A ton of you out there are still using old monitors, some of which are shamefully old. Yes, they still work, but hey, this is your eyes we’re talking about and you should have a display that allows you read everything easily.

Before listing the 5 reasons, here’s a quick way to determine if your monitor is crappy or not:

Use a laptop under 1 year old with a standard-sized screen (which is 15.6-inch these days) in its native resolution. Use a friend’s laptop, or if nobody you know has one, trot on down to your local department store and use one there. Examine the on-screen text closely, paying particular attention to menu text which is usually the smallest. If you find that you can read the text on the laptop screen a lot better than your monitor at home, it’s time to get a new monitor.

Why use a laptop for the test? Because typically a laptop display has a super-high-quality picture by design that’s much better than a desktop display. They have to be that way else nobody would buy laptops. Even low-cost netbooks have very crisp and clear screens. If you’ve ever thought, "Gee, my laptop display looks so much better than my desktop monitor..", now you know why.

Here are the 5 reasons why you should go with a 24-inch LED-backlit monitor.

1. Very good price point

If you haven’t priced out 24-inch displays in a while, they are well below the $200 mark now. Take a look at these prices. There’s some really good stuff in the under-$200 range.

It also should be noted that you do get the absolute best bang for your buck currently with a 24-inch display; it’s the cheapest way to go with a big monitor. As soon as you go over 24-inch, the price goes up sharply.

2. True 1080p

The native resolution on all 24-inch displays as far as I’m aware is 1920×1080, and that’s "Full HD" territory. Video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo are featuring a lot more 1080p video these days, but you can’t watch it at that resolution unless you have a monitor that can support it.

3. Greener

This isn’t a reference to color but rather power-saving technology. Most if not all 24-inch displays with the LED backlight system are Energy Star 5.0 compliant, and in power saving mode (which most of you know as ‘standby’), most displays only use less than 1 watt of power. When in 100% "on" mode, the power consumption is still very miniscule at under 35 watts at the most for most models.

4. 24-inch is the "just right" physical size of monitor for most people (and desks)

The question of "How big is too big?" starts at anything 25 inches or greater. Sure, you could buy a 25, 26, 27 or even a 30-inch monitor right now if you wanted to. But is this a proper size for a desktop PC setup? Not usually.

With a 24-inch display you do not have to turn your head side to side to see everything and can still keep the same seated position you’ve always had at your desk. Go above 24 however and you’ll be doing a lot of unnecessary head turning. Gamers of course love anything where the display is too big to fit into your field of vision because it adds to the "immersive experience", and those who are engineers of course want the largest possible displays for productivity reasons. But for the rest of us, we’d rather have the entire display fit within what our eyes can see.

Height-wise, a 24-inch will fit in just about all office desk setups that have shelves and storage areas above where the display is placed. Go larger than 24 and the display even with the stand at its shortest possible setting may be literally too tall to fit.

5. LED-backlighting blows away standard backlighting

LED-backlighting is probably the best improvement that’s happened to computer displays since the introduction of the LCD monitor itself. All the backlight is even. Color representation is better and more vibrant. Blacks are blacker, whites are whiter. Fonts are easier to read. Everything is better all-around.

TOO SMALL! I want bigger – but don’t want to pay too much…

24-inch too small? Geez..

Well, okay, if you want bigger without spending too much (relatively speaking), here’s a 27.5-inch by Hanns-G. $279 at the time of this writing. Darn good deal for what it is. All I can say is read the reviews carefully, because you’ll learn quite a bit. You’ll read a lot of comments of how people had to adjust the way they sit at a desk just to use the ridiculously large thing, and that a fair amount of tweaking is involved to get it to look right. Those are the tradeoffs of using a giant-sized display. And note it’s not LED-backlit, so you can expect some slight "wash" in the display. Nothing too terrible, but noticeable.

In comparison, the 24-inch ASUS VE248H is $169 at the time of this writing, and is LED-backlit. Is it worth the extra $110 for a 27.5 over the 24? That’s up to you. Personally, I think the 24 is better not only because of price point but for the fact it’s just better for your eyes and neck.

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