I gave up this afternoon and bought myself a new monitor, as this one is clearly on its way out.

I’ve had my current home monitor for a long time — probably at least February of 2001, so it’s served me very well for over 6 years. It’s a Samsung SyncMaster 955DF PerfectFlat 19″ monitor, and I’ve been terribly happy with it this far.

However, it must be starting to get old, as the display is vibrating when I’m in 1024×768 mode and if I try cranking it up any higher, it gets very fuzzy to the point where my wife wonders how I even look at it. That sort of thing I’m not willing to put up with for very long, and today I realized that I hate sitting at my monitor now because it kills my eyes to do so.

So, I went to Amazon and spent a gift certificate and bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 941BW 19″ LCD Monitor for just over $200 with expediated shipping. I didn’t adopt LCD technology when it first came out, because it was new and clumsy and a lot of programmers had qualms about it as the tendency to be hard on the eyes was greater. However, the tech has evolved far enough, I think, to warrant giving it a chance — my wife’s new LCD is brilliantly sharp, and that’s just a Dell standard issue 17″.

I was also wary of LCDs due to the refresh speed, as CRTs clearly go faster and you don’t end up with “smudging” when watching movies and so forth, but this, too, has now advanced beyond what’s acceptable. I made sure this monitor has a 4ms refresh which is super-fast.

It’s a wide screen, which should be interesting, as I’ve never worked on one before.   However, I think I’ll enjoy being able to have the real estate for documents and web surfing and being able to watch wide-screen movies without squishing anything.

So, now I can hardly wait to let my eyes rest upon its shiny glory and retire this monitor to a server or machine in the basement (still an honourable job, but not nearly as daily-driver).