LCD's are much easier to work with in my experience. Because CRTs still use glass as the visual "lens," they reflect a LOT of room glare and it makes the picture really washed out and the highlight hard to discern from the midtones. In our digital photo lab at school we have a mix of very expensive CRTs and very expensive LCDs in the room; people are always fighting over who gets the LCDs :) The blacks are much richer because there isn't as much wash-out from the ambient lighting and LCD's are much sharper because the pixels are defined on the subtrate wheras CRT pixels are roundish and fuzzy. And as for color accuracy, you're not going to see a decent LCD looking much different than a good print from a CRT. The color shortcomings are really in saturation of the blue and red areas, not the actual balance of colors, which isn;t neccessarily a bad thing, as prints are always a bit more vibrant than they are on screen. For graphics, even though I'll be stoned for this, the new intel iMac is a great deal. Intel iMac You get a dual 2.0Ghz intel coreduo processor, a radeon X1600 256MB graphics card, a 250GB SATA hard drive, a dual layer dvd/cd burner, built in wifi and bluetooth, and a 20" LCD display 1600x1200 resolution for less than $1800. Bump your memory to 1.5GB by doing it yourself for another $120: < a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/5300DDR2S1GB/">PC 5300 RAM And that leaves you another $1000 for accessories :) (or to save up for nights out on the town woohoo!) If you're not into the whole mac thing then I'd get Monarch to built you an AMD X2 rig: http://www.monarchcomputer.com I built a pretty nice rig for $2500, check it out here: Login here with user name: renderosity password: bryce And I personally can't stand dual monitors. I'd get an apple 23" cinema display or a dell 24" display