I have been look­ing for a new com­put­er mon­i­tor and research­ing if any par­tic­u­lar LCD mon­i­tor is best for edit­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs. The rec­om­men­da­tion is for mon­i­tors built with IPS pan­els, which of course are more expen­sive then the stan­dard mon­i­tors for sale that are made with TN pan­els. The one excep­tion seems to be the 2209WA mod­el by Dell which, as of this writ­ing, sells for $279.

I find that these mon­i­tors are dif­fi­cult to track down as the pan­el type is nor­mal­ly not list­ed in the spec­i­fi­ca­tions, but I found this list of rec­om­mend­ed mon­i­tors — http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/s‑ips-lcd-list.php .

There is a note regard­ing the Dell 2007WFP mon­i­tor that states 2 dif­fer­ent type pan­els were used and what you may get is not guar­an­teed. They also state that the 2209WA that I list­ed above uses an e‑IPS pan­el, a cheap­er ver­sion of the S‑IPS pan­el found in the more expen­sive mod­els. The fact that it is even on this list and in my price range makes the 2209WA very attrac­tive.

IPS mon­i­tors gen­er­al­ly have wider view­ing angles, repro­duce col­or more accu­rate­ly and give a sharp­er image. The trade off is a rel­a­tive­ly slow­er response time. This is a con­sid­er­a­tion if you play fast mov­ing video games result­ing in blur­ring or ghost­ing.

If you use a Mac­in­tosh com­put­er with the 20” or larg­er Cin­e­ma Dis­play, lucky you. Accord­ing to this list you have an IPS mon­i­tor!

Want to read more about the dif­fer­ence in LCD mon­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy, try this page — http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/lcd-panel-types.php -

Who knew? I love the inter­net. If and when I buy one, or dis­cov­er more infor­ma­tion, I’ll write about it.