How much bigger. . .not much

I've had a really good 17" monitor with my system for a while. I saw one of these on sale, so I said, what the hey. Well here is the hey:

It's 18" wide versus 14" wide for my 17".
It's 11.5" high versus 11.5" high for my 17".

If you're going to watch a lot of DVDs then this difference might make a difference. If you're setting up your system from the get go, the little extra might tempt you. The resolution that is standard is higher. 1680x1050. But you'll also want to kick the font size up to larger and, perhaps, zoom in about 25%. Then you've got the best of the widescreen and the readable font.

There is a little bit more control. You can select your source from the front panel. DVI, VGA, S Video or Composite. And it does have a built in Picture in Picture if you want to use different sources. Of course, you'll need a pretty good video card to do this.

Brightness is better. Resolution is about the same. Some things, like CIV IV look really nice. And I popped in a DVD just to see how much difference it made. It looked pretty good, but still not quite my HD quality. (I've got an ATI 1600 with 512Meg of RAM, in case you're comparing. And I'm using the DVI input.) There is also a bit less flicker on some images.