What's a dirt cheap monitor that's good(for gaming)?

[Ryan Underwood]

My 2nd monitor finally died and decided to just get whatever I could find at the store cause I was in a big hurry. This thing was only $99, but the distorting is so bad I can't even look at the screen straight without the top or bottom or sides of the screens giving bad visual distortion.

Even my ancient hand me downs I was given didn't come close to being this bad. This one has bad visuals from game to game. One might look fine after some tweaking of the monitor's settings and the Nvidia control panel and another looks way too dark. The refreshrate and smoothness is better, but it looks worst than the old crap I had. I have zero experience with monitors so I don't have much of an idea what I'm looking at.

I think I'll just keep this as a spare backup. But what I really want is one that has no distortion from whatever angle you view it from and somewhat decent colors/contrast.
Also if it has the option to allow you to adjust the screen scaling. I'm still using a fairly old GPU and want to crop the resolution to a thinner resolution than 1920 x 1080 like 1280 x 1024 to avoid stressing my card out more. Unless they all can do that now. This one I bought can, but don't know if others do that.

 

[Karadjgne]

To get viewing angles and color saturation you'll need an IPS panel, not a TN panel, TN panels being better for gaming with a faster refresh (1-2ms vrs IPS 5-6ms)

Cheap as it gets for ok IPS

Monitor: Acer - H236HLbid 23.0" 1920x1080 60Hz Monitor ($99.99 @ Best Buy)

 

[madmatt30]

^ that acer is a really good buy.

Re -screen scaling - normally done on the gpu side.

1280x1024 on a 1080p screen will be awful - massive borders because it's 4:3 ratio as opposed to 16:9

All 1080p monitors also have a native 720p setting (1280x720) which is the next step down resolution wise while keeping a 16:9 ratio

 

[Ryan Underwood]

To get viewing angles and color saturation you'll need an IPS panel, not a TN panel, TN panels being better for gaming with a faster refresh (1-2ms vrs IPS 5-6ms)

Cheap as it gets for ok IPS

Monitor: Acer - H236HLbid 23.0" 1920x1080 60Hz Monitor ($99.99 @ Best Buy)

Dunno about that one. Reading a lot about the glossy screen and my room is lit often.

 

[Karadjgne]

Look at pcpartpicker.com. Has a bunch of monitors listed, with prices and sizes etc.
IPS: best color saturation, widest viewing angle. Best for immersive games such as Civilization, Skyrim, WoW etc.
TN : faster, less input lag, better for faster game play on games like GTA5, BF1 etc

You'll be able to look up specifics such as matte screen, glossy screen etc and chose the right size, resolution, screen etc for you and your budget.

 

[Ryan Underwood]

Also, what's the major fact determining proper brightness and contrast? This TN monitor I'm using displays darks extremely poorly. Any video or videogame that involves darkness makes it's very hard to see, like the darks want to swallow up everything else. Tuning up brightness just grays things out. A cheap IPS won't have that kind of issue?

 

[Karadjgne]

IPS have much deeper color saturation than TN panels allowing for a brighter screen without the 'washed out' look. The also have a much wider/taller viewing angle before starting to loose picture, so even if you don't have the monitor perfectly perpendicular to your view, it still looks good. The trade off being its slower on the gray-gray scale so doesn't do as well with the fast paced games like GTA, but does far better for open world type games.

 

[Ryan Underwood]

IPS have much deeper color saturation than TN panels allowing for a brighter screen without the 'washed out' look. The also have a much wider/taller viewing angle before starting to loose picture, so even if you don't have the monitor perfectly perpendicular to your view, it still looks good. The trade off being its slower on the gray-gray scale so doesn't do as well with the fast paced games like GTA, but does far better for open world type games.

This HP 21KD has the same response time as that bargain IPS monitor recommended. I also noticed it only costs $44 on Newegg.

 

[Karadjgne]

And with the crappy darkness, now you know why it's so cheap.

 

[Ryan Underwood]

Got this one on sale delivered. Yeah, there's like a 300% night and day difference. I don't even want to keep that thing as a spare backup due to how horrible it looks. I'd rather have nothing and just wait for a replacement than look at that thing again. It literally was depressing me.