As much as I love FedEx, I cannot say it made me happy to fork over $100 last spring to have my Apple Cinema Display shipped across the country for the summer. Thus, upon my return to school this August, I set about buying another monitor to keep on the East Coast.

But, after three months of perusing reviews sites, I have concluded that there really are no goods substitutes for an Apple Cinema Display. Or at least none that I could find. Apple, as far as I can tell, is the only vendor that still sells LCD displays driven by IPS (in-plane switching) technology.

IPS driven LCD panels, while technically superior in most every respect to their TN and PVA brethren, cost much more to manufacture. Thus, most manufacturers switched to TN panels to bring prices down for price-obsessed consumers.

This annoyance underscores the distorted way in which most people make choices. As far as I can tell, most American consumers care only about the price on the sticker, rather than the true economic cost. They readily accept a TN panel at a lower sticker price, even though a more expensive IPS panel would ameliorate, if not completely eliminate, the problems many consumers have with LCD displays generally.

(I didn't realize this until just a few days ago, though now that I do, I finally understand why my Cinema Display looks so much better than most other monitors I've used.)