Best Monitor for Photography?

[jh95zenki]

I'm interested in buying a good monitor for photography. What do pro photographers use? Amateur photographers? You guys?
I'm not looking to spend too much money since I'm only 18.

[i like rice]

I'm still using an old Dell 2005 FPW. You can find them used for about $130-150.

If you want something new, the Dell SP2008WFP 20" is about $250

[bmatyeah]

most people focus a lot on color correction/calibration. Will you be printing?

[TROLL]

i did a lot of digging on this previously, and according to the techies you'll have to spend $800+ to get to any good photo editing monitor. however, there are a lot of monitors for $200-$300 which are much more commonly used.
at the end of the day, color management is an uphill, losing battle in most cases. if you're interested in getting serious about it, i would buy a decent monitor, but also make sure to use a monitor calibration tool so you know that it is calibrated properly. its also important to understand software color management which isn't as open and shut... i'm still working on that myself.
for what its worth though, i use a 22" widescreen Samsung. the technical guys say its not a serious editing monitor, but like i said, they are $800 up to $3000 so i dont think thats realistic for most people.

[jh95zenki]

Yeah I'm just looking into getting one around the $200-$300 area. I don't have $800 to throw around like that. I just have have no idea which ones are best in the $200-$300 area.

[TROLL]

There are sales pretty often on them... I got my 22" LCD for under $300 over a year ago so I'm sure you can pull that off now if you find the right deal. Just find something thats from a reputable company, do a little background on it online to make sure it gets decent reviews overall, and go for it...

[TROLL]

just happened to stumble on this... there might be other deals out there but this seems pretty good... http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=206900406&adid=17654&dcaid=17654#cRevSec

[TurboV]

I have a widescreen LCD, not too big but good enough for what I do. I haven't calibrated it yet, though :( I technically have a laptop but I managed to break a lot of the keys off of the keyboard in a milk incident, so it's closed on the floor and I have my monitor and wireless keyboard. I think we picked it up at a sale at CompUSA, or Best Buy, I can't remember which.

[jh95zenki]

So I've been looking at the newest dell monitors and I've found that they're all decently cheap for 22"
Now I compared the 3 22" dells and they all seem pretty much the same besides the "image contrast ratio"
one has 800:1, one has 1000:1, and another has 2000:1
I know the higher the ratio the more contrast there is, but which ones best for photography?

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productcompare.aspx?c=us&category_id=6198&cs=19&k=monitor&l=en&prods=320-5205,320-6107,320-6252

[i like rice]

Don't bother with anything that starts with "E" in the front

Of those three, SP2208WFP will give the sharpest, brightest and most natural colors. Plus, with the HDMI you can probably keep it for a few years. The 2208WFP is good but is missing a few features that the SP has.

[jh95zenki]

I think I'm going to go with the SP
what is HDMI though? High definition?
Thanks for the help guys