How to spend £125 at Christmas

Monitors

Since moving to a two monitor setup, I’ve noticed a huge increase in my work efficiency. Having that extra monitor makes life easier in so many ways: I can run a browser in one window and a Word document in the other. I can have a game running whilst keeping my MSN windows open. I can have my playlists lined up on my left whilst I search iTunes for more music on my right. The increase in happiness coming from two monitors is, in my opinion, probably unparalleled in the world of tech. It’s like planning to go out on a date with a really hot girl, to find she’s turned up with her twin and tonight is your once in a life time lucky night… Okay, it’s not that good but two monitors is definitely worth your money.

The only problem here is that £125 isn’t a huge amount of money when having a look at the monitor market. You can pretty much scratch widescreen off the list, that’s going to be totally out of reach. Which leaves us with 17” or 19” to decide from. I’ve ignored CRT monitors because I’m tailoring this article for people who want dual monitors – you’d need a pretty heft sized desk to comfortably sit the old style CRTs.

So does it matter if the monitors are cheap? Well, yes and no. First, this second monitor is going to be precisely that, your second monitor – the one you use to do menial tasks like surfing the internet, writing emails and other everyday things. I highly recommend that you have one monitor that is of high quality - to watch movies, do photo editing and read bit-tech - but your second monitor just needs to act as an extra piece of real estate. It doesn’t need bells and whistles, it just needs to do a job. Now we’ve established what we’re looking for, let’s take a look at some of the options out there.

A quick look on Dabs and I see that there are tons of monitors available, far too many to go through all of them here. Immediately my first instinct is look for the companies whose products have impressed me in the past. Benq, on Dabs, has a 17” monitor called the FP71G+. It's priced at around £130 including VAT. Over on Scan another monitor that caught my eye was the NEC 73V priced at £124.54.


If we’re looking for real estate and aren’t worried about quality then surely we should be aiming for a 19” monitor? That is certainly a valid question but we need to be wary of one thing. When monitors are made they get classified in terms of quality. Those at the bottom of that list are sold for the cheapest amount and tend to be more likely to suffer from dead pixels. Dead pixels do not necessarily make the monitor unusable but can be very annoying. Most retailers run a policy of 10 dead pixels.

So 19" monitors, these are what you should be looking for - providing you have the desk space - as they will give you even more screen space to play with - although no more physical pixels, since they run 1280x1024, like 17" monitors. Unbelievably, there are actually options here for sub £125, in fact there are almost as many options as at the 17" range.

For around £125 you can pick up the HANNSG 19" or, better yet, for a few extra quid you can pick up the Benq 19". Benq is the bigger brand here and so my advice would be to go with them.

The conclusion I have arrived at is that it is indeed possible to go dual monitors for under £125 (providing you already have the graphics card to support it). These monitors won't blow you away with their quality but will instead serve a functional purpose by making browsing and working on your computer an easier experience. For any PC enthusiast I am inclined to say that having dual monitors is a 'must have'. This is a great Christmas investment and hell, if you can afford it, why not splash out on a shiny new widescreen and make your current monitor your second monitor? (Two examples of good widescreen monitors we've reviewed recently on bit-tech are here and here)