Gaming Monitor Recommandations

[the oracle]

Hay guys I'm looking for a good gaming monitor, what do you guys recommend?

should I get a glossy screen with more vived colors, some say it's a gimmick that mostly makes pictures of exotic frogs and birds look more accurate, but I spoke to a guy at a store and he swears by it for gaming.

and what about extra wide-screen? I can see that creating issues in games.

[sathomaso]

Widescreen?  YES DEFINITELY! Simply because games nowadays support the full 16:9 format, and IMO it's better for FPSs because of the additional viewing field. Plus you can get some "older" games also run on this aspect ratio (quake 1,2,3, halflife 2, warcraft 3 etc). Also you can then watch regular 16:9 movies on it without the black bars on top and bottom, like it was the case on the old 4:3 screens.

Personally i am playing on the laptop I am also working with, which has a matt-surface screen.
But if you intend to use the new monitor for gaming only - and i therefor assume you will be playing in a darkened room without the sunlight-glare issues - i would suggest you buy one with a GLOSSY SURFACE! As you already mentioned the color-contrast of the glossy screens is generelly better than the matt ones.

Cannot really recommend any specific monitor at the moment, but just keep looking the refresh rate of the one you intend to buy is rather fast, this makes the gameplay looks smoother. Although I guess with nowadays technical advance most of the recent flatscreens with have decent refreshrates, about 2 - 4 milliseconds or something.

[Blackmantis]

Little personal experience here on monitors:

I just spent a thousand dollars $1000 on a Dell 2408WFP monitor, with my dad constantly over my shoulder saying "You get what you pay for". Clearly not.

Monitor image was rubbish, and there was horrible input lag (ie, the mouse appeared to fall behind on the screen, took a second to catch up with the real thing, as did keyboard input and sounds matching what's happening on the screen).

Dell wouldn't refund the monitor so we left it on the street for someone else to take, and I bought a nice Philips CRT monitor which can handle even higher resolutions than the LCD can (I know it's not exactly a native resolution or anything, but the dell 2408 I had had weird scaling issues above 1024x768). Maybe it was just a bad monitor??

Also remember, there is no refresh rate on modern monitors (LCDS), so you don't need to worry about that too much, but if you get a CRT, I reckon it should be able to comfortably do 1600x1200 at at LEAST 75htz.

For good image quality, get a nice 24" lcd monitor. I hear Samsung is good, and I hear Dell is good despite my experience.

Although I hear input lag is a problem with pretty much all large LCD monitors. If you're a sharpshooter in a game, kiss it goodbye. Imagine playing a game with really heavy antialiasing that causes the game to have that smooth graphics lag, that's what it's like.

I can understand people not wanting CRTS. I love them because you can crank them up to high resolutions and stuff. The LG CRT I had at home had amazing colours and image quality, it could also hit 4096x3072 which was handy for sorting through enormous folders, but when pushed to 8068x6144, it had to be pushed down to 60htz and it would simply show a quarter of the screen (Alhtough the mouse could be used to move the actual viewing area around.).

[HuntingBull]

I have a Dell 3007WFP 30" LCD monitor and it is absolutely THE best thing I have ever purchased!
You have to have a video card that supports DVI-D Dual Link to be able to use all of the resolutions that monitor can display, otherwise you will get the kind of performance, or lack of, that you experienced. I have an ATI Radeon 4850 which supports the Dual Link DVI and everything looks amazing on this thing. Games just blow me away on this thing especially old games like Doom and Quake. I have had this monitor for about 2 years now and it just rocks!!!