Monitor Brands

Which brand of monitors are known for high quality and good prices?

These brands are at my local store.

HP(Overpriced?), LG, Samsung, Acer, ViewSonic, Optiquest, Dell(ew).

I was wondering if you just rate which one is the best and second best here? Heard of BenQ as well but none are sold around here.

I know it varies for each model, but in general which company is the best?

Thanks in advance

There used to be premium and low end monitor makers back in the days of CRTs, but the LCD market has changed things. LCD monitors are treated as commodities by the market (i.e. they are all interchangable, only price matters) which has driven formerly premium monitor makers to add cheap crap models to their product lines.

Bottom line you can't just say it's "XYZ Manufacturer" so its a good product. You really have to check reviews of specific models to know which are good and which are bad.

Early LCDs biggest challenge for gamers was refresh rate. That's a hurdle that has long been overcome. The refresh rate on almost any monitor today is plenty fast for gaming. TN Panel technology has gotten response times into 2ms territory and made LCD monitors really cheap. At the same time TN Panels have poor color consistancy and poor backlighting. So if you're just gaming they are great deals, but if you have other uses for your computer that require a consistant image across the screen you need to find a better monitor.

BTW, Dell does not build their own monitors. They have other manufacturers put Dell casings on their monitors. For this reason there are cheap garbage Dell monitors, but there are also very nice (and well priced) Dell monitors.