At a time when you can buy a 24-inch LCD monitor for less than $300, why would you ever consider spending twice that much for Dell’s 24-inch UltraSharp U2410? Because the U2410 is a precision instrument; those $300 monitors are really just HDTVs sans tuners.To be fair, those cheap monitors are a good deal if all you need is a display for watching movies, surfing the web, playing games, and editing snapshots destined for Flickr or grandma’s digital picture frame. But if your livelihood depends on factors such as visual accuracy and color fidelity—or if you’re just passionate about excellence—the U2410 is the better value. The U2410 is based on an IPS (in-plane switching) LCD panel, which is considerably more expensive to manufacture than the more common TN (twisted nematic) panels you’ll find in inexpensive monitors. IPS panels, on the other hand, typically boast superior color reproduction and much wider viewing angles compared to TN panels. The U2410 not only delivers on both those counts, it also boasts a gray-to-gray response time of just six milliseconds, which is very fast for an IPS panel.