When you spend a lot of time online—whether working, gaming, watching videos, or just surfing the web—it helps to have a monitor that makes the experience more comfortable and immersive. Depending on your intended use, you’ll want to assess features like resolution, screen size, speed, and color quality. While some are dedicated to productivity and others to gaming, quite a few are well suited to both, so they can pull double-duty in your home office if you’re still primarily or partially working from home.
Monitor Features to Consider
Before you buy a monitor, you should check all of its specifications to ensure it includes the features you want. If you can’t afford a 4K screen, you should aim for a wide 16:9 aspect ratio and Full HD display. Most of the best monitors are LCD with LED backlighting; however, OLED tech is finally coming—along with its self-illuminating pixels (no need for a backlight) and better contrast. If you need color accuracy for work like photo editing, check for features like High Dynamic Range (HDR), a high contrast ratio, and In-Plane Switching (IPS) panels, which all help improve visuals.
If you’re a gamer, you’ll require a graphics card designed for faster action, such as AMD’s FreeSync or Nvidia’s G-Sync, which smooths the video and reduces latency. Ideally, the response time for gaming monitors will be about five milliseconds or less. Refresh rates of 60Hz are the most common, but the most premium gaming monitors may go up to 200. Whether you’re shopping for gaming or work or both, also make sure that the monitor has ports and cables that are compatible with your laptop and other accessories, or you’ll have to purchase adapters as well.
How We Selected
To choose these seven monitors, we surveyed the market and took into account professional reviews from trusted publications such as Wirecutter, CNET, and PC Mag. We then scoured thousands of user reviews on retailer and company sites to determine our Consumer Score for each, which represents the percentage of customers who rated the monitor at least four out of five stars. We evaluated each option based on value, performance, design, and connectivity to ensure a variety of options that will fit a range of intended uses and preferences.
