Toys! The best part of working full time and being responsible for no one but yourself. Having gained an interest in hybrid home theatre/computer setups over the past year, it only made sense to get a nice screen to accompany my 5.1 setup.
I had been waiting for ages to buy a Dell 2407WFP. When it finally arrived, it was plagued with problems--blurry text, colour banding and faulty component inputs. That just wouldn't do, so it was off to research alternatives. The BenQ FP2401W was the next screen to catch my eye. Twenty-four inch, with HDCP and an HDMI port built right in? 1080p out of the box? Yes! But it, too, was too good to be true. The hard to find release date kept getting pushed back further and further until it landed sometime in September. I'd been waiting months, and was tired of it. Back to the old drawing board...
At this point I looked at a few other 24" alternatives. Unfortunately they were plagued with a variety of problems, a major one being what's commonly referred to as "input lag". Input lag is a side effect of the PVA panel technology used in pretty much every 24" LCD on the market right now. There is a delay between the changing video signal coming into the screen and when the screen itself actually updates. It is rather small...but not small enough. After test driving a few screens at the local Fry's, I realized I was not one of the lucky ones who can not notice the lag.
So 24" screens wouldn't do. I took a step back and looked instead at 23" models, which used
a different technology (IPS) that did not suffer input lag problems. There were several options, but what it boiled down to was that I could choose the HP 2335 that did not support HDCP and yet had a full array of inputs (component/svideo/composite) or I could get a
Viewsonic that DID support HDCP but had no inputs other then DVI/VGA. In the interest of playing the occasional round of SSB:M, and after reading some reviews that put the screen in a very positive light, I bought the HP.
It was huge! Plus the widescreen aspect made watching stuff so much better. All was good.
Then it happened. What all LCD purchasers dread. I began to see some dead pixels.
Actually dead pixels I can deal with. STUCK pixels are the problem, specifically one nasty green one that's close enough to the centre of the screen to be really annoying. Not wanting to call newegg (ahh, that's a rant for another day) I decided to call HP directly. Considering that it was 11:30pm, I was pleasantly surprised to have the phone answered by a real person. I was less then thrilled when it became apparent that English was most definately not the guy's native tongue. After several minutes of frustration, he thankfully transferred me to someone else.
The next guy was much better; easier to understand and very helpful. After talking to him for a few minutes, I had a replacement monitor on the way via 2-day air. I also realized that despite the outsourced tech support, HP's policies are really really solid. For high end screens that have lots of pixels, many manufacturers INCREASE the number of dead pixels a screen needs to be declared defective. From a manufacturing point of view, that makes sense: bigger screen = more pixels = greater chance of defect. But as a consumer, that policy really sucks! It only takes one annoying pixel to ruin an otherwise great screen.
HP takes the high road. For their higher end large LCDs, they instead REDUCE the number of dead pixels required to declare a screen defective. The magic number is 5, which my screen exceeded.
So I was thrilled. Getting a replacement had been so easy, and they were footing the bill for return shipping as well.
Unfortunately, there's always bad to go with the good. The screen I received was less than stellar. More bad pixels then the first, plus it had this wierd purple hue around the outside. No good.
So I got to repeat the entire process. The next screen comes tomorrow, and I shipped back the replacement screen today. Fingers crossed that whatever they sent me this time is better, because good customer service or not, my patience is wearing a little thin.
I've recently come to the realization that despite its popularity, not everyone has or wants Facebook. Some people are spooked by the lack of privacy; others just don't want to get sucked in to yet another time waster. 
