caution when judging monitors in local stores

[sys-eng]

It is common to read advice about looking at monitors in person at a local store before deciding on one. I just want to emphasize the importance of checking the settings on the monitors that you are looking at. I visited a local Circuit City and BestBuy today and found that ALL of the monitors were set wrong. Most had the resolution set to a non-native setting and many also had the brightness and contrast set to the max. Most were driven by PC’s that had shadowing turned on so the text was poor. It was much worse than a new car dealer trying to sell dirty cars. After tuning a particular HP monitor, the salesman looked at me and said, “Wow! How did you do that?” Gee wiz, all I did is set the resolution properly, turned the brightness down about half-way, set the contrast so black text looked sharp, and turned off the shadowing in Windows. One store had about dozen monitors of various sizes and resolutions operating off one computer so most of those monitors were trying to work off a resolution that is not prime for them. To make matters worse, they had most ofthe monitors on a shelf about 7 ft high.

 

[NoNRG]

Most retailers like these use VGA compared to DVI connections as well.