If you're like me, a computer geek with too much money who doesn't mind spending ridiculous amounts of money on cool sh*t, this is a great monitor. If price is an object at all, don't get it. Simple as that.
There are some downsides to this monitor beyond the price: With 1600x1024 pixels, there is a high likelihood of dead pixels (pixels that stay one color all the time) and supposedly SGI's policy is not to replace monitors unless there are more than 5 dead pixels. So be aware of this before you buy it. Mine has two dead pixels and for the price, I would definitely prefer not to have these, but the coolness factor of the monitor outweighs this downside. Another downside is that this monitor has a unique digital input only, so you are forced to use the one video card that works with this monitor. This means you can't use the coolest latest and greatest 3D gaming card with this monitor or hook up your laptop to it. Also, be aware that as this is a flat screen FTF monitor, if you run games or programs that use a fixed resolution, you won't take advantage of the full size of the screen like CRT monitor do. This is somewhat annoying for games that run at 800x600. At least they do some pixel doubling for 640x480.
BUT, the good news is that SGI just announced this <A HREF= http://www.sgi.com/flatpanel/multilink_adapter.html >new multilink adapter</a> which costs $300-400 and will take input from analog VGA or any digital format, so it will now work with any video card. Also, the adapter will supposedly do some sort of resizing automatically to fit non 1600x1024 on the screen better (I'm curious to see how well this works). These adapters are supposed to start shipping in July 2000 and I am looking forward to getting one.
Also, the good news for true geeks is that there is support for this card/monitor in XFree86 and AcceleratedX, so you can use this monitor under Linux, FreeBSD, etc. I use mine under Linux mostly and it works great. So if you like to load up on your xterms, there is no better monitor.
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