I use a fifteen inch flat panel monitor.
There are good and bad points.
The good are the picture clarity is extremely crisp, the colour definition excellent, and most come with an auto refresh button that will clear up any fuzzyness that may appear from time to time.
Also due to the monitor being a flat screen, you truly get the 15" screen size (as opposed to 14.x on a standard 15" etc).
So the screen feels closer to a 17" standard screen.
This may also be true of flat screen CRT monitors - I don't know.
The down side is that scroll effect people talk about.
If you are overly sensitive to such things, then you will be annoyed by it.
Also the refresh rate is much lower than a standard screen, and the screen resolution is restricted to reality - in that a 15" screen will not display beyond 1024x768 in most cases.
Actually this resolution looks pretty good on a 15" or 17" flat panel.
If you are truly well endowed in the wallet area then the 19" screens are awesome.
The average cost of a 15" screen is around $300 - cheaper with mail in rebates etc.
The average cost of a 17" about $500, and the 19" models don't give much change out of a grand.
Obviously this is several times more expensive than CRT screens, even flat screen CRT monitors are much less expensive than flat panel monitors.
One last plus is the footprint. Or to translate into plain english - they take up a fraction of the desk space the equivalent CRT monitor needs.
Hope that helps.
BTW as flat panel monitors are digital they are also equate to a flat panel digital TV (called high definition in the US). The only thing they lack is the tuning circuitry - which by itself doesn't account for the huge difference in price between a monitor and it's equivalent tv model - for instance 19" flat panel TV's cost close to $2000.
There is no reason for that, and as most digital TV is delivered via a set top box of some kind (mostly to give scrambling/de-scrambling options to the cable/satelite provider) there is absolutely no need for them to be able to tune into different channels.
In fact a decent video capture card, such as the ATI Radeon's or the TV Wonder, etc make far superior tuners, with the added advantage of turning your PC into a simplified Tivo system.
