A couple of specifications you should be looking at when purchasing LCDs.

Contrast Ratio -- How bright it gets.. You want something that's at BARE MINIMUM of 250:1. I have mine at 300:1. The higher the better.

Horizontal Viewing Angle -- How far to the side you can be siting and still see OK. Take no less than 120 degrees. that's 60 to the left, and 60 to the right, off the vertical axis.

Vertical Viewing Angle -- Same idea as horizontal. Take at least 15 degrees. Mine is at 30.

Maximum Resolution -- Not much to say here except that you should set your video card to the max of the monitor. It may support lower resoutions, but it won't look good. Because the LCD is designed with only so many pixels horizontally and vertically. And setting it at a lower resolution, especially one that's not a whole integer scale down, will look very bad.

Pixel Error -- Under 5 is good.

Response Time -- measured in ms. It measures how long it takes for a pixel to react, to change brightness or color. It's important when you are going to be doing high frame rate work. Consider a movie that plays at 30fps (29.97 for you purists), you'd need a response time of no worse than 33.3ms. For a video game at 100fps, you'd want a response time of 10ms.

One last thing. Once you get an LCD, make sure to turn on ClearType in windows XP. Makes a big difference with LCDs.

I think that about sums it up. Good luck

My thanks to Xin Li on the question of "what to look for"
Mucks


Now where did I put that Credit Card?

This is an extention to Mucks excellent post above and is based on personal experience.

My personal opinion on using an LCD monitor.

LCD monitors are excellent choice for text based applications. The image appears much sharper.

Due to digital technology the speed is not yet fast enough for high speed and action games. You get a blurry effect. The good ole discreet technology (CRT - Cathode Ray Tube) is still the only viable choice for gamers.

Pivot software with some of the LCD monitors is very good an option since you can tilt the screen all the way to 90 degrees and look at an A4 size document in its entirety. Excellent option which I am afraid you cannot do with the normal monitor.

For some reason a 15 inch LCD looks much bigger than its counterpart (CRT monitor).