Buying a monitor on Ebay

[Robot Chicken]

I was looking to buy a new 19inch TFT monitor (flatscreen) and had a look on Ebay...there are some good deals and much cheaper than the shops but I was warned that TFT monitors suffer from occasional dead pixels etc.

Does anyone have a flatscreen TFT and have you had any problems? I did see a nice Philips 19" for a good price but it has a return to base warranty...in Nottingham!

 

[Cian]

Well, all my laptops bar one have LCD screens

Well, bar three but non-working ones don't count

And I've got a 15'' TFT myself.

One dead pixel across the lot of them.

HOWEVER! Anyone selling one second hand will probably be shifting it because its problematic.

My 15'' is a Philips Brilliance 150, their original TFT, 1999 or 2000 model. Its getting a bit of picture waviness under Windows at 60Hz, but under an OS that uses 59.97Hz (NTSC) its fine (thats Windows 2000, BeOS and Linux).

 

[Beach Hut]

We've got two TFT monitors a dell and an acer - both are perfect.

Maybe we were lucky but as with every electrical item when broke just by another one.

 

[Kryten]

ours is still alright, nothing wrong with it yet

 

[Cian]

Be careful of very very old ones though. Some people selling stuff just as "flat screens" are selling you DSTN's. These are unusable even for the most basic kind of gaming - CM is hard on a DSTN, and I mean the text gets blurry in the commentry. Video is unusable, etc.

 

[Cian]

One gotcha there. DSTN's have excellent viewing angles, and are very good for totally static images. This is because the liquid crystals in a TFT are through much more layers (Thin Films, hence the TF) than DSTN (Double, only two layers), and that causes refraction which reduces video angles and produces the haze that TFTs suffer if old or dropped.

 

[BUTTERBALL]

Videoseven 17" TFT from BT online £249 - and it's excellent.

 

[Rangdo]

Try here:

ebuyer.com

Never used it for monitors but bought lots of other stuff. Very cheap and fast delivery. Get my ink cartridges here for just over £1 each for colour and black.

 

[disgruntled h blocker]

...Or try novatech. They are in Portsmouth and seem to be reasonably priced.