Introduction

It’s not a hard task to find someone who is interested in an LCD. While LCDs have dropped in price, the general thought is that they are still too expensive to be a viable option for most. The most affordable LCD is a 15” model and while it has almost the same screen size as a 17” CRT monitor, you’re very limited by a low resolution of 1024 X 768 which severely kills your desktop working area.

BroMagic are quite a new company to Australia and recently released a line of LCDs for the budget user in mind out of their factory in Taiwan. Three models are currently available, 15” VGA, 17” VGA and the one we are looking at today - the 17” DVI model.

The choice of LCDs to choose from these days is huge. First you have to decide what size: most people are going to be choosing between a 15” LCD or a 17” if they can stretch their budget that little bit further. With so many brands on the market and prices differing a lot, it’s not always a case of you get what you pay for, like they say. Just because you pay a few hundred more for a particular brand, it doesn’t mean that it’s a better monitor.

DVI is a term that you may have heard come up and it’s simply a cable that provides a digital signal compared to an analogue one with regular VGA. A question that pops up a lot is, “Will I notice the difference between VGA and DVI cable?” The best way to answer this is, “Can you tell the difference between a movie being played in VCR format and a movie being played in DVD format?” Some people can spot the difference straight away, while others will not notice any difference at all; the same can be said for a DVI monitor and a normal 15 pin VGA monitor, just to a slightly lesser extent.

So let’s see what the BroMagic company can bring to the table as far as LCDs go.