It depends on the resolution and the dot pitch of the monitor. First
of all, you should be looking for a flatpanel monitor. There's no
reason to buy a new CRT today. For one thing, the price difference
will be negated by the difference in power cost. Secondly, there's no
excuse for sitting around with a giant radiation cannon blasting at
your head all day now that there's a good alternative. So buy a
flatpanel monitor, and buy the biggest one you can afford. A finer
dot-pitch will give a sharper image, but looking at a relatively
"coarse" screen at a distance of 3 feet will theoretically be similar
to looking at a finer, but smaller, screen at a closer distance. If
that makes any sense. Flatpanel monitors do work far better at their
native resolution than at any other resolution, but for any
decent-sized monitor that will be substantially higher than the 800x600
you mention.

As for your last question, if the 19 and 22 inch monitors were both set
for the same resolution, the text would be larger on the 22-inch
screen. Remember that the resolution is the total number of pixels on
the screen, so a bigger screen means bigger pixels. This is about
video data, not screen elements.

A related discussion is the number of illuminating elements on a
screen. This is determined by the pitch of the screen, and its size.
A finer-pitched screen will have more illuminating elements (LEDs on a
flatpanel). And for a given pitch, a larger screen will have more
LEDs. With a flatpanel monitor, the maximum data resolution is limited
by the number of LEDs on the screen.

ulysses

Monroe wrote:

Looking for an opinion on monitor spec's for viewing text and graphics
(but predominantly sequence graphics) at a distance of approximately
36 inches. Add to that, slight near-sightedness. Was thinking good
AG 19 inch (NEC/Mitsu) at 800 x 600 res. What do you think? Up this
to say a good 21 - 22 inch? . . . but I've never used this size screen
before . . . .some say that working with standard office documents is
difficult on a larger screen . . . also (and I'll show my ignorance
of the matter here, never actually having the opportunity to compare
two monitors side-by-side, and not completely understanding monitor
spec's), given identical resolution on a 19 and. 22 inch monitor,
would this result in identical physical text size?.

Thanks for any and all.
--

Monroe