Bulky CRTs have now, mercifully, all but been completely edged out by LCDs. Where CRTs used to be dim but fast and LCDs bright but slow, LCDs have improved quickly and now offer both excellent brightness and speed, making them great for gaming at home and for editing spreadsheets at the office. With their slim profile, improving technology, attractive price tag and generally sleeker looks, LCD monitors are now the technology of choice for most monitor buyers.
Graduating from LCDs, HD-LCDs are becoming ever more readily available and offer you gaming and film playback in full 1080p at affordable prices. It's hard to argue for the added expense of HD if you just want to use your laptop to browse the web casually and check emails, though.
A monitor's Response Rate is the speed with which the monitor can draw images to itself: a high Response Rate may cause stuttering and ghosting as a monitor struggles to keep up with drawing images to the monitor, this problem can be especially acute when playing "next-gen" games with high frame rates or watching films with action packed scenes. Fortunately, most LCD monitors in the market now have sufficiently low response rates that no issues should arise in this regard, but if you're planning on using your monitor almost exclusively for such uses, you should make sure you buy a monitor with a minimum level of 5milliseconds, though preferably under 3ms though.
Contrast Ratio describes the luminosity of a display: the differences between black-and-white; if a display has poor luminosity (a low contrast ratio), distinguishing between white and light grays can be difficult. Unfortuantely, Contrast Ratio became to monitors what megapixels are to cameras, a much vaunted but much-useless figure that marketing departments get excited over but don't help their population of users; helpfully, Gizmodo have a neat "Contrast Ratio Shoot-Out (Everyone Loses)" that helps you untangle the web of confusion.
Dell and Samsung are highly regarded within the industry for their monitors, being both well-built and well-performing at reasonable prices.
You've may have HDMI inputs on your TV, but what're the rest of them?
DVI: this standard, although relatively old, is still in common-use across a variety of applications in the computing world, most commonly for PC-monitor and PC-projector connections. Learn more.
HDMI: with HDMI output, you can push out your HD videos from your camcorder straight to your HD-capable TV. If you own a blu-ray player or Sky HD box, you've probably heard of HDMI. In HDIM you have a single, slim cable that can carry HD video and sound to your television. Gone are the days of fiddly and unsightly standard A/V cables with multiple heads and match this-colour-with-that-colour.
MiniDVI: phased out in favour of Mini DisplayPort.
Mini DisplayPort: the successor to MiniDVI, this Apple-conector (which Wikipedia notes that "Apple announced that it would license the Mini DisplayPort connector with no fee") is touted for being able to "capable of driving resolutions up to 2560x1600, commonly used with 30-inch displays".
VGA: this standard, while quite old, is still in common use for connecting a PC to a monitor.
Looking for The Next Big Thing™, you many have seen manufacturer's starting to push LEDs. Being new-to-market, LEDs are still expensive, and while they do offer benefits over LCDs -- truer colours, better brightness, higher contrast and greater energy efficiency -- it is, for now, advisable to wait it out until LEDs reach critical mass within the market.
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