GLScooby

I got a 19" NEC CRT from work for my Pop a couple of years ago. It bit the dust not too long ago, and he's back in 17" hell.

I wanna get him a nice 19" LCD for christmas, but after doing some thread reading, review site browsing, and straight up shopping, I'm finding there is quite a bit more to all of the features offered today.

I'd like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but I'm admittedly confused by some of the LCD features and which ones may matter more than others.

Dot pitch, Contrast ratio, Response Time, and Native Resolution seem to be the 'big ones'. I'm interested to hear some views on which are the 'more important' criteria I should consider.

Some background: Pops is practically blind. Not really, but he's an old coot, so It'll probably be 640X480 or 800X600 res. My monitor at work is a Viewsonic VG900b, and looks excellent in its native res of 1280X1024 (obviously), but looks terrible(fuzzy) in anything but that. Integrated speakers and TV tuning are a non-issue, don't care either way. He is NOT an FPS gamer, so I'm not sure a smoking response time is necessary - unless it can cure other shortcomings, if you catch my drift.

So fire away, and gimme some help, cause Santa is comin' to town!

UNCLBEN

Here is a good comparo AnandTech did recently on 19" LCDs. It should be a good place to get started.