Fed up with that big fat monitor sitting on your desk? Then welcome to the wide world of display options, where your choices have rarely been so broad and affordable. We'll deal with monitors first, and the factors you need to consider, before moving on to projectors.

First thing with a monitor is the size of the screen itself. The very minimal you should look for is 15-inch (diagonal). If you're buying a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) based screen - they're the big and bulky ones - then check that the viewable size, which the manufacturer is obliged to state, meets your requirements too. Generally with screens, the bigger the better is a decent rule of thumb, although not to the detriment of other features.

A key thing to look for is resolution. This is basically the number of pixels that the screen can display at any one time. For instance, a resolution of 800 x 600 will display 480,000 pixels on your screen. The more pixels the better, as this generally makes the display more comfortable to work with. Make sure you note the maximum supported resolution of any screen you intend to buy, and ensure that it's at least 1,024 x 768 so that it can display sufficient 'screen real estate' for all your icons and applications.

You may also want to check out additional features. Built-in speakers are becoming quite popular, for instance, although they fall far short of the quality of a standalone set. More and more monitors come with an integrated USB hub, which is always useful, and if your graphics card supports digital video interface output, then a screen with DVI input will allow you to get a better quality image.

Technicals out the way, you're then left with a choice between a CRT or TFT (thin film transistor, commonly called LCD or flat panel) screen. The bulky CRTs are falling in popularity, although at the moment they generally offer better resolutions and colour depth than their flat panel counterparts. They're also obscenely cheap in some cases, and obscenely heavy in others! Dedicated gamers and graphics professionals may be best off sticking with a CRT unit for the time being, for these reasons.

TFTs, though, are growing in popularity, and are shortly expected to officially become more popular than CRTs. TFT screens take up a lot less desk space, are much lighter and tend to be more visually attractive. They don't belch out the warm, dry air that can make working near a CRT uncomfortable, either.

Flat panel TFT screens can't yet compete when it comes to the redraw rate of a CRT screen (which can basically update the image on screen more times per second), and this can cause some occasional motion blur when things on screen are moving quickly, but improvements are being made in this area all the time. The same is true of colour depth; TFT screens are closing the gap with CRTs when it comes to accurate colour reproduction.

Moving now to projectors, these have traditionally been out of the price bracket of the home PC user. But recently they too have tumbled right down in price. This brief overview should give you some pointers of what to look for.

Firstly, there are three differing light technologies you're likely to meet. DLP (or digital light processing) utilizes hundreds of miniature mirrors to project the image, with one mirror per pixel that it can display. They then angle each mirror to get the right colour displayed. DLPs are the growth area in projectors, seeing as they've brought the weight of the hardware down, and the images produced from them tend to be brighter and steadier.

Secondly, there are Single Panel TFT LCD Projectors, which project an image by shining a light straight through a panel of see-through LCDs. Again, each LCD is controlled to give direction over the colour that needs to be displayed. These tend to be the cheaper units, although colour quality can suffer.

The third technology is a variant of this, called Polysilicon LCD; the change here is that there are three panels of LCDs, one for each of red, green and blue. It's difficult to get the image particularly bright from such a unit, but this is the technology that tends to get you the more precise colour quality.

Next area of consideration is brightness, measured in lumens, and basically the higher the number, the bigger you can make the image. ANSI lumens represent the brightness of the image projected, so if you have a dark, small room you want to use the unit in, then just under 1,000 lumens will do. A large output in a brightly lit room may require several times that number.

When looking at projector resolution, you need to consider what you'll be hooking up to the unit. Most likely it'll be a laptop computer, and if that's running at 1,024 x 768 resolution for instance, then your projector will at least need to support that. The higher the resolution, the higher the price.

This is just a brief overview of the factors you need to consider, and as with all purchases of this value, then additional research will pay dividends; you should also consider things such as keystone correction to adjust the display when the projector is not perfectly aligned with the display surface, and so on.

Prices of projectors and LCD/TFT monitors will continue to fall over the coming months, and it's worth keeping an eye on the reviews on this site to get a clearer idea of what you're looking for.