hi,

i am looking for a budget monitoring solution. i am doing event- and imagevideos with a dslr (7d) mainly for web usage or presentation at fairs. so no broadcasting quality required. i edit in ppro cs5.

i use a HP ZR24W as my working-monitor and like to add a second monitor for preview and color grading.

here are my thoughts:

i am poor of space on my workingdesk, so i like to go with an 23". my monitor of choice so far is the dell u2312hm Dell U2312HM Review (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_u2312hm.htm) since it plays native 16:9 hd signals. it has no hdmi-port, but i guess dvi/hdmi will do. audio playback over my soundcard. the monitor already has a good srgb preset so i guess calibrating it with a colorimeter will set it to an adequate 709 color space for hdtv.

i thought of adding a i/o device but i already checked out the matrox mxo2 mini on a similar system and could not make out that much performance diffrences in playing back my footage. in addition ppro does the yuv>rgb conversion. i think i do not need the matrox calibration tool since i plan on calibrating with a colorimeter. is there anything the matrox mini can (regarding calibration) a colorimeter can not? if not i see no need to use a matrox. i would rather use a black magic intensity pro.in addition the bmi+colorimeter solution would be around 500$, whereas the matrox alone costs 560$ and i would still need a colorimeter(+260$) to be safe (as recommended in many threads in this forum).

so here are my questions:

1) is the dell u2312hm a bang-for-the-bug for a colorgrading monitor (considering my purposes)? if no, feel free for other suggestions

2) do i need a i/o card? if so, is the bmi+colorimeter solution adequate or should i go with a matrox mini (+colorimeter)?

i am looking forward to your suggestions.