I need a new monitor. I currently have a dell -- It's darker than it should be, but the brightness adjustment is broken. But the colors always seemed pretty good.
I can't afford the really good stuff, so I'm probably just heading to best buy and getting a 100-200$ monitor, 20".
I don't have the expensive color correction package.
So the question is: Are there certain monitor manufacturers that I should be considering because they're good out of the box? Are there manufacturers that I should be avoiding because they suck?
I have a 21" NEC Accusync at home and a 17" Dell at work. I also have nearly identical Dell at home, in a multi monitor configuration with the NEC. The NEC definitely shows me more subtleties and fine nuances in my shots than the Dells do. I bought Ellen a 23" Asus recently when Fry's had them on sale. I also bought one for myself, and had to return one because the backlight was dead. I chose to just get a refund and not a replacement. The Asus was better than the Dell and an upgrade for Ellen, but the NEC still had the better image, despite being a little smaller.
I've recently gone through four Dell's at work. All are in the 20" to 22" range and all look identical from the outside. The pictures are another matter. One is bright, sharp, and has great color. Another is dark and muddy. Another is bright but the colors change from every viewing angle.
Unless your buying a companies flagship model you usually don't know what is on the inside. Most monitor manufactures don't make their own LCD panels, so they just throw in whatever panel they happen to have a deal with at the time. This leads to huge inconsistencies with the picture quality.
The best thing you can do it see it in person. Better still would be to bring a thumb drive with some test images on it and mess with the monitor settings. There is still always a chance that the one you take home has a different internal LCD panel, but hopefully the display model and whats on the shelf were made at about the same time and have the same internal LCD. If you do get it home and it sucks, take it back.
At under $200, you basically take what you can get. Good IPS-based monitors are out of that range.
Of what's left, Samsung makes some decent monitors (they actually make the LCD panels), and you can get a 23" for $170. There's also a 24" Dell in the same range.
