Hey guys. I'm a visually impaired person using a 15 inch laptop right now. Could you all suggest me a monitor?

I want a new monitor solely because when I zoom in text now, it takes up too much of the screen for a page / document to be readable. I find myself sitting with my head 1-2 inches from the screen. I figure if I get a bigger screen, I can zoom in all I want and be able to sit comfortably.

I'll be using it for programming , text documents, reading ebooks, and web browsing. I will be using it at low resolutions. I've tried that out on other widescreen monitors and because of my vision, I actually prefer it and think text looks better that way.

I'm willing to spend $250 and I'm looking for something from 22' -27', bigger is better. Note that I don't care too much about image quality.

Any suggestions?

I would suggest picking up a 25" - 27" monitor at 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. The monitor's PPI at this size is already on the extremely low side, which I think it benefitial for your purpose because default text and icons will be fairly large you won't need to scale as much. I found one 27" monitor on Newegg that matches this condition and is $259. You can probably shop around and find a better deal.

If you are using Windows, I would recommend not reducing the screen resolution at first. There is a scaling engine built in from Vista forward that you can use to increase all text and UI components up to 2 times larger without changing the display resolution. You can access this from the screen resolution control panel, it's either in the advanced functions (VIsta I think) or labeled "Make text larger or smaller" right on the page (7 and 8). Using this control on the monitor I linked above, you can make a 12 pt font appear a little less than 1/2 inch tall (if you want to) on the screen without lowering the display resolution. This is better because you have more precice control over how much the image scales and fonts will be sharper since you are using the full subpixel resolution of the monitor.

Like @ChaosDent mentioned, you will want something 25"-27". You will still want to run at the 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution, but you will want to actually change your DPI settings to help with increasing the font size for everything. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/443-dpi-display-size-settings-change.html

That should help out quite a bit.

Hey, thanks for the advice guys.

I've actually tried messing around with those Win7 features before. It makes stuff readable, but not nearly ideal. I bet this will look better on a bigger display.

Also, people have suggested just getting an HDTV, and I've thought about it. Now considering that I don't care too much about image quality, do you think it'd be a good idea to just get a cheap 32 in TV and use my laptop with that?

@thegreatmuta92 said:

Hey, thanks for the advice guys.

I've actually tried messing around with those Win7 features before. It makes stuff readable, but not nearly ideal. I bet this will look better on a bigger display.

Also, people have suggested just getting an HDTV, and I've thought about it. Now considering that I don't care too much about image quality, do you think it'd be a good idea to just get a cheap 32 in TV and use my laptop with that?

As someone who uses an HDTV as a computer monitor? Only if you don't feel comfortable paying that much for a monitor.

Now, I don't want you to think that I'm not happy with my TV - I am very happy with it - but even at 1920x1080 it doesn't look as sharp as actual computer monitors and doesn't scale as well when I do the whole text changing thing that @ChaosDent mentioned. I also have some vision problems, though nowhere near as bad as having to squint two inches away from a 15" screen, and it works fine. I just think an actual monitor is better unless you don't have that extra money.