Just to add into the 17" LCD monitor discussion - my brand-new LED backlit NEC (A172 or something like that) does pretty good with non-5:4 input resolutions, and looks sharp until you dump stupendously low resolutions into it. I would take it very-much over the no-name 17" I've had since ~04, or the CTX that was built in ~00 (and died recently) because the colors are substantially better, it has a quick re-draw (afaik its 8-bit TN), and it has HDCP on the DVI input which makes it useful with modern computers as well. 😀
jwt27 wrote:
And what's the deal with 1280x1024? Why would anyone ever want to use that?
If you've ever worked with a lot of text, terminals, etc you will quickly come to love 5:4. 😀
It's no problem for gaming either, especially with a lot of early 2000s games that are Hor-, where you can either display 4:3 (and depending on the monitor it slightly stretches (hard to notice in most cases), or slightly letterboxes (easily ignored in most cases)), or in some lucky cases select 5:4 and actually see more of the game-world than on any other display. The two 17" SXGA LCDs I've got both do a very good job handling 1024x768, 1280x720, and 1280x960 inputs in addition to their native 1280x1024, and both accept 75 Hz (and these features seem fairly common based on other threads that've cropped on Vogons).