Two days ago I did something kind of fun and scary at the same time: Dell had their 24″ wide screen monitors on sale for $699 CAD yesterday, and I ordered three of them. Yes, three – that’s 72 inches of monitor goodness. Why? Well, I’ve had my eye on an upgrade to my dual 20.1″ Dell LCDs for a while now, and I’ve been looking hard at how I use all my computers in my home office, and I think some different hardware will help me get more done, faster. The three Dell monitors are part of the plan…more details to follow later. I also opted to lease them, which is something I’ve only ever done with computer equipment once before. Three of these beauties for $58 per month over four years – I qualified for their best financing rate (9.99%), so it’s not too bad in terms of overall cost of leasing ($490.86). And, yeah, these are the same monitors that I bought back in August ($50 less now) and ended up returning a few days later. Am I a glutton for punishment? Maybe. I want big monitors, and I’m really hoping that four months later, Dell has addressed this issue. There aren’t any monitors on the market that compare to these for $699 each. I read up in their forums before ordering, and it seems like the latest batch of revision A03 monitors no longer have the banding problem. How am I going to use such big monitors? Well that’s a tale for another day…
[as a side note, I’m realizing now one of the dis-advantages of having a template with a non-white background…if I end up posting images designed for white backgrounds very often, the background might need to change]
Jason – this is what GIF/PNG transparency is for. Grab that magic wand, make the mask, and bingo!
Although… a monitor on a red background might be rather ugly. How about partial transparency? That should look pretty sweet. 🙂
–janak
Yes yes, I know what transparency is for – but I wasn’t sure the monitor would look good as a GIF, and PNG files tend to be huge. Because this image was a fairly harshly compressed JPEG, there was a lot of white JPEG artifacts, so my first attempt at a GIF transparency looked horrible – I picked pure white as the transparent colour, but there were many off-white pixels (due to the artifacting) that didn’t vanish. The PNG transparency didn’t work at all – I think my aged PhotoImpact 10 wasn’t creating them properly. I ended up sampling the red and colouring over the white, THEN making the transparency…what a hassle! And this blog was supposed to be nothing but fun for me. 😉