Benq makes good DVD burners. That's all I know about Benq, but it's better than nothing.
Viewsonic has made good CRT monitors. I have one taking up space in my apartment that's still good, but I only use LCD now. I have a nephew that has a Viewsonic LCD but I never asked him how he liked it.
I never heard of Sceptre, so I wouldn't buy one, but that doesn't mean much. I have noticed newegg has sold LCD monitors in the past with brands nobody ever heard of. After a few weeks they didn't sell them anymore and the brand name disappeared from the radar screen.
I only buy Samsung because that's all I ever had. I've now bought three and they all work fine with no dead pixels.
I think reading the reviews on newegg is a good idea. You have to read a lot of them, and be sceptical and analytical. Let's face it, a lot of people couldn't plug in a monitor and get it right. Also even among reviewers that know their *** from their elbow, their needs and powers of observation will vary greatly.
For instance, I'm not a gamer so I don't pay much attention to quick response time, and have no idea how important that is to gamers. I also am not particular if the colors aren't quite true, and have no idea how I could tell anyway. Basically I want sharp text that's easy to read. It could very well be that any brand would make me happy, but I don't know.
Apparently gamers also care about how black black is, if that makes any sense. No LCD monitor can display absolute black, it's just a matter of how dark the gray is. To anyone but a gamer I think it's immaterial and unnoticeable. I can only notice the difference when displaying an all black screen in a dimly lit room. But in those conditions I can see my old expensive top of the line Samsung will display a darker and more uniform black than my new and much cheaper Samsung can. Under normal conditions though it's unnoticeable and I'm glad I saved the $100 by not going for the top of the line monitor this time.
My monitors are 17 inch and I have no need for anything bigger. A 17 inch LCD is the equivalent of an 18 inch CRT.
When you get the LCD monitor, if you are running XP, you ought to try turning on ClearType fonts. I don't know the details but I've read it has to do with achieving antialiasing at the subpixel level. I've found the difference can be small sometimes or huge at other times. It seems to depend on various things including the particular monitor you have.
That would be nice!
