Probably like a lot of HN’ers, I spend 10h+/day in front of the laptop looking at text (coding, email, browsing...). I’d like to make it easier for my eyes and get an external monitor. What should I look for?
Some notes from what I already googled:
* I prefer larger fonts, so I’m aiming for a 27” size
* somebody mentioned “I've found is that I get the least eye strain by using a large (37"+) 1080p TV as a monitor”. What is your experience?
* pivotable display, in order to see more lines of code
* IPS panels seem to be the best, however others mention they aren’t so great for text: “every IPS has the same sparkle effect” (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1466914)
Thanks and a Happy New Year with great eyesight :-)
So if you go high resolution in Windows then expect to be manually altering the size of the text in every program you use (Chrome, Visual Studio, Word, etc).
In my personal opinion LED causes less eye-strain than LCD (less "flicker" with LED). I haven't noticed an improvement between IPS and TN panels, but I also look at the screen straight on (and most of IPS's perks are in things that don't help text anyway).
I strongly recommend that whatever you wind up getting turn the brightness down. I took mine from 100% (default) to 25%. The default brightnesses are for displaying them in stores (in the "brightness wars") and have no place being that high when in use.
If you're using a Mac then you're fortunate as Apple support 2560×1600 displayed as 1280x800 which means much higher resolution fonts and no need to mess with the sizes of things (ala Windows).