Why not to buy a 19 inch tft/lcd screen

Whoever is going to buy a new monitor now, will probably buy a 19" screen. But many people don't realize that buying a 19" screen is throwing away your money. Why is that?

First let me explain a little bit about how a monitor works. Every monitor has something we call "pixels". A pixel is a tiny "dot" that can glow red, green or blue. Since your monitor have many of these pixels, and they are very small, it looks like an image to you. There two things to remember about those pixels. First the amount you have horizontal and vertical and second the space between those dots.

The amount of pixels you have is called "resolution". An example of resolution is 800x600 or 1024x768 which means as much as 800 pixels horizontal and 600 pixels vertical (or 1024 horizontal and 768 vertical). The higher the resolution, the more space you have for programs, the bigger the program windows can be. If your resolution is too small you probably will see horizontal scrollbars often.

The space between the pixels determines the sharpness of the image you see. Have you ever seen a newspaper from really close or under a magnifier? You easily can see dots that form the letters and images. What if you would make the space between those dots bigger and bigger, say for example 1 cm. Then you would have a really big newspaper and it would be very hard to read. But you could also read you newspaper from 5 meters, because from 5 meters you would not see any dots anymore, but normal letters.

So what do you think is is better if the creator of your newspaper would want to make the letters bigger: more space between the dots, or just more dots? That is exactly what manufactures have to choose when they create a bigger screen. And with 19" they all choose the same thing... more space between the pixels. And don't forget that while you do have a bigger newspaper, you do not have more space for letters. Because the letter grew relative to the total size of the newspaper.

More space between the pixels of a monitor thus means a bigger picture, but not more space on your monitor. You can not fit more images/text/windows/etc on your screen. And as an extra you have a less detailed image. The amount of space on your screen is exactly the same on a 19" as it is on a 17".

Conclusion: Unless you have eyes sight problems and need a monitor screen that is as big as possible (thus bigger letters), I would see no reason why you would ever want to buy a 19" screen. The real question you have to think about (considering size) is 17" or 20". And if you really think the letters are too small, there are some very nice 20" monitors that give you a bigger (then 17") screen, with a slightly lower resolution (1400x1050), resulting in some bigger letters then normal.

I hoped I was clear on this subject, for questions you could post them as a comment. Good look picking you new monitor :-).

Hello tnx for your explanation but what do you think about widescreens.