Monitors : Higher resolution or higher refresh rate?

iko22 said:

Well, @AntonisCy , Black Friday deals tends to be placed on stock that the retailer cannot get rid of . In computing terms, this is usually the stock that underperforms. So, it is often wiser to look beyond the deals, to find the high performance kit, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

I have noticed that much of what's been on sale with those early Black Friday deals are subpar items. Plus, I've been reading that as Christmas draws closer, things are going to get more expensive this year than in previous years. I think Black Friday might not see as great of deals as people think.

@AntonisCy, check out the prices now and get what you feel to be reasonably priced and good quality. You might be disappointed by Black Friday and find that things are far more expensive after it.

jvickers said:

I have noticed that much of what's been on sale with those early Black Friday deals are subpar items.

Click to expand...

Yes, it just makes the buyer buy twice, as the first purchase is not quite what anyone wants .

I don't know how easy you can adapt to a large monitor, but I think anything larger than 24" is difficult to work on, especially if you type a lot. Unless you set the scale too high (more than 150% for 1080p or 300% for 2160p) but then you lose the advantage of the large screen as you will see less items on screen than with lower scaling. I guess video size/quality is not affected by scaling, not sure.

spapakons said:

I don't know how easy you can adapt to a large monitor, but I think anything larger than 24" is difficult to work on, especially if you type a lot. Unless you set the scale too high (more than 150% for 1080p or 300% for 2160p) but then you lose the advantage of the large screen as you will see less items on screen than with lower scaling. I guess video size/quality is not affected by scaling, not sure.

Click to expand...

This is an excellent point. Anyone who uses a monitor for non-art or watching movies (e.g., people working in Word and Excel a lot) would need to rescale the size of the content just to see the font. Didn't even think about that.

Plus, I've always thought too large a monitor would cause you to have to move your head to get a good view of the content at which you're looking. You'd have to be further away from the monitor to see the entire screen in a glance. A 25" monitor is about as large as I would go because you can still see the entire screen and can focus on portions with simple eye movements, and I sit approximately 36" from my screen.

I have a 25" in front of me, a 24" to my left, and a 23" to my right. The 23" is the easiest to see a Word document on. I wouldn't go with a 25" monitor again, though, because it apparently is an odd size and costs more. At least, my Viewsonic 25" did. You can get a good 27" monitor or extremely good 24" monitor for what I paid for my 25" monitor.

Again, good point on the scaling.

spapakons said:

I guess video size/quality is not affected by scaling, not sure.

Click to expand...

Yes, the DPI (Dots per Inch) is important when working with print quality graphics work. Anything from 300-400 DPI is necessary. If you do not work with print quality deliverables, as @jvickers says, then lower DPI scaling is acceptable. Personally, I think it worth it to invest in a 150 - 300 DPI monitor.

Sometimes I need to capture the screen with Snipping Tool to save some websites as the option to save an image is disabled, I discovered that scaling affects photos (at least in browsers, I am not sure for offline picture files), so to get the best possible quality I have to set scaling to 100% so the photo is not scaled (and hence quality is compromised).

Just a thought while browsing through Amazon. If you use Edge, it will alert you of coupons, price comparisons with other sites, and sometimes a price history, especially if there's a difference in the price of the item at which you're looking. It's a handy feature to have when shopping for monitors (anything, really).

There are price comparison sites, such as skroutz.gr and bestprice.gr for Greece, that you can find the cheapest shop in your area for the item you want to buy. They also have a price history button so you can see how the price varies through days. I believe the same is true for your local price comparison sites. Why don't you just visit one to find the cheapest price for the monitor?

spapakons said:

There are price comparison sites, such as skroutz.gr and bestprice.gr for Greece, that you can find the cheapest shop in your area for the item you want to buy. They also have a price history button so you can see how the price varies through days. I believe the same is true for your local price comparison sites. Why don't you just visit one to find the cheapest price for the monitor?

Click to expand...

Well, mostly because I didn't think of it...

spapakons said:

There are price comparison sites, such as skroutz.gr and bestprice.gr for Greece, that you can find the cheapest shop in your area for the item you want to buy. They also have a price history button so you can see how the price varies through days. I believe the same is true for your local price comparison sites. Why don't you just visit one to find the cheapest price for the monitor?

Click to expand...

Just thought of a reason. (It took me so long because my brain shuts down after 5PM.)
Why not use the feature in Edge since it's right there when you're browsing for monitors? You can always go search the monitor prices on a site after, but it doesn't hurt to have a thumbnail of how much the monitor costs in relation to everything else.

spapakons said:

I don't know how easy you can adapt to a large monitor, but I think anything larger than 24" is difficult to work on, especially if you type a lot. Unless you set the scale too high (more than 150% for 1080p or 300% for 2160p) but then you lose the advantage of the large screen as you will see less items on screen than with lower scaling. I guess video size/quality is not affected by scaling, not sure.

Click to expand...

I use my 32" monitor with a slight upscale so that Word documents on screen are the same size as full page on paper (or 2 pages side-by-side) love it!