OT: What to know before buying an LCD monitor??

[PvK]

I noticed an LCD monitor on retail display that looked fairly good (I'm an LCD skeptic), but then I noticed that it had a very wide aspect ratio. Since LCD's don't seem to do very well at other than their native resolution, this sort of had me wondering how that was supposed to work with things other than wide-screen movies and desktop applications. In SE4, for example, I guess you'd just have a lot of black to the side(s) of the application... hopefully it wouldn't stretch everything.

I had also just seen some modern expensive TV's on display and I have yet to be impressed by those, either. They _were_ stretching things to fit their aspect ratio, which looked awful (welcome to the WIDE Wide Wide Wide World of Sports...), and like an LCD the display was dark unless viewed from just the right direction (which gets harder for a huge screen), and the resolution really doesn't impress me, especially with so much video these days being compressed digital for cable or DVD instead of analog, so more resolution gives a better view of how crappy the encoding and format are, with jaggy lines, pixelated movement, rectangular compression artifacts... crap, just give me a CRT.

PvK