"This is not a display to be used for spreadsheets or by sysadmins." eh?

I suspect it is, if the coloured pencil department want all the insulating on their lovely aluminium-cased machines to be intact, and those cases not live... BOFHs like their FPSsen nice and crisp, you know.

viewing angles of 178 degrees both horizontally and vertically - surley that hood will get in the way a bit???

...is a pretty good approximation of Pantone 348C.

However, I no longer need that sort of accuracy; alsom I don't have five friggin' grand burning a hole in my pockets.

However, many many moons ago, I once approximated the effect of that hood by placing a big black keyboard case over my head to overcome hideous glare on a bright winter day in Edmonton, Canada.

Mine's the one with four Pantone books (regular, metallic, pastel, and tinted varnish) in the back pocket. And not $5,000 with nowhere to go.

Yeah, right... I look forward to hearing how the BOFH is going to wangle one out of his newest Boss sometime soon.

I think you will find this is vital equipment for every corporate manager with his salt, for looking at porn all day, er, ahem, conducting vital first-line business maximisation enterprise decision management making.. er... stuff. Like choosing the new PAs and business card colours, and which country to outsource to. You know, imporant stuff.

The cushion tossers will need it too, as pink iPods are ONLY compatible with screens over 29" and +$4500. It's impossible to select the right shade of burnt-umber-fuscia-delight for the bosses wife's borfriend's sleazy cousin's Mercedes SLK seat covers.

Mac users: c'aint shewt 'em, and c'aint bludgeon them to death with old Apple Studio Displays with proprietory ADC cables. Hurry up and DIE already, Steve.

The photos from those cameras get printed out on a less than 14-bit printer.

but no thanks.. i'll stick with my 30" dell monitor which only cost £600..

Oh, I dunno - if it had HDMI, and I can't see any mention of it in the writeup, it's the sort of thing I could imagine hooking my 360 up to ... sadly, at least for LaCie but not for my bank account, I've already got my eye on a dual input (VGA/HDMI) 28" TFT which costs 250 quid, including VAT.

Still, congratulations to LaCie for not only flaying Apple on price but also making something so goddamned ugly.

Well those four Pantone(TM) colour swatches are going to set you back quite a bit already aren't they.

There are more expensive monitors available than this. The highest price I have seen is c. £7000 (but sadly I have mislaid the details of this).

Damn it, I've got to get onto The Register earlier.

It's be amusing if you weren't able to remove the hood either: I can view it at 178° from all angles, but I can't with this bloody hood.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this regard, but I find the best bang for your buck is to use kit that is 2 -3 years old. I love to read the reviews on new stuff and gasp at the prices knowing that the bits I choose will be mine for a lot less in two years or so (mostly). That's all I can afford to do. Of course you have to be sharp and get it at the lowest price before it's pulled off the shelves completely, as happens frequently. This way my (new) old stuff works fine, for me, and I haven't been suckered into the 'must have' 'gimme gimme' life style choice scenario whatsit all that much.

"more coal from the bunker dear, I'm going to write a letter to our MP using the steam-powered Babbage typo-matic....."

Why exactly are the comments moderated when we can get away with wishing death upon a person due to us disliking their choice of... display connectors? Irritating.

Regarding the product: Whee, nice! I'm not even a color pro and I'd still love to have something with this kind of performance just to look at photos. Yet, as already said, too bad it's a LaCie.

Scott Broukell posted Friday 9th January 2009 10:26 GMT"

"I'm sure I'm not alone in this regard, but I find the best bang for your buck is to use kit that is 2 -3 years old. I love to read the reviews on new stuff and gasp at the prices knowing that the bits I choose will be mine for a lot less in two years or so (mostly)."

I'm completely with you, Scott. Whenever possible, I buy second-hand, reconditioned, B-stock--be it a car, a camera, a display, or even a hard drive. Hell, I even acquired my first and second wives second-hand! But back in 1993, I "needed" a large display with 1600 x 1200 resolution at a refresh rate of 75 Hz or higher so I could do technical publishing. The only offerings were Nokia's new 445X 21-inch color CRT (102 kHz scan rate) at $2550 U.S. and Matrox's 4GB graphics board at $930 U.S. I had to take out a 3-year loan to buy them. Now, thankfully, one can buy a monitor and board with specs that put these to shame, without breaking the bank. By the way, my family still uses that Nokia monitor on one of its PCs!