17" or 19" TFT

[chrestomanci]

How good is your eyesight? Is anyone over 50 likely to be using the montior much?

The smaller pixels of the 17" display will make it harder to read small text. If you can see if fine then that won't be a problem, but if you can't then you will end up wishing you brought a larger display.

For myslef, I have a 21" CRT on my desk at work, that I run at 1800x1440. Some of my colleges think I am mad, but for me it is great to be able to fit that much desktop real estate on screen, and I can see the small fonts just fine. The company is slowly upgrading people to LCDs, but as they are only 1280x1024, I don't want one, as for me it would be a substantal downgrade

[Mithrandir]

Good point chrestomanci.

My eyesight is good within monitor range! My desktop is 1280x1024 on my 17" CRT. The desktop on my work's 15" TFTs look like those kids picture books with one picture on each page!

[abeacock]

I have the Viewsonic VX724. It is a seriously good monitor with great colours and great for gaming (ET and CS:S).

I paid £210 from Amazon back in Jan, it's now £160 in SavaStore!

Just so you know, the Viewsonic-recormended refresh rate should be 60Hz at 1280x1024 (make sure you set v-sync to be enabled).

[Rack]

Widescreen 19" is nice. 20" is a better buy though.