What is the most important part of any computer?

I suspect most people would say the CPU but I think that is just the result marketing dollars from Intel. The right answer is the monitor.

Think about how you actually interact with a computer. The four parts of a computer you interact with are the monitor, keyboard, sound and mouse. If you are like me, you stare at a computer monitor 10+ hours of a day.

While CPU's get a lot of media attention, the monitor really doesnt. In truth, I knew very little about monitors other than resolution and refresh speed and those are pretty minor features in LCD monitors.

Turning a bunch of numbers into an image is tough work and the quality of monitors varies considerably. In fact, the technology of monitors is pretty amazing.

I had a 21" widescreen monitor from Gateway (FPD2175W) for several years. I paid about $650 for it new. It was 1600x1050 and a great monitor for me.

But after getting a decent 24" full HD monitor at work, it was time for a change. Just think how productive I would be with a full 1900x1200 desktop?

A larger monitor would also mean I would need a faster PC to play games. More pixels means more power required for the same game performance. Which is a bonus because I was itching for a new PC anyway.

Thus began another intense research project for a new 24" monitor. It was hard to find scientific monitor reviews but one of the best sites I have seen is TFT Central, a European website. Based largely on the strength of this review at TFT Central, I ended up purchasing an HP LP2475w.

my decision

HP LP2475W 24in LCD Monitor

In the end, I had it narrowed down to three 24" full HD monitors. The Dell 2408WFP (S-PVA) was the cheapest but it had the highest input lag. The Samsung 245BW (TN) had fewer connection options and lacked 1:1. The HP LP2475W (S-IPS) seemed the best of the three for me.

At the time it was hard to find the monitor. HP's own website was pretty crappy and Newegg did not carry it so I ended up buying from Amazon.com and crossing my fingers that there were no bad pixels or other problems that would necessitate a return. Happily there were none.

color

I wanted the best color accuracy as a matter of principle. During this process I learned a ton about color in monitors, and I was a little surprised to find out how much color varies between monitors. Especially from the cheaper TN technology and the more expensive IPS and PVA monitors.

black levels

Related to color is black levels and that was actually my main complaint with my old monitor. Many games just look black. My old monitor could not show the right shade of gray so I got black. If I tweaked the in-game gamma, I got a washed out color which doesnt look better either. So the ability to show black and shades of gray was important.

input speed

As a gamer, I also needed to think about input lag and speed. I have never experience problems in either of these areas but TFT Central reviews showed good examples of both issues.

1:1 aspect ratio

Another critical feature for me was an option for 1:1 aspect ratio. LCD monitors have a fixed number of pixels. If you send the monitor an image that is different from its number of pixels, many monitors will try to resize the image to fit the screen. Scaling images up (say from 1600x1050 to 1900x1200) makes the images look like ass. It might be OK for watching a DVD (which I wont do) but its a serious problem for games or text.

I needed a monitor that had the option of preservice a 1:1 ratio between the input image and the displayed image. If I send it a smaller image, the monitor should just show less or black space where there is no image. The HP had that option.

Calibration

One of the things I learned about in this process was calibration and how important it is. So I purchased an X-Rite Eye1 calibrator and used it on all our PC's. Using this tool you can calibrate the monitor itself and the video card in your computer (called an ICC color profile). The differences between calibrated and uncalibrated can be pretty dramatic although you probably would not notice with a calibration tool or 2 monitors side by side.

I am happy with the color results of this monitor. You can see that the color gamut (right) is large and the color accuracy (left) is almost 1:1. Good stuff.

Issues

Unfortunately, there are two flaws in this monitor that get my goat.

First, I use the monitor with a PC and a Mac. I want to switch the input between these two. There is no button for that on this monitor.

Instead of a simple Input button, the monitor has a "quick select" button and three inscrutable on/off configuration settings: auto-detect input, auto-switch input, quick-select. Instead of a simple Input button, the monitor tries to be smart and ends up being frustrating.

I want to press the input button and have it change inputs. This monitor wont let you select an input that it has not already detected as being on. If your PC goes to sleep or is still booting up, it does not detect it and you cannot switch to it. Grrr #1.

Related to this problem, it has an issue with my Mac. When a mac detects a monitor, it does a handshake thing, blanks the screen, and then refreshes both monitors with an image. That is ok and I was used to it with my previous Gateway monitor. But the Gateway only does this handshake once; it remembers the setting and I could quickly change inputs without this handshake.

Not so for the HP. This monitor re-initializes every time I change inputs. Hard to describe in a blog but instantly annoying. The result is slow to switch and blanks both screens on the Mac. Grrr #2.

closing

In the end, except for the two Grrr's I highly recommend this monitor. If you only use one input, I would give it a 10. If you use more than one, I give it an 8 or -2 for annoyance.