As far as best bang for my buck + quality brand & performance, I went with Samsung because the refresh rate was nice and fast so you dont get the LCD blur in games.
Also for personal preference I also went with a standard square 19" screen vs wide screen as for I hate my older games in widescreen mode making everything flat and wide or running the widescreen in square resolution as if it was 15" with black wasted area on left and right of screen. I did however have to pay almost 2 times the cost of a widescreen to get an older style square screen though, which is stupid that they cost so much more, when you would think that with everyone wanting the wide screens ( except for myself ) that there would be an abundance of them to be in check or cheaper than the widescreens. I cant imagine the widescreens being that much cheaper to produce than standard square screen displays. Unless there is a shortage of square screens for people such as myself who still want a square area that is correctly proportioned for older games etc that are coded to run only 800x600 or 1024x768 and no other resolution size.
When I saw the price tag 2x a widescreen, I almost bought a used display to save money, but yet again I wanted fast refresh without blur and a display that would last with a warranty. Samsung has a great warranty plan and I use to buy samsung for the business I worked at at my prior job. Out of liek 300 displays we only had 1 drop out, and they were great about the replacement. I had the original box saved and shipped it back and I received a replacement in about 2 weeks. I give Samsung 5 stars. I have also dealt with other display brands like Acer, Dell, Hyundai, HP, and envison. And Out of those names the Dell and HP displays lasted the longest in a corporate environment where they were left on 24/7/365. While we had a large number of issues with the Acer line that someone decided to buy 30 of when I was on a 2 week vacation for a project to cut corners. The Acer warranty system was a mess, and the replacement displays lasted about as long as the original displays which was about 3 months before issues like backlight burning out, and pixels stuck littered the screens.
