
   
   Step 7
   Find out the viewing angle. With LCD monitors, when you are not looking directly at the monitor it will be visually distorted. The maximum viewing angle lets you know how far from the center you can look at the monitor and still see it at an acceptable level.
   
8. 
   
   Step 8
   Count bad pixels. Find out what the acceptable level of bad pixels the manufacturer has set. Bad pixels are pixels that don't turn or or are stuck at one color. A small percentage of monitors have bad pixels when they are manufactured but throwing these monitors out would be costly so manufacturers set an acceptable level of bad pixels.