At work I use a laptop plus an external monitor. Before this there were two monitors lying around: a Lenovo LCD, 22 inches, big white TN panel, completely unbearable. Then the radiology department retired a CRT, a Philips, and it looked surprisingly good — until a few days ago, when that Philips died too. I thought about it for a long time, whether to buy a screen with my own money for the office. Considering that my idiot director has me writing stuff every day and I spend long hours staring at a computer, at the very least I shouldn’t be blinding myself on a big white panel, so I gritted my teeth and picked up an ASUS VS239HR — 23 inches, IPS, VGA/HDMI/DVI. It arrived fast. To my surprise it was a perfect panel with no dead pixels, and the backlight bleed wasn’t too bad either — way better than I expected. Some quick impressions below.