Joe -

If you can get the 1024 x 768 resolution on your 19 inch monitor, you can look at everything pretty much the same as it would be on a 1280 x 768 large screen. You just have to sit a little closer. You should be able to get a pretty good "feel" for what you'll see on a larger one, though, just by playing around a little with your present monitor.

The dual monitor setups I've seen do "pass the cursor" from one monitor to the other just by moving the mouse. With some really ancient systems you had to click on an icon for the "other monitor," but I think that's pretty much gone away.

On your present monitor, as an example, in Word you can click Window - New Window and you'll get the same document in two separate windows. Drag one side of the top window over to make it narrower. Click the other window and drag the opposite edge in, and you should be able to put two windows side by side in your 1024 pixel wide view. Your mouse will move over both, but you will still have to click to make one or the other the "active" window. (I can't say whether the dual monitor setup automatically makes the "other" instance the active one when you move the cursor to that monitor. You may still have to click once.)

The "visual feel" should be much the same as you'd see with any larger monitor with a 768 pixel height - you'll just sit a little closer. The extra width of the TV monitor, 1280 px, won't normally be usable when you're in "compute mode" so you can just imagine a gray border on each side.

One writer carried by my local newsrag says that most large format TVs are set up for optimum display in the showroom, and that's a long way from what you'll want in your home. If you make a few adjustments - recognizing that the knob marked brightness actually is the gray-scale (color balance) adjustment and the knob marked contrast really controls the brightness, etc. - you'll probably end up with significant reserve in the knob settings. That will let you turn things up when the picture starts to fade, and also probably minimizes burn-in. It's not really clear whether the life figures quoted are for factory settings or for correct home viewer settings.

To some extent, with the Liquid Crystal displays, I'm told that a "burned in" area can sometimes be "burned out" just by displaying a moving scene over it for a while, so the edges that show up when you've watched a few movies that don't match the screen aspect ratio can be "faded" out just by watching a few full screen displays. I don't know whether the same effect applies to Plasma displays.

It really is the pixels that count, not just the screen size. Get as big a screen as is reasonable, and just get a cozy love seat so you can sit up closer for the movies (unless you're watching football with the guys).



or maybe if you are....

John