B10[mg]

Let's start of this post with Joffie's motto: "hardware sucks". This is very true and every time I need something hardware related I get the wrong product, which is not compatible with any kernel I can possibly compile. And every time, I tell myself: next time, do some research and then go buy it! Sounds perfect, but it never works.

For a while now, I noticed that my good old CRT monitor was getting really old. Especially compared to the TFT screens at work. So, with the extreme price drop over the past few years, it was time that I got myself a TFT monitor!

Thinking "hardware" I remembered the promise I made myself: read up on it, before you buy something on impulse again. But too late, I was already heading into town. The city where I currently live, doesn't supply me with a lot of places where I can buy these kind of screens, so I decided to go to the dreadful MediaMarkt

I don't like this store. They try to sell everything, resulting in a bee hive of customers crawling over eachother. They claim to be very cheap, and sure, a few products are cheap, but a lot is not!

Nevertheless, there I was standing, facing a wall of at least a fifty different kinds. Luckily they were organized by size and since a 19" screen seems good enough for me, I could scrap a few dozen items of my "compare these" list. Instead of studying the product specs before going into a store, I figured comparing them was the least I could do.

The little cards underneath the screens showed only a handful of specs. Size, Refresh Response, Dot Pitch, Luminance, and Contrast Ratio. Now a few of these words speak for themselves. The refresh response rate should probably be as low as possible. Same for the dot pitch value, yet what the hell is this luminance? It's measured in cd/m². What does that stand for? I had no clue, so I finally asked one of the sales kids (who tried to bug me 7 times already within 30 minutes).

The poor guy was pondering and started stuttering. "That is a good question, sir". "Thank you", I replied. After 5 minutes, I asked if a co-worker of him might know, and he finally confessed that he really had not the faintest clue. Unfortunately, the cow-orker had no clue either.

This pissed me off. There are 5 settings they have to know something about, yet a simple question they cannot answer? I didn't expect him to explain it to me in detail as on Wikipedia, yet some information would be nice.

So I made myself a new promise: next time when I'm bored, I'll go question the guys on really technical details. I wonder how long teasing them will stay funny, but it should amuse me for a few weeks. And I'll have to study the details myself, so I learn something ;-)

I doubt it will stay amusing for a long time though, for these crazy stores alone drive me insane already :-(

MediaMarkt