Buying a monitor in Sim Lim Square

A few days ago, we were at Sim Lim Square shopping for a 20″ monitor. Here’s an example of how not to sell a product.

Most of the shops were displaying (still are) their range of monitors, connected to a single PC with the video signal distributed through a switch. Surely, you’ll know that this method is unable to support all the monitors in their native mode. If PC’s video is configured to support a 17″ monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution, then that same resolution will be used for a 20″ monitor with a maximum resolution of 1680 x 1050. The result is that the 20″ monitor is displayed with thick and crude graphics, and not in its native mode.

So I asked if they could display the 20″ monitor in its native mode. ALL of them said no. The reason was that their PC could not support higher a resolution higher than 1024 x 768.

Alright then, how about if we bring our own laptops to test out the monitors?

So we brought our laptops down to try. Only 2 vendors were willing to let us try with our MacBooks, but the problem was both of them didn’t have a DVI cable. At least they managed to borrow one.

There was this young chap that I remembered who insisted that he didn’t have a DVI cable and went into a speech about how they cannot open up new boxes just with the intention to test the displayed monitors. “Like that how to sell the monitors with the opened boxes!”, he said. We didn’t ask him to do that, but mentioned that he could borrow it from somewhere else, like the rest did.

Kudos went to the young lady promoter for Philips monitor. She brought us to her display area and made all the arrangements for us to test out the Philips monitor. We almost bought the Philips monitor, until she brought us back to the dealer who can’t sell an opened box.

In the end, we bought a Dell 2007WFP monitor on the Internet. So far, I’m very pleased with it. The monitor has 3 USB, DVI, VGA, S-Video, Video and audio inputs. The display is bright and cripsy. My MacBook recognises it immediately, and the monitor responds to the MacBook. The monitor’s control buttons are nicely arranged on the bottom right of the screen, making it look quite professional.  Here’s a picture of it:

Therefore, if anyone wants to sell something, put your heart into it.  Otherwise, don’t bother.

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