Phoenix Gazette

Monitors are the Rodney Dangerfields of the computer world - they don't get any respect. Think about it, the last time you imagined the perfect computer system, the list probably included a super fast Pentium or Power PC chip, high-speed CD ROM driveand a multi gigabyte hard drive. But no monitor.
It's an afterthought. "Nobody gets caught up in the monitor," said Jim Beedle, a senior analyst with In-Stat, a Phoenix-area market research firm. "They want to know how big the hard drive is and whether it's multi-media. They take for granted that the monitor they get will be good." he said. "That's a mistake. The monitor is what you look at. The rest of the box doesn't mean squat."

Industry experts say that a truly good system, one that will please the owners for years to come, must include a high quality monitor. But finding one can be as tricky as negotiating a minefield in clown shoes.

"There is so much misinformation put out by marketing people. They are preying on the ignorance of the public." said Erv Kallstrom, owner of Erv's Monitors, and East Valley trauma center for ailing monitors. "They believe it does no good to have the customer know too much." "Take screen sizes for example. It's a basic specification tossed around by any monitor retailer. Like televisions, monitors are measured diagonally and come in sizes such as 14-inch, 15-inch, 17-inch and 20-inch. But how many monitor buyers have ever put a ruler up against the screen? So-called 14-inch monitors actually measure 12.5 or 13 diagonally. A 17-inch measures 15.5 or 16 inches diagonally. Why the measurement flim-flam? Nobody interviewed for this story could say. "It's just something they do, " Kallstrom said of monitor makers.

Another feature monitor makers and sellers overplay is resolution. Each monitor creates images with tiny dots of light called pixels. Low-resolution graphics have few pixels per square inch and take ?? a boxy, stair-step look when viewed close-up. High-resolution graphics pack in more pixels per square inch, and often resemble photographs. Most monitors are capable of displaying images at various resolution, such as 640 x 480, 800 x600, 1024 x 786 pixels. The trouble is that most monitors are too small to display all the information in a high-resolution image. Kallstrom explained that a good quality 14-inch monitor, for example, is capable of display a 10-inch wide image. The number of pixels that most monitors can handle is 70 per inch. That means the image on the 14-inch monitor is 700 pixels wide. That's fine if you run at 64- x 480 pixels. But Kallstrom says you're wasting electricity if you try to display 800 x 600 or higher resolution images on such a small monitor.

The lesson: Don't be swayed by a small monitor's ability to display high-resolution graphics. If you really want to view all the scenery in, say, Flight Simulator 5.0 shoot for at least a 15-inch or 17-inch monitor.

The monitor industry also confuses the public about inter-laced and non-interlaced screens. Inter-laced screens are refreshed about half as often as non-interlaced screens, and tend to flicker and cause headaches. Not surprisingly, monitors stamped "non-interlaced" on the outside tend to be more expensive. The funny thing is that virtually every monitor made today is non-interlaced. So don't pay more just for the stamp.

Kallstrom also warns about getting the dot pitch you've paid for. Dot pitch is the distance, measured in millimeters, between pixels of the same color (green to green, blue to blue or red to red.) Most monitors sold today come with a 0.28mm dot pitch, which display a finer resolution image than monitors sold a few years ago with 0.39mm dot pitches. Kallstrom says monitors sometimes come through his shop for repairs that are billed as 0.28mm dot pitches, but actually have 0.39mm pitches or more. "In my opinion, this amounts to consumer fraud" Kallstrom said. "And nobody is saying anything about it."

So what's poor consumer to do?

Two things to begin with: Stick with a name brand monitor and expect to pay for quality. The experts say top monitor manufacturers don't sell monitors that fail their quality control. But the failed monitors don't go into the trash heap. They get sold to someone else who tweek them enough to make them work and then sells them for less under another name. Kallstrom says he sees this all the time. He'll take the back off a no-name monitor bought in for repairs and can tell immediately it was made by a major manufacturer, Usually, tiny magnets have been glued around the back of the picture tube to correct image quality faults.

It was difficult getting experts to agree on which brand names are best. Monitors from Sony, NEC, CTX and ViewSonic got high marks. But Kallstrom said NEC monitors are difficult to repair because parts are hard to come by.

As for cost, experts said buyers should avoid paying less than $250 or $300 for a 14-inch or 15-inch monitor. A good quality 15-inch should probably cost closer to $365, with a decent 17-incher going for about $665. By all means, they said, steer clear of anything under $200. Kallstrom said that $149 monitors that recently hit the market "sucker bait." "If you get a cheap monitor, it's not going to be manufactured as well." said Jeannie Marette, manager of the Monitor Warehouse in Phoenix. "A lot of times the makers will run the components at the highest rate that they're capable of to make them look good. But that makes them fail sooner. Your chances of having problems are higher."

In the near future the cost of monitors, primarily the 15- to 17-inch range, will be slightly higher, because of supply shortages. Experts attributed the shortage to the failure of manufacturers to keep up with the demand. Generally, Beedle said, monitor prices should keep falling, along with the costs of other computer components, at a rate of about 25 percent a year.

One thing to look for: a high vertical refresh rate, the speed at which the screen redraws images based on new information. The higher the rate, the better performance and the less chance of eye strain. Shoot for a rate of 72 Hz or higher. Kallstrom said it's not difficult to find a good monitor, but it takes a little effort. "We are passive consumers." he said. "We should be active consumers. Ask questions!"