And the Fail Boat plows on...

[elfs]

I've been wanting to get a large monitor for my laptop for some time now, but I have no idea how to go about buying one or configuring one for my set-up.

Still, with that level of incompetence under my belt, I tried three different places to shop for monitors: Staples, Best Buy, and Frys.

Frys was the worst of all three. This rather surprised me, as I've come to expect better from them, but the guy literally told me that he didn't think I was interested in buying a monitor that day and he had other people waiting. The "other people" were an older couple who he proceeded to bamboolze with talk about how the machine he was selling was "on sale today only" and "worth every penny" and so forth.

Best Buy was a little better. When I told the guy I was using Linux he said, "Oh, I don't think any of our monitors support that." But kudos to him for at least letting me hook up the laptop to his monitors and try them out. We got some working, but I didn't think the resolution was all that great.

And Staples was the best: the woman let me try just about any monitor, and really did try harder to sell me something.

Still, I don't have a large-scale monitor for digital editing yet. And I could really use one. Just a cheap one, you know, something 21" and about $160 or so. Anyone know of a good one for a widescreen laptop?

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Retail outlets are completely useless for this sort of thing. My recommendation is to keep a close eye on slickdeals.net and/or dealmein.net -- they both tend to notice when Dell offers stackable coupons on monitors, which is how I got my last two.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Micro Center is an east coast thing, to my knowledge, but they often have good deals. I got a good deal on a 24" widescreen monitor for my desktop unit from them.

http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0303284

I haven't a clue if that's the right aspect ratio, but have a look 'round.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

It's nationwide, but not in Elf's neck of the woods.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

What's so hard about plugging in the VGA and turning the laptop on?

There are three ways you can run this:
1) screen mirrors what's on the LCD - not all that useful, but projectors can be used for presentations.
2) external screen is used while LCD is off, giving a bigger image.
3) external screen is an extension of the desktop, giving more workspace. This is the most useful, although any desktop icon you leave here is invisible when the monitor is unplugged again.

I find that screens up to 24" have a single VGA/DVI connection while screens bigger than that have dual connections that make them impossible to use with most laptops.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I did not know (and now I do, since I've looked) that the command to activate the VGA output is:

xrandr --output VGA --auto --output LDVA --off

And there are complimentary commands for going the other way.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

'grandr' -- a GTK frontend to xrandr -- is a bit friendlier about this.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

You mentioned using this monitor for "digital editing"... Low-cost monitors sold for business and home use are 6-bits per colour channel. They fake 8-bits by multiplexing to be able to advertise 16.7 million colours. These are normally labelled as having STN or DSTN panels. If you want real colour gamut accuracy for video or photo editing you have to pay more for 8 bits per channel panels. Look for terms like S-IPS or S-PVA in the panel technology. The best monitors will have a gamut better than 100% of the standard Adobe screen gamut.

For example, Dell do several 20" LCD monitors -- the 2007FP has a wide colour gamut S-PVA panel and costs 280 quid in the UK. The IN2010N is the same size monitor and costs a bit over a hundred quid but it doesn't have the same colour response. It's OK for general text editing, spreadsheets, emails etc. and it will even do a half-decent job on graphics and images but using the higher-gamut screens makes it very obvious the lower-gamut monitors lack colour definition and fidelity.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

What nojay said.

I found this page (http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/lcd-panel-types.php) very helpful explaining the tech and tradeoffs.

[kengr]

If you can live with a 4:3 aspect ratio (which will work fine for an extended desktop) keep an eye on freecycle and one craigslist and local used electronics places.

I got a 21" CRT that does 1600x1200 for *free* off of freecycle a few months back. And a friend got a similar unit for $1 at goodwill.

Sure, you'll eventually want something better. But it's a cheap way to start playing with things.

This is one of my few true complaints about the T6x series and many ThinkPads...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...is the lack of a digital output without buying one of their docks, but when they came out even then high resolution screens that really benefit from a DVI port were quite expensive, more expensive than the low-end dock and comparable to the high-end dock.

But whenever I've tried 20" or so screens on my laptop, I get driven bonkers by the fuzzy text that results even running at the screen's native resolution, since it's going through a D2A then an A2D conversion.

I blame being spoiled by 1920x1200@147dpi.