New monitor & BluRay -- new video card also? Best DVD?

As long as both video card and monitor supports HDCP (High bandwidth Digital Content Protection). By now all 24" monitors should have HDCP so that is not an issue. You need to make sure your 8600GT does indeed have HDCP so that you can watch Blu-Ray discs.

If you want or need to upgrade your video card for the "best" video quality, then I would suggest a Radeon HD 4650 or HD 4670 if you intend on doing some light gaming. If you are more of an nVidia person, then buy the 9600GT (better gaming performance than the HD 4670) which basically comes in second based on the two sets of scores below.

Read the following article which should help you out:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] yback.html






You should spend the extra monitor on a good monitor as well. Most inexpensive 24" uses TN panels which is preferred by gamers, but due the viewing angles and dithering to boost 256k colors to blend up to 16.7m colors these TN panels are not recommended (at least in my opinion) for any professional graphics or video work. More expensive monitors uses S-PVA or IPS panels and they can create 16.7m without having to blend or dither colors. This reduces the amounts of video artifact that you will see. This includes both color banding and "blocky" colors. 24" S-PVA panel monitors starts at around $575; the Dell 2408WFP is a good example and is currently on sale for $480 + shipping + tax.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna [...] u=320-6272



Example of video artifacts:

I test one particular scene from The Dark Knight on all three of my LCD monitors: 26" NEC LCD2690WUXi (uses a H-IPS panel), 19" Planar PX191 (uses a S-PVA panel, bought in 2002), and lastly my 23.5" Asus VK246H (TN panel monitor).

The scene was when the Joker blew up the hospital, there was an aerial scene of the explosion and thick cloud of black smoke. Both NEC and Planar handled the scene superbly, the black smoke looked like smoke. The Asus handled the scene rather poorly because of the TN panel, instead of a nice cloud of black smoke I was large blocks of black and dark grays.

Another scene that I briefly tested was at the beginning of the movie inside the court room which had wooden veneer walls. I was able to see slight vertical bands of colors on the walls when viewing the scene on my Asus. The TN panel could not handle the subtle color variances of the wood.