Sally,
I bought a Viewsonic VP171S 17" digital LCD monitor with my new PC about 2 months ago, and find it gives excellent definition, colour rendition, brightness (too bright at max. setting) and contrast. Unlike my previous LCD screen, it has no noticeable "dead pixels" interfering with the view (a fault I often noticed on other rinal models). It also has a very stable, height/tilt adjustable stand, and will pivot thru` 90 degrees if you want to use it in portrait mode (software also provided). If you want to use more than one screen, side by side, it has a very thin bezel around the edge of the screen. As well as a digital input it has two analogue inputs, to suit whatever graphics card your PC may have. It`s not cheap (about £360), but after viewing many rival models and reading magazine reviews it seemed to be the best for my purposes. It came with all necessary cables, which I`m told are sometimes an extra with other makes.
When selecting any new screen, one thing I noticed was that performance was infuenced by the PC to which it was connected. Several times I saw different results from exactly the same type of screen connected to different PCs. Sometimes this was due to incorrect setting of the display options on the graphics cards, but even after optimising these the sharpness levels on similar screens varied widely. The spec. of the graphics cards themselves seemed OK, so I don`t think that was the problem. I asked numerous "experts" why this should be, but no-one could come up with a convincing answer. I only resolved it by following the suggestion from one "expert" that I should view my preferred screen linked upto a suitable PC before buying.