Onkar Joshi's blog

I bought a BenQ G2412HD monitor some time back. Here are a few points that may be of help to anyone deciding to buy something in the family of large LCD monitors.

• I got it for Rs.12,000 from Croma in Pune in September, 2009. I got a Labtec Wireless Mouse + Keyboard set worth Rs.1,500 free with it as well.
• It has a 3 year warranty from BenQ.
• I paid up another Rs.750 for 2 years extended warranty offered by Croma. If at the end of 5 years I have not had any servicing done from Croma, I can claim Rs.750 back from them.
• BenQ does not have a zero dead pixel policy like Samsung does. Read the details of their policy on dead pixels on their website. If you buy your monitor from a store you can have them turn it on and you can look through it for defects. I found one blurry pixel on my monitor. I can see it only when I search for it and it has never bothered me at all. The Samsung P2350 also looked good to me but this BenQ model had a better price and freebies when I bought it.
• Graphics support – I have an AMD Athlon 2600+ on an Asus A7N8X-VM motherboard with an on-board GeForce 4 graphics card. This chip drives the monitor at 1980×1080 resolution at 16bit or all resolutions below it at 32 bit. I use 1600x900x32 which is 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Speakers – There are no built in speakers like some of the others models like the E2400HD in the same family.
• I have noticed significant ghosting of text when scrolling text on web pages – not sure if my video subsystem is contributing to it. It did not happen on my older monitor. It’s annoying initially, but after a while I stopped noticing it.
• Great for all those movies! The black bars are smaller or absent if the movie is in true wide-screen ratio of 16:9.
• Websites generally don’t use all the space offered by wide-screen monitors very well. This should improve as they catch on.
• This would be a great productivity booster for people working with development software that can use lots of on screen real estate like Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio, PhotoShop, DreamWeaver, Flash etc.
• The screen is big. Friends envy it! I’m happy with the purchase.

My old 17″ CRT – an LG 700E Studioworks died after several years of faithful service. May try and resurrect it if I upgrade my system and decide to setup dual monitors. In fact dual 19″ monitors can be had for almost the same cost as mentioned above. Having dual monitors can be a great productivity boost as well. So if you are building a system primarily for work, give that a thought.

Any thoughts on the topic? Leave me a comment!