ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-04, 19:42:Its the same with LCDs.
What is true of one is true for the other. I remember there were OEMs here in the UK that offered cheap […]
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Its the same with LCDs.
What is true of one is true for the other. I remember there were OEMs here in the UK that offered cheap monitors with cheap systems and the more you spent the better you got.
Those OEMs did serve a useful purpose, in this country it was Time and Tiny. There were others but those two were the big players with their own stores, then of course there was Dell and Compaq but they were mostly for business users.
They matched monitors to prices. Theres no difference now.
I mean how many people can say they have the best monitor, rather than the best in the price range?
I don't know what retailers in the UK are like, but here (Canada), what's notable is that the mass-market retailers do not stock good monitors. They didn't back in the CRT days, they still don't today in the LCD era.
So, it's not like they show you "here is a $300 monitor and here is a $900 monitor" and try to upsell you. The $900 monitor... just doesn't exist... in their world. So, if you want a $900 monitor and you're willing to pay for it, you need to know it exists and buy it from someone more specialized. The only place where they might try to upsell you is from a smaller low-end monitor to a bigger low-end monitor. And this continues to this day - e.g. you will not find a USB-C-docking-capable monitor at those retailers.
I also remember one incident with an LCD my dad bought in 2008-9 or so. A 24" 1920x1200 Samsung when those had become affordable and before the industry decided to chop off the bottom 10% and rebrand the resulting monstrosity as "full HD". Samsung offered two SKUs with the same model number and apparent specs - one, sold through specialized stores, had a fancy height/tilt/etc stand. The other, sold through mass-market retailers for a few dollars less, had a much more basic stand.
One thing I will note that has changed in the LCD era is that retailers do NOT try to sell matching-brand monitor + computer bundles anymore. Back in the 1990s, there were both official and unofficial bundles - by 'official', I mean that the computer manufacturer sold the retailer a full bundle with a (inevitably-mediocre) CRT monitor as a single SKU (and sometimes even a single huge box), then 'unofficial' means a bundle that the retailer put together. Haven't seen one of those in probably well over 20 years. I guess laptops just took over that part of the market... or the presumption is that most people buying those desktops will be re-using existing monitors (which may explain why you can find a desktop with a DVI port in a store in 2023).
There's a deep irony to this - if there's anything I've learned in three decades of desktop computing, it's that you are better off spending extra money on nice peripherals like monitors/keyboard/mouse that i) will last, and ii) dramatically improve your daily experience, rather than spending that money on additional performance that you can probably upgrade to later when you actually need it or that will never matter within the lifetime of the system. And yet the mass-market retailers here basically do not sell nice peripherals.
Nice peripherals are like this weird secret that only knowledgeable old nerds know about. Just like younger folks nowadays have never seen a nice non-Mac laptop until they enter the workforce and get handed a Lenovo ThinkPad or similar.