Now you can get a very nice Hewlett Packard HDMI monitor for a few hundred dollars. I use a HP2709m that I bought for just under $400 last fall. It's a pleasure to work on and if I want to pop a DVD into the player I can watch it in a small box or can play it full screen and it looks fabulous. I use my regular computer speakers, I don't use the monitor's speakers, so I can't report on the sound quality.

My son built his computer that he took to school and we shopped around for a monitor. Since I had a good LCD flatscreen monitor he could take but he didn't want to, I told him to use some of his gift money and buy his own. We shopped the HP monitors and then found one that worked even better for his dorm room - a 23" Samsung for about $299 that is both a monitor and if you attach an antenna or a cable, is also a tuner. He doesn't plan to use this as a TV, they have one of those also in the room, but this means he can attach his various game players to his monitor and play them (Wii, XBox 360).

SRS