I was lookin at purchasing a 17" LCD or even possibly a 19" widescreen one. I thought about the widescreen thing and that would probably make games look out of scale and such.
Of course "widescreen" is just another way of saying "reduced height"
(a widescreen monitor may have the same diagonal size, but has significantly less pixels than a 'normal' 4:3 aspect ratio screen 19" screen. If you watch a lot of movies on it widescreen may be a good idea, but for 'normal' use? Not so much. Also, depending on the actual monitor, it may not support 'normal' 4:3 resolutions such as 1024x768, or it may stretch them or show black bars on the side.)
I absolutely love my Acer AL1917ABMD 19" (non-widescreen) LCD. under $200 at newegg.com, and works great. Crisp, No blurring in games, etc.
Viewsonic also has some pretty good screens at good prices.
My 19" LCD replaced an older 17" one, and I don't regret getting it for a second)
Couple of pointers when you do look for an LCD:
1) Stay far, FAR away from the 'discount' brands such as rosewill, benQ, and other no-names. LCD's come in several grades, and the budget brands tend to use the lowest grade panels. This matters big time, since the return policies for LCD's depend on the screen grade used. Almost noone allows a return if you have one dead pixel. The good brands allow you to do a return if you have 2 or 3, but the low end won't even consider a return unless there are literally dozens of dead pixels. NOT worth saving a couple of bucks over. (I used to have a link to a site that spelled out the return policies for all major brands, but can't seem to find it right now)
2) Look for something with a low response time. Low response means less blurring. Don't go higher than 8ms.
3) Be aware of the following: There are two major types of LCD panels: those advertised as 16.7 million colors, and those advertised as 16.2 million colors. It may sound insignificant, but there is a major difference:
the 16.7 million color screens use 8 bit per pixel. the 16.2 million color screens only use 6 bits per pixel, and have some hardware-based fancy dithering algorithms to make things appear better than they really are.
The advantage of a 6-bit panel is that it's faster to change colors (= lower response time), but an 8-bit panel can give a much better image quality.
If you're an avid gamer, the 6-bit panels are great. If you're into digital image editing and such, definitely go with the 8-bit ones.
Stay far away from the 6-bit panels that also have a crappy response time, that's the worst of both worlds.
4) High contrast ratio is important. The higher the contrast ratio, the more realistic your images will look, especially with the black being 'blacker'
5) When it comes to brightness though, in my experience many screens are
too bright. my current screen is 300cd/m, and I find even that too bright to look at with the default settings, and had to turn it down. Many of the older screens have higher brightness, some even 450cd/m -- The major downside of that is that you give up the eyestrain of a CRT refreshrate, only to replace it with the eyestrain of an uncomfortably bright display... so be careful.
6) Stand. Many of the cheaper LCD's don't have a height-adjustable stand, and can only tilt the screen. May not sound like a big deal (after all, how often do you adjust the height of your monitor?), but it can be very uncomfortable if the default non-adjustable position of your monitor is too low to be comfortable.
My first LCD screen (17") couldn't even tilt either. I ended up having to rig a cardboard box with something under it so I could both raise it and change the viewing angle. My current screen can tilt, but by default it still wasn't height adjustable. (I knew that in advance though, and ended up also getting a 3rd party height-adjustable VESA-100 compliant stand. Pretty much any LCD screen these days has a standard mounting point on the back, where you can attach a 3rd party wall mount or stand to it.)