Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This monitor is an amazing value (it can be found for $500).
I am a software engineer and bought this monitor for my home office.
It has a very large .309" dot pitch, which is exactly what I wanted, so text appears as large as possible at a given font size.
Not sure why some people whine about large dot pitches in monitors (and at the same time buy 50"+ TVs that naturally
come with humongous dot pitches).
This is an awesome monitor for a programmer or anyone spending a lot of time reading text.
The 1920x1200 resolution is ideal: it's more than 1080p (full HD) and doesn't need a fancy dual-link dvi graphics card. Any 32MB card can display full color at this resulotion. Unless you play 3d games, you can take full advantage of this monitor for web browsing, watching video, photo processing, presentations and so on with a $30 card.
If you go to a 30" monitor, you get a very small dot pitch (text will appear smaller) and will need a much fancier graphics card.
This page has an excellent visual presentation of how the font looks like at different dot pitches:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/658-1/lcd-tests-the-acer-and-dell-26-and-27.html
This monitor is dual input (vga and dvi/hdmi) so I've been using the VGA connection for my ubuntu linux workstation and the DVI for an apple laptop and can switch between the two from the monitor's menu buttons. Using 1920x1200 at 60hz I see no difference in quality between VGA and DVI (I was worried that VGA won't be good enough, but it is!)
The monitor has built in speakers that can be driven either by HDMI (if you hookup a DVD player for instance) or via a separate audio input. The monitor also has audio out, so you can connect better speakers (the built-in ones face backwards as they are on the backside of the monitor, so they have poor projection). They are ok for casual movie watching though.
Another thing I look for in a monitor is capability of low brightness. For a programmer, too-high brightness is a big problem. Many LCD monitor's are ridiculously bright and cannot go down to 100cd/m2 (at 100cd/m2, also called "print-level" a white screen is about as bright as holding a paper page in a well-lit room). Anything more than that is quite straining for the eyes, especially at night. Turning the brightness to 0, and the contrast to about 25, I get the "paper effect" with this monitor, although blacks are not as deep as I would like. It does better than most monitors, but not nearly as good as my older Sony 19" SDM-HX93 LCD which had an amazing backlight adjustment.
Another feature I miss is lack of presets. My old Sony had presets so with a single button I could switch from high brightness for day-time movie watching to low brightness late-night programming.
With the Hanns.G I need to go to the menus and turn down brightness and contrast (which takes about 10 key presses altogether). Not many monitors have presets though.
The only 27"/28" monitor I found that does is the Samsung 275T, but it costs double the money!
The monitor's stand is pretty good. It swivels left/right and can be tilted upwards (useful if you want to look at the screen while standing up).
My biggest gripe about the monitor is the poor vertical viewing angle. Looking down is fine, but looking up darkens things quite a bit. I like the middle of the monitor at eye-height, but this makes the top of the screen a little darker. I would have to lower the monitor so the top edge of the screen is at eye-height to avoid this problem.
There you have it. This monitor isn't quite perfect, but for the money it's a fantastic value. It's being marketed as a gaming monitor, but does a excellent job as a professional workstation monitor as well. It would also be a very good choice for anyone with poor eyesight due to the large dot pitch which makes fonts appear larger.
I would definately buy it again!
UPDATE: I discovered a way to lower the brightness in addition to the brightness/contrast controls. Go to "Color setting" in the menu, and turn down all 3 RGB colors; I set Red to 70, Green to 70 and Blue to 62. This lowers the brightness considerably, so I do not have to reduce the contrast too much to achieve the low brightness setting I am after for easy-on-the-eyes late night coding sessions.
You can take the RGB colors all the way to 0 resulting in a black screen; it's an awesome brightness adjustability!
This trick may work on other monitors too, please comment if you have the chance to try it on Samsung, LG, Viewsonic, or other monitors.
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HANNS.G 28-inch Widescrenn LCD Display HG-281DPB.
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