I bought a 19" widescreen Samsung 941BW during Black Friday and, mostly, haven't regretted it. For text there is no doubt that the LCD is superior to my old IBM G96 CRT. The LCD is just so much brighter, clearer and easier to read!
I also remember hearing the refrain about 'Don't get a 19" widescreen, get at least a 20" (or 21" or 22" or whatever)' when I was looking at LCDs back in November. If you were going from a 19" 4:3 LCD to a 19" 16:10 LCD maybe that makes more sense. But I don't think it applies if you currently use a CRT, especially if you're using it at a lower resolution. I can honestly say I have
never felt any lack of vertical space with my 19" 16:10. I think a large part of the reason for that is because I'm comfortable using the LCD at its highest resolution ... 1440x900 in my case ... and consequently feel as though I have
more usable vertical space with the LCD than I did with my CRT monitor. In other words, you can't just compare raw dimensions in inches. What matters is how much usable visual information the screen can display.
Ultimately, whether or not you are comfortable with a particular screen size is a very personal choice. If you haven't already done so, you should definitely take a trip to one of the big box stores where they would have LCDs on display so you can compare and contrast and get a feel for whether or not a 19" widescreen would be too small for you.
The one other piece of advice I would offer is to pay attention to the contrast ratio of the LCD. My LCD is 500:1, but when I'm watching video, especially from a DVD, I notice areas that are supposed to be black but are actually more greyish. I'm not sure if an LCD with a larger contrast ratio would show blacker blacks, but it's something to consider/research as long as you're still just looking. So far that's been the only aspect of my LCD I haven't liked.
And, to be honest, this may not be a fault of the LCD at all. It may just be that I haven't got my LCD set up correctly. To date the biggest improvement I've made to how the LCD displays video was to get rid of all of my tweaking attempts by forcing all the settings back to their factory defaults. So you have to ask yourself if my problems were/are just "user error".
I assume you're planning to wait until prices drop again, right? There were a lot of LCD deals available around the Black Friday period, but prices seem to have gone back up since then. I'd suggest waiting until after Christmas to purchase to see if better deals show up during the post-Christmas sales.
-john, the redundant legacy and partially color blind dinosaur