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Best Monitor for $250?

New, refurbished or used ? I went used recently and got lucky.

Try the Hot Deals or For Sale/Trade forums and see what turns up.

Since many major companies are going LCD there are some very good used ones on the market, but it is a gamble
flying without a 3year warranty 🙂
 
I would usually say to ditch the shadowmasks like the G90f+, but after my experience with aperture grills, I would say to just get a shadowmask. Aperture Grill's advantages is that they could let a lot more light pass through, so therefore their monitors are a lot more vibrant. However with my 21" IBM P275, whenever I turn up the brightness/contrast so that it is vibrant, it starts to get blurry, and I need to dim it down a lot to get it sharp. Also they suffer from poor convergence. So I feel that shadowmasks are still the best choice.
 
When I bought my Viewsonic 17? SM it was sitting on the shelf next to a Sony AG. I thought the SM looked better all around and had better color saturation. There could be other factors like the graphic card and monitor adjustment here, but I also did a lot of comparing at several other places that sold the Viewsonic SM and came to the same conclusion.

My impression is that shadowmasks caught AG?s long ago. And Viewsonics SM?s are particularly good.
link
Note: Due to advances in shadow mask CRT design, some shadow mask CRTs rival aperture grille CRTs in brightness.

link (1998)
According to the company, (Viewsonic) SuperClear combines ?an enhanced phosphor treatment and optimized glass? to deliver images that are up to 30 percent brighter and with an improvement of up to 10 percent in color fidelity compared with images on conventional CRT monitors. Princeton Graphics Systems of Santa Ana, Calif., has antireflection technology that combines filtering and CRT surface coating techniques, minimizing reflective light while maintaining image brightness and color accuracy.


 
I'm also in the market for a 19" flat screen CRT and that viewsonic looks pretty good. It comes up as $220 for me on a pricegrabber search.
 
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