KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

In reality, each of us spend a huge amount of time interfacing with our systems through peripherals – so we should all spend more time thinking about them. There's a New Year Resolution for you all.

Which leads us nicely into the resolution of our choice for budget monitor.

First, we will look at parameters for this group.

KitGuru readers are all keen enthusiasts, who want serious data with which to make buying decisions. If you didn't care about the hardware, then you'd just walk into your local store and buy whichever screen was on sale for less than £150.

In the UK, it is easy to put £300 worth of petrol in your car each month – you don't even have to try that hard. Driving a little slower or faster, can easily change your annual spend by that kind of amount, so we decided to consider screens up to around £300 in this category and we'll open the price limit all the way in the next category.

There are a huge number of decent screens in this price bracket – and we've tested a lot of them in 2013.

One screen that we absolutely adore is the Asus PA248Q Pro art monitor. It delivers the kind of colour definition that a professional needs and if you are a professional designer – then this is the screen we would steer you toward.

That said, KitGuru also has to encompass gamers and people who do normal (non-design) work on their PC.

For that reason, we have decided to go with one of the most innovative screens ever created, the AOC Q2963PM.

In terms of resolution, it offers 2560×1080. In effect, it has the ability to display a pair of 1280×1080 windows side-by-side. That leads to very large deskspace area. It is also a very immersive solution for gaming because the 29″ screen takes up more of your field of view, alongside a more productive desktop.

Instead of alt-tab-ing your way from Outlook to Photoshop and Chrome etc, you can simply set up the 2 most important panels side by side and work with both simultaneously. Very liberating.

Build quality is excellent, it is technically impressive, offers pure blacks and vibrant colours with a super thin bezel and a wall mounting option.

We knew it was special when we saw the buzz it created at Multiplay's i49 and we were not disappointed when we got it into KitGuru Labs for torture testing. Since it's been here, a few ‘regular' people have seen it – and all of them wanted to know where they could buy it.

You can read the review, over here.

The KitGuru Award for Best Value Monitor 2013 goes to the AOC Q2963PM.

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