Glossy vs Matte

About a month or two ago I paid a visit to the friendly local electronics retailer, Best Buy. I was in the market for a computer monitor. I had briefly looked before at other places, Costco, Office Depot, Fry's among others. My last monitor was purchased in 2006 and was starting to make an annoying humming noise when on. It was a good ol' monitor and I'll probably still use it for the xbox or something, but it needed to be replaced as the primary monitor.

However, after seeing the great selection of about 10-15 monitors that Best Buy had available, I suddenly realized something. All the monitors were practically identical. Sure, the sizes and features varied here and there but the specs didn't vary that much (720p or 1080p?). Not only that, but they all looked THE SAME. Glossy screen with glossy black casing. It's as if they guy in charge of making every computer monitor suddenly thought, "Well, pretty much EVERY hdtv available for purchase has a glossy screen and glossy black casing, so why don't we just make all computer monitors look like that too?"

I had, in the past, always thought that this "glossy screen revolution" was just a trend that would eventually go away. I loved how the first LCD monitors came in matte, getting rid of the glare suffered over the years with CRT monitors. Sure, I'd heard time and time again that a glossy screen allows for "more vibrant colors", but for the longest time I was convinced this was more of a media buzz phrase to trick people into buying crappy glossy screens. That is, until recently.

I ended up buying a fairly nice Dell monitor, matte screen. It sits on my desk right next to my mac laptop, which has a glossy screen. Let me tell you, the difference is quite noticeable. I'm taking back everything I thought about glossy screens. They actually do look far superior. Most notable are black, and any of the dark shades of all the colors. Sure, they are inconvenient in many circumstances, especially on laptops. Nevertheless, once you get the thing in a suitable location that doesn't produce horrible glare, it shines.

There is a slight possibility that this mac laptop's glossy screen looks a lot better because it also happens to be LED backlit. Not sure if any companies make LED backlit matte screens, but I would be interested to see one and how it compared to the glossy version. In the meantime, I highly recommend a glossy screen for any monitor purchase.

Addition by Subtraction

Over the past decade hard drive sizes have increased and their prices have dropped. All this storage capability allowed my music and photo collection size to skyrocket. As far as space was concerned, I never felt the need to delete anything. However, this lead to a huge clutter of content that became quite unusable for most intents and purposes.

With photos, you may have taken a couple shots for each scene just to ensure you get a good quality version from the set. What good is the final archive of the album if the high quality takes are hidden in the clutter of photos that didn't turn out as good? If you feel a permanent delete is too harsh, then at least put the "extras" in a subfolder or hidden location, don't let them suck the life out of the beauty of the album as a whole.

I thought to call this "pruning" your photo albums, and apparently someone else did also:
http://lifehacker.com/396758/prune-your-photo-collection-with-picasas-stars

His approach is nice. Focus on highlighting the good pictures and you'll find that the less "contributible" photos will bleed out in the end, and you can proceed to move/hide/delete them.

This starring system also works wonders with a music collection. If you have iTunes or and iPod, you can star your songs as you listen. For large music collections this is a MUST! Imagine putting your collection on shuffle and liking EVERY song that comes on. This is possible if you star your songs and create playlists based on those songs.

Copeland

Went to the Copeland concert in SLC with Adam & Kilee. It was a great show, lots of energy especially at the end. It kills me that they are breaking up. They are such a great band, one of my favorites.