For a very long time, I've put off changing my bulky 17" CRT for a TFT. I've worried for a long time about having quality colour reproduction, knowing full well that most screens out there are 6bits per pixel. I've had a very good CRT for a long time and the thought of subtly altering my working environment made me very nervous. As someone who works on websites, colour is important. One of my machines has a cheap 17" TFT, and it is crap. Even my PowerMac's otherwise high quality screen can be difficult to work with as it's very sensitive to viewing angles.
Well, I've been working a lot in Eclipse recently and have got quite using to having a few panels open for my sources. So much that I started to push my CRT over it's usual 1024x768. I found that even modest increases in screen size were making really big productivity improvements - even as the screen started to look blurry.
So I finally decided to get myself a big TFT - I decided on a widescreen 20" early on, as it would provide a lot more space (1680x1050) and fit within the physical constraints of my desk.
My initial choice was an Acer at £250 - a very highly regarded model, and one with a proper 8bit per pixel screen. Well, I procrastinated and by the time I was ready to place the order, I couldn't find stock anywhere.
On to choice 2: the HP L2045w. This has a 6bit panel, but at £180 and with a lot of very nice features, I decided to go for it.
First impressions: excellent screen. The colour is uniform across the whole area, there's virtually no backlight bleed, no dead pixels, excellent viewing angles and a brilliant stand that allows you to point the screen just about anywhere.
The monitor didn't come with a DVI cable so I tried it with VGA at first. It was blurry like this; in fact, if you don't have DVI then don't bother with this monitor. The quality was quite bad. Once I'd bought a DVI cable though, it was completely transformed. Everything is viewed in pin-sharp clarity.
Regarding colour, I was pleasantly suprised that I really do need to go out of my way to look for steps in colour. They are there, but I'll never see them in my normal work. It still seems stupid to feed a perfect 24bit colour signal into a monitor that will render the colours like a machine from 1992, but as of today the extra money required for a proper monitor isn't worth it to me.
No speakers are on this monitor, but given that all integrated speakers are very poor this is a good design choice.
In summary, I'm a happy HP customer.
