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You've been looking on Amazon, haven't you? LOL! Yeah, those charts at the bottom are confusing.

LCD - Liquid Crystal Display. ALL modern displays are this type. About 20 years ago, there was another panel type, known as "Plasma." Plasma TVs / Displays had deeper colors and blacks, from what I remember and were better suited for movie-snob-techno-weenies. One of the main drawbacks with Plasma was "Burn-in;" if a stationary image sat in one place for a long time, that image would be burned into the panel and you would see a form of it, even if the display was off. LCD panels did not have this problem, and I think were cheaper to produce. So Plasma technology was abandoned around 2007-ish? Somewhere around there.

LED - Light Emitting Diode. It's a Semiconductor that emits light when an electrical current flows through it. This type of technology is in all displays, smart phones, flashing lights on your computer, etc., etc. It's everywhere. With this type of technology, you have millions of little "light-bulbs" creating an image for you to look at, as opposed to CCFL, which is a single light-bulb that illuminates a display. CCFL type of technology was used before 2009, and that's when LED display panels took over. LED & LED-Lit are the same thing.

Now, you are looking at the wrong thing for monitor type. It's going to be LED based, and a LCD panel. What is the tricky part is what type of display panel technology that is being used. The two most common kinds are TN (Twisted Neumatic) and IPS, which stands for In-Plane-Switching. Since I bolded IPS, I will give you a guess on which one to buy? :)

IPS - based LCD panels are better for photo editing, as the colors and contrast are consistent from edge-to-edge, or corner-to-corner. The viewing angle is also more/wider. This is what you want for photo and video editing.

TN - based displays are great for general computing and are more suited for first-person-shooter video games. TN displays are in 95% of laptops and are one of the main reasons that I don't recommend laptops for photo-editing. It's tough to find a IPS-based display in a laptop and my "Go-To" Manufacturers that used to have them, don't install them as an option any longer.

So, what besides IPS do you look for in a monitor? A matte coating or matte front panel. You don't want a glossy monitor, as it can suffer from glare and reflections from your environment. The Dell Ultrasharp models are usually pretty good and a are a good place to start. Here is a Dell U2417H.

Oh, one other thing with today's fancy screens....


You do not want to use the old standard 15-pin blue VGA Cable, also known as D-Sub. This technolgy was from 1989 and was only meant to drive CRT (Tube) monitors up to 20" or so, not today's high-resolution flat panels. Now, it's true that some flat panel displays only have a VGA port but chances are these displays are also TN panels. You want to avoid these types and use either a HDMI connection, or better yet, DisplayPort. Of course, someone could use a connector called DVI-D but most displays don't have that port any longer as HDMI and DisplayPort are the two main kinds.

So which one? Either on a 24" display that does 1920 x 1080. If you have a 4K display, you really want to use DisplayPort. With either digital connection, you will get a better / sharper picture, more accurate colors and better contrast dynamic range. You will physically see a difference between a VGA cable and a HDMI / DisplayPort cable on the same monitor. The digital connection's picture looks so much better. It's kinda like going from VHS to DVD in terms of quality.

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Display Port is the future. It's also better suited for 4K screens, and soon to be 8K screens, then 16K. If you have a 1080P screen, either works fine, so don't stress about it.

As far as sound, I have external speakers as monitor speakers always seem to sound like crap.

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