[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

I love all the "definitive" one-line answers you get here....

I am IT director for an advertising company, who's business it is to create magazine-quality material for its high-profile customers.

We use a mix of monitors, from Sony Trinitron (yes, still!!! I hope they never die) to Sony 22" high-end LCD and then down to Chinese "Chimei CMV221D" 22" 1680x1050px cheapies for all non-graphically-challenging applications. To be quite honest, these monitors can be bought for around the $400 (or less now) mark and in most Photoshop situations perform adequately well. For the really critical stuff (skin tones and corporate colour work) we use calibrated Sony monitors exclusively. We do, however use the Chimei's for most other PS work and pagination (page layout) in Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. They are more than adequate, and at a price one hell of a lot less than the Sonys. Resolution is good, colour accuracy is better than average uncalibrated, and the viewing angle isn't bad either. They are proving more reliable than others we have tried on the low-end, such as Benq and LG.

For the money you can't really go wrong. Never had a dead one, or any dead pixels so far, but it's a numbers game with the cheaper machines... The Chinese are definitely getting better at this game.