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Monitors Make a Big Difference
 Monitor is the most visual part of a computer system. We see it first and stare at it for much of the day. It provides a window into the Internet or into the workings of a computer. But, are they all the same? Hardly — as anyone who has gone through a catalog or visited a computer showroom can attest.

A monitor is quite simply the term that we give for a display screen and the outer shell that contains it. There are several different ways to classify monitors. The most common is in terms of color capabilities. They are broken into three categories:

• Monochrome monitors display two colors; one for the foreground (or text) and one for the background. Commonly these colors are black and white.

• Grayscale monitors display different shades of gray. In the not-too-distant past, larger color monitors were so expensive that large grayscale monitors were common for design use.

• Color monitors display anywhere between 16 and millions of colors. These monitors display colors by using three separate signals known as RGB signals (red, green, blue) not unlike a TV set. Today, unless you're working with really old equipment, you'll be hard pressed to find anything but a color monitor being used.

Monitors are then classified by the size of the screen. Like a television, the screen sizes are measured diagonally (who thought of that one!) so size can be misleading. The standard monitor size today is 15" with 17" monitors very quickly becoming the norm. There is a significant jump in price once you jump to the 20" and 21" sizes.

A monitor's resolution is the next area to be concerned with. A monitor's resolution indicates how closely packed the screen pixels are. The more pixels that you have, the sharper the image on screen and the more expensive the monitor. High end monitors display 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels and above. Low-end monitors display 640 pixels by 480 pixels.

All of these factors should be taken into consideration when purchasing a monitor and when considering if a monitor is as good a deal as it seems. Designers are encouraged to purchase the largest monitor, with the greatest resolution, that they can afford. The programs designers use come with a lot of control palettes that take up screen space. On top of that, working with color images is not really practical or possible with anything but a high-resolution monitor which feature lots of pixels per inch.

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