I bought this beast around Valentine's day when LG was offering a Valentine's discount. And I can tell you, I've never been happier with a monitor. Looking at the pictures, it makes the ring thing look like some aberration, but really it is a nice feature, and eventually I grew into it, since it's classy and modern. Sure, if you're looking for functionality only this could be a little overkill, but as a home PC, this is just right. There are no buttons, which means you use a software interface to control brightness and all the other adjustments, which actually is more than comfortable, because you can turn the program off and the monitor won't forget your settings. When the monitor is in sleep mode, the little LED on the bottom "breathes" pulsating in a rhythmic dance giving some extra bling to your monitor. The sleep mode can be turned off, as so can the LED at any given moment (like when you want to watch a movie or something. Both the LED button and the power button are touch sensitive, and it comes with an adapter to connect to either VGA (analogue) or DVI (digital) video cards. There are actually models within the models, and the best you can get (if you can find one) is the one that comes with 3000:1 contrast ratio and 2ms response time, which is killer. The only disadvantage I found in this monitor, is because all LCDs have view angles, this one was optimized to view from both sides and from the top (what you would expect for every person to want), but sometimes I throw my Beanbag couch in front of it to watch a movie, and I get way lower than the monitor's level, in which angle things get a little dark. Actually, if you view from any other side, you can pretty much look at them from complete 180 degree angles and if you can see the screen at all, you'll perfectly be able to see the image; leaving the only downside as the bottom view angle, which can be compensated in other ways (like standing further from the monitor when sitting in beanbags :D ) Oh, also the price ranges around AR$ 1000 pesos here in Argentina which should be around $300 dollars, but that is including tax and shipping and etc. So buying one of these in Europe and the U.S. should cost you just under 300 dollars which seems to me as more than a bargain for a monitor with such excellence. - Aphis