I’ve put together a desktop computer to use for development at home, and I need to get a new monitor for it. The old ViewSonic 15″ LCD that we paid $1,200 for 10 years ago is still in good shape, but its maximum resolution of 1280 x 1024 is not big enough to do serious work. I borrowed a monitor from the office, but at 1366 x 768, it’s not any better than the ViewSonic. Ideally, I’d like what I have at the office: a 24″ LCD with 1920 x 1280 resolution. But that, as it turns out, is very expensive.

You can get 1080p (1920 x 1080) monitors really cheap: about $100 for a 20″ unit. If you want a 23″ or 24″, you’ll pay $125 to $175, depending on brand and features. If you want HDMI input, you’ll pay another premium. Still, you can get a really nice 24″ 1080p monitor for under $200. You can, of course, spend as much as you want. A 60″ LCD TV makes a really nice monitor. It’ll cost you some serious cash, and it still won’t do better than 1920 x 1080.

If you want 1920 x 1200, you pay a huge premium. I think I saw one online for about $275, but in most cases you’ll have to shell out at least $300 for that extra 120 vertical pixels. That might not seem like much to some, but for a programmer or writer, 120 pixels works out to maybe 10 more lines of text. Vertical screen space is precious. Not $15 per line, though. Since I’m not willing to pay the premium for 1920 x 1200, I’m going with a 23″, 1080p model.

Graphics cards are kind of weird, too. In general, there are two types: the $20 card that will do video, and the $120 high performance card that you use for action games. As with anything, the top price is however much you want to spend. The middle ground (between $20 and $120) is mostly populated by fanless versions of the $20 cards. Trying to cut down on noise, and because I’m not much of a gamer, I’m going for the fanless cheap card. $50 isn’t exactly cheap, but that dang computer (a Dell 490 with a Core 2 Quad running at 2.5 GHz) is already too noisy. I’m not going to add more noise.