Budget LCD

[Mr Smiley]

I want to buy my parents a nice LCD monitor for something less than $200. My mom's eye sight isn't that great and right now she is using a 17 inch LCD running at 1024x768(native res is 1280x1024) because she thinks everything is too small and hard to read(I tried turning on clear type and raise the DPI but she still doesn't like it). So I was thinking of getting a 19 inch LCD with a native res at 1280x1024. Do you think this would help her? Should I go for a low end widescreen? My mom only surfs the web and checks her mail but my dad is a contractor and uses Photoshop quite a bit. Does anyone have any recommendations for any monitors?

 

[Dainas]

Luckily out of the three main criteria's for LCD quality (Response time, Contrast/Brightness and pixel size) the latter has been by far the most neglected by the Monitor(and TV) industry. To this day, It should not be too hard to find a 19-inch or 20-inch Display with big'ol pixels for a 1280x1024 native resolution.

 

[BernardP]

1280x1024 on a 19-inch is not so big for older people well into presbyopia.

My parents are both older than 70 and I had to set their 19-inch LCD @ 1024 x 768 because they found the native resolution too small.

And I must admit that myself, with a 19-inch monitor at work, has set it at 1024 x 768, because I am a high myope with presbyopia. A cursory look of my 40 or so office colleagues shows that at least half of them have their res. at 1024 x 768. I even found one @ 800 x 600, with the monitor pushed all the way back, wearing reading glasses over his contacts...

You can go to http://www.tvcalculator.com/ to view the pixel pitch for all monitor sizes.