Office Monitors

Best specialty LCD monitors for office work

While general-purpose and budget monitors will satisfy many users, high-end choices typically use more-advanced VA (vertical alignment) and IPS technology that can be important for many applications. The 20-inch HP LP2065 (*Est. $360) is one such VA monitor, and it has the best text quality of any monitor tested in Government Computing News' roundup. GCN found that its color accuracy is good too, but that it's very poor at displaying shades of gray. On the other hand, PC Magazine cited grayscale performance to be one of this monitor's strengths. The monitor is fully adjustable and can rotate 90 degrees. As it is marketed as a business monitor, the LP2065 has a three-year limited warranty with next-business-day on-site service.

The HP LP2065 monitor earns favorable reviews and moderately high ratings from a number of reviewers, including PC Magazine and CNet.com. User satisfaction is very high. Price is a criticism of reviewers, but average prices were about twice as high when this monitor was reviewed. It's clearly a much better value now.

Widescreen 24-inch LCD monitors have 1920-by-1200 resolution. "The resolution of 1920 x 1200 is as high as you can go with a single-link graphics card," according to TrustedReviews.com, so at this point you have to be mindful of your hardware limitations. Reviewers disagree about the practicality of a huge monitor. Some unequivocally think bigger is better. Others believe there's such a thing as too big.

Simon Baker conducts exhaustive tests of the 24-inch Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP (*Est. $690) for TFT Central. He says the monitor's ergonomics and connectivity options are fantastic. Text quality is generally good. Baker acknowledges that it's a matter of personal preference, but he finds a 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution to be ideal for office work. "The resolution easily affords you enough desktop real estate for side-by-side working," he says. Color accuracy is a major weakness, according to Baker, and blurring in video is evident. Yet he concludes, "The 2408WFP is still an excellent choice offering great all round performance and features." The S-PVA monitor has a full complement of connectors, including a USB hub.

John Breeden of GCN concurs, choosing the UltraSharp as his Reviewer's Choice. Text display in particular is very good; in his tests, the UltraSharp displayed text in a variety of fonts down to 6.8-point size. He did feel it necessary to note that his particular testing monitor had a stuck pixel, although he felt it might have been a fluke.

X-Bit Labs' Oleg Artamanov found the Dell 2408WFP to be a good buy too, especially considering that the monitor had an S-PVA panel. He also reviewed the slightly newer Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP-HC, which boasts backlight lamps with improved phosphors, leading to improved color over its predecessor model.

HP's new LP2475W (*Est. $600) features a 24-inch IPS-based display, a technology which TFT Central's Simon Baker notes is rare. Although it is sold as part of HP's line of business monitors, Baker feels that the underused IPS technology is better suited for gaming or photo editing. Baker recommends the LP2475W, which tested better than some PVA models, although he cautions that color accuracy was poor out of the box and needed calibration for the best results.