As environmentally-concerned designers, one of our real-life efforts to help save the planet is to power-down our electricity usage in the office, be it air conditioners, printers, fluorescent lights, you name it. We tried our best to turn them off when they’re not in use. Over the year, one of our most notable power hungry equipment was the CRT monitor for the office Windows PC, which with our constant website projects and with everyone running non-Intel Macs or Windows with IE 7.0, its presence is required for IE 6.0 testings (Yes, that is probably what it does most if not printing ID cards for our clients).

While the PC itself doesn’t do much to our individual workflows, we decided to give our office’s corner occupant an upgrade from its rather old and distorted CRT monitor. Our selection goes to the Samsung Syncmaster 740N. It’s a fairly decent LCD panel with a fair price as well. And since we don’t need the DVI connection, the analog port is nothing for us to be worried of. The specifications itself is not top-notch, but it’s a good bargain with that kind of price. And Samsung is known as a reliable LCD manufacturer as well.

With the new monitor, we hope that it’ll give us all aesthetic, energy and health benefits that could lead us to better productivity, because LCD monitors are slimmer and nicer to look at, and not to mention has no graphical distortions, uses way less power (which means a positive point for our electricity bill), and easier to the eyes with its much less radiation than the CRT.